#lishepus

[dedalvs]

Have you cooked up the written form of the angelic language of Lishepus before, like an alphabet?

No, I didn't figure that would ever require a written form. It was used at a time when humans didn't really have writing, so why would they have come up with one for what was essentially a human pidgin?

[dedalvs]

have you ever made an a posteriori language for a project? It seems like all of your prominent projects are a priori. While I make both kinds, most of the conlangs I make are descendants of existing languages or hypothesized languages IRL.

I think my most famous a posteriori language is Trigedasleng from the CW's The 100. It's actually my most popular language. Beyond that I also created the Azrán language for AMC's Into the Badlands, which is an evolved form of Spanish, and Jessie Sams and I created Kezhwa for Amazon Prime's Paper Girls, which was a kind of futuristic con-creole (or code) for time travelers. Lishepus for Syfy's Dominion is also an a posteriori language, and the Verbis Diabolo I created for Showtime's Penny Dreadful is an a posteriori project. There may have been others, but those are the ones that come to mind.

[dedalvs]

In the cases when you're making a language for a television series or movie, have you ever decided against a phoneme because there was no way to easily transcribe it and (by extension) no easy way to put words with that particular phoneme into the actors' scripts?

Not that specifically, but I have changed things when I thought the romanized version would be consistently misread (e.g. changing all long [eː] and [oː], which would be romanized ee and oo respectively, to something else via a sound change), or when romanizing something would prove inconvenient, or produce inconsistent results (e.g. changing all [sʃ] sequences in Dothraki to [ʃʃ], as both would end up being spelled ssh; or having a phoneme /ʕ/ that was [ʕ] at the beginning of a word and [ʔ] in the middle of a word, rather than two phonemes /ʕ/ and /ʔ/, despite the fact that it would make sense [this was for Lishepus in Dominion]). The only things that are really hard to romanize are having, for example, both /ʃ/ and /ʂ/ as phonemes, or both /t/ and /ʈ/, and I tend not to do that type of thing anyway. So far it’s worked out all right.

[dedalvs]

Sry for my terrible choice of words in my last ask. I didn't mean problem as if there was something wrong with it, more like I have a problem with understanding. I didn't mean to say that you've made a mistake, I'm far from that. Let me rephrase the question: Can you please make a interlinear translation of the Part so I can understand the grammar better? That was what I meant to say. Sorry if it came out wrong.

All good! And now the interlinear is there in that post, so that should help.

[dedalvs]

Okay, so I have a problem with the Lishepus part in the last episode "The seed of evil" of Dominion. What Michael says is: "Amna. Kashis bual diagin kalin." if i'm correct. First off: Am I? Second question: Can you explain to me the grammar of the second sentence?

I have to say, I find this ask utterly perplexing. You have a problem with the Lishepus in 209? What’s the problem? Second, why would you expect to get the transcription right just based on hearing it? There really hasn’t been that much released on the language. You’d basically be transcribing it blind. And even if you did get it right (you didn’t, but it was kind of close! Nice job!), without knowing what any of the words meant or what the grammar was, how could you form any opinion about it at all? That is, how would you know enough about the language or the line to determine that there was something wrong with it? I can understand if your actual question was “Can you tell me what Michael said in 209?”, but that doesn’t seem to be what’s going on here. I’ll be quite interested to hear what the issue is.

The line is this:

Aamna. Gajisa buhaal dhi’agiin kaliin.

It means this:

“Honor. More than any other angel.”

And, like the English, there’s no verb. Here’s an interlinear:

/Honor-ACC. Great-CMP-ACC on-other angel-GEN.PLU all-GEN.PLU/

So that should be it, unless they swapped out the subtitle, or something (but again, how would you have known, unless the subtitle was something absurdly short like “Yes”?). If you see any issues with it, please let me know.

[dedalvs]

ogress replied to your post “Hi, I loved hearing the Lishepus in tonight's episode of Dominion! Is...”

Are there irregular nouns that only have two case forms instead of three in Lishepus (like in, say, Classical Arabic)?

No, but there is a specific reason for that. While there are some nouns that don’t decline at all (the same in all cases), those that do are fairly regular, at least morphologically. This is because Lishepus is itself a construct within the fictional world. That is, it’s a language the angels created so that humans wouldn’t understand them when they were speaking to each other. It just needed to be enough to throw humans off. Angels themselves can speak everything.

[dedalvs]

Hi, I loved hearing the Lishepus in tonight's episode of Dominion! Is it alright if I ask for the translation of the word 'honor'? I loved that scene between Michael & Noma and how Michael switched over to using Lishepus there. Thank you so much; your work on Dominion is really cool. :)

Glad you liked it! The word for honor (or righteousness) in Lishepus is aamnu. Incidentally, if you’d like to see how that declines…

Nominative: aamnu (sg.), aamnuun (pl.)

Accusative: aamna (sg.), aamnaan (pl.)

Genitive: aamni (sg.), aamniin (pl.)

Construct: aamn-, aaman

The latter is used in possessive constructions. So, for example, aamnii is “my honor” in every case and number (thus it could be “my honors”, despite that interpretation being unlikely given the nature of the word). If you wanted to say “I took the human’s honor”, you’d do it like this:

Emontii aaman insi boh./take-1sg honor-CNS human-GEN PRF/“I took the human’s honor.”

So, there’s a bit of grammar. Glad they found some good use for Lishepus this season! Hope you’ve enjoyed it. :)

[dedalvs]

Hello Dave, do you have an alphabet key for the Lishepus glyphs used in Legion and Dominion? I've been trying to copy down the stuff from tattoo pics but have had little success.

There’s actually no connection between the tattoos and Lishepus. After all, if there was, the angels would be able to read them. The point of the tattoos is that no one can read them except the Chosen One—and even then, he can only read certain ones at certain times. I have no idea what Gabriel thinks he’s going to do if he gets the tattoos; he’ll never be able to make heads or tails of them.