Carpathian 20 - Dark Slayer

contrast, many of the speakers of Carpathian from thousands of years ago are still alive. Their presence—
    coupled with the deliberate isolation of the Carpathians from the other major forces of change in the world—has acted (and continues to act) as a stabilizing force that has preserved the integrity of the language over the centuries. Carpathian culture has also acted as a stabilizing force. For instance, the Ritual Words, the various healing chants (see Appendix 1), and other cultural artifacts have been passed down through the centuries with great fidelity.
    One small exception should be noted: the splintering of the Carpathians into separate geographic regions has led to some minor dialectiza tion. However the telepathic link among all Carpathians (as well as each Carpathian’s regular return to his or her homeland) has ensured that the differences among dialects are relatively superficial (e.g., small numbers of new words, minor differences in pronunciation, etc.), since the deeper, internal language of mind-forms has remained the same because of continuous use across space and time.
    The Carpathian language was (and still is) the proto-language for the Uralic (or Finno-Ugrian) family of languages. Today, the Uralic languages are spoken in northern, eastern and central Europe and in Siberia. More than twenty-three million people in the world speak languages that can trace their ancestry to Carpathian. Magyar or Hungarian (about fourteen million speakers), Finnish (about five million speakers), and Estonian (about one million speakers), are the three major contemporary descendents of this proto-language. The only factor that unites the more than twenty languages in the Uralic family is that their ancestry can be traced back to a common proto-language—Carpathian—which split (starting some six thousand years ago) into the various languages in the Uralic family. In the same way, European languages such as English and French belong to the better-known Indo-European family and also evolved from a common proto-language ancestor (a different one from Carpathian).
    The following table provides a sense for some of the similarities in the language family.
    Note: The Finnic/Carpathian “k― shows up often as Hungarian “h.” Similarly, the Finnic/Carpathian “p”
    often corresponds to the Hungarian “f.―

    2. CARPATHIAN GRAMMAR AND OTHER CHARACTERISTICS OF

THE LANGUAGE
    Idioms. As both an ancient language and a language of an earth people, Carpathian is more inclined toward use of idioms constructed from concrete, “earthy― terms, rather than abstractions. For instance, our modern abstraction “to cherish― is expressed more concretely in Carpathian as “to hold in one’s heart”; the “netherworld” is, in Carpathian, “the land of night, fog and ghosts―; etc.
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    Word order. The order of words in a sentence is determined not by syntactic roles (like subject, verb and object) but rather by pragmatic, discourse-driven factors. Examples: “Tied vagyok.― (“Yours am I.―); “Sivamet andam.―
    (“My heart I give you.―)
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    Agglutination. The Carpathian language is agglutinative; that is, longer words are constructed from smaller components. An agglutinating language uses suffixes or prefixes whose meaning is generally unique, and which are concatenated one after another without overlap. In Carpathian, words typically consist of a stem that is followed by one or more suffixes. For example, “sÃvambam― derives from the stem “sÃv―

    (“heart―) followed by “am― (“my,― making it “my heart―), followed by “bam― (“in,―
    making it “in my heart―). As you might imagine, agglutination in Carpathian can sometimes produce very long words, or words that are very difficult to pronounce. Vowels often get inserted between suffixes, to prevent too many consonants from appearing in a row (which can make the word unpronounceable).
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    Noun cases. Like all languages, Carpathian has many noun cases; the same noun will be “spelled― differently depending on its role in the sentence. Some of the noun cases include: nominative (when the noun is the subject of the sentence), accusative (when the noun is a direct object of the verb), dative