#zemen

[dedalvs]

Zemeni Orthography

For this season on Shadow and Bone, @quothalinguist and I got a chance to create the Zemeni and Shu languages. This is a post detailing the orthography of Zemeni. Christian Thalmann created the orthography for Shu, and I'll post about that here, as well. More info on the languages coming soon!

[dedalvs]

Zemeni Language

When @quothalinguist and I got the go-ahead to create the Shu and Zemeni languages for season 2 of Shadow and Bone, we decided to split up the work, with Jessie taking Shu, and me taking Zemeni. Jessie spent a lot of time deciphering everything in Shu in the books, and I was very intrigued by the very small bits of Zemeni from King of Scars.

In chapter 13, Nina is giving Hanne some Zemeni lessons. She's conjugating a Zemeni verb on the chalkboard, and she says, "Well start with this verb: bes adawa." Then later in the paragraph she says it means "to fight".

Later in chapter 24, Nina encourages Hanne by saying Adawe, which is translated as "Fight", and the implication is that it's a command. Later, Hanne rises, and says, by way of response, Adawesi, "We fight".

I loved the hint at a paradigm here, and the two word strategy for the infinitive. I started there.

First, I went with "do" for bes, and decided adawa would be a verbal noun. With adawe and adawesi, either we could say there was some combination of vowels that resulted in final a going to e, or the root was adaw-. I liked the latter—especially because a semi-frequent rule I've seen is roots not being able to end in a glide. It would lend itself to a kind of feedback loop: If bes is always used with the nominal form of a verb (the root), and roots that end in a glide take a copy vowel, then it could be the case that speakers would think adding a copy vowel to a verbal root would get you a nominalized form of that verb.

From there I back-formed the pronouns, basing them on inflections, and added more pronouns and more inflections. I added a rule I thought was fun: High vowels lowered after glides. That ended up making the paradigms a little funky.

Once the dust had settled, the pronouns looked like this:

And the conjugation of adawa looked like this:

Then the passive:

Nouns are a bit simpler. Nouns only inflect for plural. It will be familiar, as it's the same word that gave us the first and second/third person plural pronouns (an old word meaning "all"). Here is an example of some singular and plural nouns:

And those are some of the basics! I hope you enjoy the second season of Shadow and Bone! Hoping we get to do more in the future.

[dedalvs]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

For those who enjoy going through the conlang dialogue from their shows, I've posted all the conlang dialogue for season 2 of Shadow and Bone. Please do note that this will contain mild spoilers for season 2. If you care about spoilers, watch the show first and save the link for later!

[nanodoekjes]

Droogdoek met schoonmaakdoek ramenset met gratis verzending Nu 17,25 #droogdoek #ramendoek #raamdoek #zemen #streeploos #glasdoek #origineel #droogdoekcleandry https://www.nanodoekjes.nl/product/ramenset-raamdoeken-ramenwassen-zemen/ https://www.instagram.com/p/B5xYHp8nZnY/?igshid=efiqb53s2g6z

[online-promo]

(Dubzoic)

[janotubeblog]

ZEMEN Part 156