Carpathian 21 - Dark Peril

Carpathian, “the land of night, fog and ghosts”; etc.

    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.”)

    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, “sívambam” derives from the stem
    “sív” (“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).

    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 (indirect object), genitive (or possessive), instrumental, final, supressive, inessive, elative, terminative and delative.

    We will use the possessive (or genitive) case as an example, to illustrate how all noun cases in Carpathian involve adding standard suffixes to the noun stems. Thus expressing possession in Carpathian—“my lifemate,” “your lifemate,” “his lifemate,” “her lifemate,” etc.—involves adding a particular suffix (such as
    “- am ”) to the noun stem ( “päläfertiil” ), to produce the possessive ( “päläfertiilam” —“my lifemate”).
    Which suffix to use depends upon which person (“my,” “your,” “his,” etc.) and whether the noun ends in a consonant or a vowel. The table below shows the suffixes for singular nouns only (not plural), and also shows the similarity to the suffixes used in contemporary Hungarian. (Hungarian is actually a little more complex, in that it also requires “vowel rhyming”: which suffix to use also depends on the last vowel in the noun; hence the multiple choices in the cells below, where Carpathian only has a single choice.) Note: As mentioned earlier, vowels often get inserted between the word and its suffix so as to prevent too many consonants from appearing in a row (which would produce unpronounceable words). For example, in the table on the previous page, all nouns that end in a consonant are followed by suffixes beginning with
    “a.”

    Verb conjugation. Like its modern descendents (such as Finnish and Hungarian), Carpathian has many verb tenses, far too many to describe here. We will just focus on the conjugation of the present tense.
    Again, we will place contemporary Hungarian side by side with the Carpathian, because of the marked similarity of the two.

    As with the possessive case for nouns, the conjugation of verbs is done by adding a suffix onto the verb stem:

    As with all languages, there are many “irregular verbs” in Carpathian that don’t exactly fit this pattern. But the above table is still a useful guideline for most verbs.

    3. EXAMPLES OF THE CARPATHIAN LANGUAGE

    Here are some brief examples of conversational Carpathian, used in the Dark books. We include the literal translation in square brackets. It is interestingly different from the most appropriate English translation.

    Susu.

    I am home.

    [“home/birthplace.” “I am” is understood, as is often the case in Carpathian.]

    Möért?

    What for?

    csitri

    little one

    [“little slip of a thing,” “little slip of a girl”]

    ainaak enyém

    forever mine

    ainaak sívamet jutta

    forever mine (another form)

    [“forever to-my-heart connected/fixed”]

    sívamet

    my love

    [“of-my-heart,” “to-my-heart”]

    Tet vigyázam.

    I love you.

    [“you-love-I”]

    Sarna Rituaali (The Ritual Words) is a longer example, and an example of chanted rather than conversational Carpathian. Note the recurring use of “andam” (“I give”), to give the chant musicality and force through