Category: Language

Languages in The Heart of the Staff

Modern English is the language spoken throughout Elf Killers and the epic series, Heart of the Staff.  Fairies speak Middle English without most of its obsolete words in Good Sister, Bad Sister, The Burgeoning, Reaper Witch  and Doom . The rest of the languages used appear as isolated words and sentences chosen to give realism and color to various characters. Most of these are explained by context and all can be found translated in the respective glossaries in the books where they appear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Language:                              What it is:                               Who speaks it:

 

Niarg Standard                       current Modern English          Kingdom of Niarg

                                                                                                Kingdom of Loxmere

                                                                                                Kingdom of Goll

                                                                                                Kingdom of Bratin Brute

                                                                                                Jutish Elves

                                                                                                naked dragons

                                                                                                Cyclopsia

 

Archaic Modern Niarg            Middle English                       all Fairies

                                                                                            all profanities uttered by

                                                                                                  Ocker the raven

                                                                                            Niarg (600 yrs prior)

 

Old Niarg Standard                Welsh                                     Kingdom of Niarg

                                                                                             Kingdom of Loxmere

                                                                                             Kingdom of Goll

                                                                                             Kingdom of Bratin Brute

                                                                                             Cyclopsia

 

Jutish Elven                             Irish                                        Jutish Elves

 

Old Gwaelic Elven                 Irish                                         Gwaelic Elves (1M yrs prior)

 

Gwaelic Elven                         Manx                                      Gwaelic Elves

 

Gwaelic                                   Cornish                                   Gwael

 

Headlandish                            Breton                                     Penvro (Head)

                                                                                              Dark Empire

                                                                                              Mammvro

 

Goblish-Beakish                      Pictish                                     Kingdom of Marr (Beaks)

                                                Doric

                                                Scots

 

Ngop                                       Wagiman                                 the Ngop

 

Wagiman is almost extinct. The last I knew, only ten Australian Aboriginals still speak it.

 

Trollish                                    transposition of an                    trolls

                                               aboriginal language

 

 

 

Trollish is a very nasal sounding language, the transposition of an aboriginal New World language, where each letter in the original tongue is replaced with a different letter. In particular, the sounds most frequently used by the aboriginal speakers are replaced with the sounds which are the very most difficult for them to pronounce. Trollish uses such non European peculiarities as noun-verbs, which we originally tried to represent in English by running nouns and verbs together (as they are in the aboriginal) in words such as, headsmash, juicychamp, cantgoback, rollybottomhohoslap and grabupsqueakers, which we soon changed to head-smash, juicy-champ, can’t-go-back, rolly-bottom-ho-ho-slap and grab-up-squeakers in order to be easy to read.

And as always, please let us know what you think,

*** When reading our books please keep the above languages in mind, and… Especially remember that the language of the Fairies (In the four books below) is not full of grammar or syntax errors, it’s MIDDLE ENGLISH! ***

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fairy Tongue

Elvian queen standing in the enchanted forest

Fairy Ring

Our green haired Fairies including Meri Greenwood speak what the people of Niarg know as Archaic Modern Niarg, the ancestor of what they were speaking at the time of our epic tale. It sounds like some sort of Germanic or Nordic language, yet it is quite easy to understand and it makes the Fairies come to life.

 

What Archaic Modern Niarg happens to be is Middle English with most of the obsolete words eliminated so that the uninitiated modern reader can read it without difficulty. It is no harder to read than a note full of misspellings passed by grammar school kids, yet it would be understood at once by people in the London area, six hundred years ago, since we have based its spelling, grammar and word order on the writings of John Wycliffe and Geoffrey Chaucer. 

 

Thirty years ago, I learnt to read Middle English using the rules of pronunciation based on a vowel shift which was thought to have occurred by the widely respected E. T. Donaldson and others, which made the language patently incomprehensible to the ear, and made Chaucer’s poetry not rhyme very well. As a Botany major, I had no stake in revering his work and I didn’t think he supported his claim very well. So, I started reading it with Appalachian vowels and found that it not only rhymed much better, it was now easy to understand when one listened to it.

 

When I read some Middle English to my Navajo students, they thought it was eerie because it sounded like a foreign language except that they could understand it perfectlywell.

 Carol & Tom Phipps

 


Heart of the Staff Complete Series Box (1)