#languagebent

The adventures continue as I continue my path down learning Pali for the sake of crushing the patriarchy of monks in most schools of Buddhism. Well that and reading my religious texts in their original language in general, but hey we need to make our dreams for the future sound as crazy and extremist as humanly possible.

At any rate more quirk speculation has continued. In particular we have thought of things for the Zahhaks, Vriska, and Gamzee. Now Zahhaks from what we know are greatly concerned with order. Sanskrit and Pali, which is derived from that first thing, have Sandhi which I have cried about in the past because it is basically a long list of rules for elision, metathesis, epenthesis and so on. So too will our troll language have this. Beyond this a few of the grammatical cases have forms in the plural that are typically only used in poems and Equius at the very least is known to fancy poetry. Horuss just appears to be talented in most things.

Which leads to the idea that both have impeccable skill with Sandhi and use the unusual, almost poetic, grammatical cases like -ebhi. They also tend towards more unusual consonantal Sandhi at times because. ORDER. PROPER LANGUAGE. So awesome. Indeed it just makes them sound funny. Equius to compound his funniness has an awkward accent, thus marring his ability to stick with Sandhi truly properly. I'm not sure just what that will be exactly though it may relate to horses in some fashion.

Gamzee's quirk will be based mostly upon his syntax since Sinhalese script doesn't have case. One thing that's been noted is that Gamzee does not do things to people. He does them at them. This is an unusual break in typical grammar and could make for a way to represent quirk. So Gamzee doesn't use the ablative case at all, instead using the locative pretty much for that exact same purpose. This looks and sounds rather off at first but people get used to it. Beyond that I am thinking of ways to simulate all caps emphasis by looking into things that are done with Indian scripts. And then smashing them into SInhalese script.

...Like with Vriska's quirk! Meet ऽ which looks quite like an s. Now this lovely thing to my knowledge is not used with Sinhalese script at all, but is used quite often with Devanagari. It has a variety of purposes, typically to mark elision and the lengthening of a vowel. This is important because that is something rather key to Vriska's quirk. I may very well just smash that after Sinhalese vowels because these aren't actually the languages we know, but horrible troll languages that are horrendous mish mashes. Beyond that all sounds vaguely similar to the word for eight, attha, will likely be swapped out for attha in a fashion reminiscent to what she does in the comic. We may even use a numeral for attha, some of which look vaguely reminiscent to her astrological sign.

This leaves a problem of what to do with Aranea since, prior to the pirate crew, she does have a related quirk to Vriska but doesn't replace eight sounds unless she's excited in some fashion. I would like to keep their quirks related in some manner, like with the Zahhaks and their impeccable Sandhi and poetical speech. So she Vriska needs something more and Aranea too needs this thing. So hrmm.