#sith language

So, High Sith should be a phonetic alphabet, where each letter corresponds to a syllable used in the Sith language.

Some of these letters will be variations of other letters; similar to each other in the way that the sounds will be similar, or a combination of letters where two sounds would be combined.

So--what sounds are in the Sith language?

Wiki: The phonetic palette of the Sith language consisted of 23 phonemes or speech sounds. There were approximately 11 obstruents and 6 or 7 sonorants: /t/, /d/, /k/, /q/, /m/, /n/, /ts/, /dz/, /s/, /z/, /h/, /t͡ʃ/,/j/ /ʃ/, [ɹ/l], /w/, /ʎ/. Accordingly, the graphemic system to represent these was t, d, k, q, m, n, ts, dz, s, z, h, ch, j, sh, r/l, w, y.

There were also 6 distinct vowels: i or i (with "ee" sound) æ or â (as in "bash") u or u (as in "suit") ʌ or û (as in "club") oʊ or o (as in "toad") ɑ or a (as in "ah"). In addition, a and o would combine with i to make diphthongs: oi (as in "toy") and ai (as in "buy"). The epenthetic vowel was /u/.

What I'm getting from this is that the vowel sounds they have sound like this: ee, aaaaah!, oo, uh, oh, ahh, oi/oy, and eye. And their consonants included: t, d, k, q, m, n, ts, dz, s, z, h, ch, j, sh, r/l (<- the sound used in Japanese, I'm assuming), w, and y. Vowels plus consonants=25, the wiki says I'll need 29-30. Both are find, we have enough characters on the page of the Spellbook of Freedon Nadd to fulfill this.

Some of the characters look like each other, so I'm going to assume their sounds are similar in this alphabet.

Similar sounds: d & dz & z, s & h & sh

Similar characters:

and

this second one is totally hakagram graush's shadow hand trolling the dark jedi exiles by going 'yeah yeah hakagram and i were the only ones to use these super-special secret pronouns when it was just us having uh evil sleepovers' because the 1st person dual pronoun evolved overtime to be used by the kissai while the regular 1st person plural was used by everyone else. the nominative, the genitive plural, and the instrumental cases are the only ones that retain the original phonemic structure while the rest just slurred 'ari' into the 'arjV' glide.

A sister brought me a book today. Not a nightsister mind you, one of the other clans. She was uninterested in speaking of it, simply handed me a tome and said 'leave it somewhere when you are done', then disappeared.

I opened the book and it greeted me, words writing themselves as I watched. It introduced itself as Shin, and asked me to write my name. I made charcoal and sharpened it to write 'Jagannath'. This seemed wiser than penning my own name in my own hand, on paper that tingled with the force like the shimmer of sunlight on water.

The tome offered me knowledge in exchange for my own, then the pages all went blank. I wrote... many things. Some stray bits of knowledge, excerpts from sith scripture, idle thoughts in my mind, events from my visions long past and not yet happened, and on. It was oddly enjoyable to scrawl without the need to clarify my thoughts into some semblance of rationality, as I do here.

When at last I felt done, the words began to order themselves. The Qotsisajak cleaned itself up, translated itself into ur-kittât, and became luminous. My thoughts of the future ordered themselves into chronological order, rated themselves on probability, and came together into a section labeled 'The Prophecies of Darth Maul'. It was interesting to watch the book take all that I had given it and organize it like a strange librarian.

Then, the pages cleared again, and knowledge it did indeed share. A fair trade, by my estimate.

After finishing the saddle, I decided this giraffe needed a little jazzing up, and settled in decorating her with some Sith symbols and phrases. After spending a few agonising minutes on the Star Wars wiki, I realised that no one gives a shit about continuity and I was just going to have to wing it.

I took a few key words from the existing list and filled them in with my own made up words.

Kots (to break) + Itsu (chain) = Kots ha itsu (To break the chain)

Chwit (to throw) + Ari (Lord) = Chwit H'ari (To (over)throw the master)

Kusk (to dream) + Midwan (power) = Kusk gu midwan (To dream of power)

Won (to free) = Won ga cransz (To free the mind)

Annoyingly enough, they have a phrase, "Ja'ak", which means "I am free" despite looking nothing like the verb Won, which means "to free".

After doing all that, I looked for Sith alphabet to write it in. Unsurprisingly, it was just as unorganised and sparse as the vocabulary. Using the one picture we have of the script as inspiration, I decided to write them out in stylised English. Just for fun.

'I am free' - I like to think freedom is one of Maul's guiding tenets; something that he held onto even when times were bad. Even when times were hard, he has escaped the Nightsisters and a life of slavery.

Considering their love for mantras and codes, I'm imagining these are either old Sith mantras that Maul found or ones that he made for himself.

'To break the chain' - Again, focusing on freedom and refusing to be enslaved

'To overthrow the master' - To not only escape slavery, but to destroy those who enslaved you.

'To dream of power' - To become more than you are.

'To free the mind' - Similar to Kusk gu midwan, to never let yourself be restrained.

So, can we agree that SWTOR acting like the Republic and the Empire both have Republic Basic as their primary language is the result of the translation convention and not because anyone in the Empire outside the territories it conquered during the Great Galactic War actually speaks Basic as a first language? Because the Republic has only had three relatively brief periods of interaction with the Sith worlds spread over thousands of years, and the interaction was mostly them killing each other.

The official language of the Sith Empire is the official standard dialect of the official standard language which Republic linguists usually call Modern Sith. I have given it the very imaginative name of Imperial Standard. Imperial Standard does not have gendered third-person pronouns like English does but some other members of the large family of Modern Sith languages do, mostly the planetary languages of the ancient Ratakan slave colonies where the Stygian Caldera’s Twi’lek population originates.

Imperial Standard has three singular third-person pronouns reflecting a person’s stage of life and the socially appropriate level of respect due to them.

Minors (che): traditionally used for people who have yet to pass their Trials of Adulthood but in the modern Empire is generally only used for people below the age of majority. A notable exception is that in the Sith Academies it is still commonly used for Acolytes who haven’t completed the Trials irrespective of age.

Adults (vhe): for living people above the age of majority. The legal age of majority is higher in the Empire than it is in the Republic, coming at the beginning of a person’s ninth year of life (eight Korribani years, about twenty standard years). This is assumed to be a flow on from the culture of the longer-lived red sith to the rest of the Imperial population.

Ancestors (dze): the most respectful pronoun is reserved for the dead and, in Vitiate’s Empire, the Emperor. It would have been considered vaguely blasphemous to use it for a living person in earlier eras, though the first Sith Lords – the twelve Jedi Exiles – insisted their followers use it when speaking of them.

While I use che/vhe/dze for the pronouns this is part of the translation convention. I’m not good enough with conlangs to come up with plausible word forms and deviating from the English vhe/vher/vhir/vhirs pattern would make it more difficult for a reader to tell that they’re dealing with pronouns and not, for example, somebody’s name.

There are also three plural third-person pronouns in Imperial Standard, also tiered as minors, adults and ancestors. When speaking about mixed groups you use the level of appropriate for the highest ranked person in the group. Luckily for me all three pronouns translate into English as ‘they’.

The pronouns a person uses for slaves and droids reveals a lot about that person’s views on slavery and droid rights.