#vashoth

Harding stepped back up to the counter and scrambled up onto the high counter. Not only were the shelves in this house absurdly high, but the counters were too. Stupid, blasted qunari and their stupid tall bodies. Her attempt to get onto the counter failed, and she dropped back to the floor with another sigh. This was starting to feel like it was more trouble than it was worth, but she was determined to make some semblance of a good impression. With a frown she looked around and spotted a stool. Herding ran over and grabbed it, carrying it back to the counter.

With the addition of the stool, she was able to get up onto the counter on her knees. Balancing was a little precarious and she reached up for the bowl she was looking for. Blast it, she still couldn’t reach it. When Taash got back she was going to kick them in both shins. Still muttering to herself she looked around and then stood up on the counter. She would not make a good impression if she got caught putting her feet all over the kitchen counters. Harding could hear Ma cussing her out all the way from Ferelden.

But! She managed to get her hands on the bowl. Harding let out a small whoop of success and bent down to put the bowl on the counter. Good. Now she could start mixing her favorite salad. Taash said that Shathann preferred light foods with lots of vegetables and fruit. And she didn’t have to actually cook anything to make it. Now that the bowl was secured she could get down, and she turned to drop off the counter. One of the cabinet doors hit her back, but she paid it no mind. Until she dropped one foot off the counter and suddenly found herself hanging free, hoisted by her own pants.

“What?!” Harding shouted and scrabbled through the air, trying to grab anything that would give her enough leverage to get back to the counter. Andraste, please spare her this humiliation. Harding grumbled angrily as she strained to reach the other cabinet door. “Come on, please,” she begged. She would even go back to services if she could just get out of this.

The sound of a throat clearing was like ice in her veins. Harding dropped her hands and turned her head to look at the doorway. Shathann and Taash stood side by side, shadowed by the bright light pouring in behind them. Well, at least Taash was amused. Shathann, on the other hand, looked… Pissed? Offended? Maker’s breath, the woman was impossible to read. Taash had a point. Shathann always looked unimpressed at best. And now here she was, dangling from her kitchen cabinets like some sort of kitchen gremlin.

“Hi,” Harding managed awkwardly to break the silence. Where was a sudden darkspawn horde when you needed one? Or, this was Rivain, maybe some possessed skeletons or something. Anything to disrupt this moment. Maybe she could spontaneously combust.

“Mom, this is Lace,” Taash said, not able to hide the amusement in their voice at all. “Lace, this is my Mom.” Shathann just shook her head slightly and gave Taash a nudge before turning and walking over to the table where she seemed to keep her research. Taash crossed the small house to Harding easily and grabbed her gently under her arms, lifting her off the knob her pants were caught on. To further Harding’s humiliation, Taash did not put her down immediately, instead holding her up at eye height.

“So um… what happened here?” Harding narrowed her eyes in annoyance.

Tal-Vashoth are a mixed group–obviously, they left for their own reasons.⁽¹⁾ Some don’t change their name: Salit didn’t, as far as we know. Ashaads one and two from the Valo-Kas may also be Tal-Vashoth, but we’re not ever told. Others may not use Qunlat at all, like if Bull goes Tal-Vashoth. Several Tal-Vashoth names we’ve heard tend to be specific protests of some sort. The two we know are Maraas (“nothing”) and Katari (“one who kills”), though I have a few quibbles on the latter one.⁽²⁾ 

Others? We simple don’t know. Armaas in DAO has an unknown name.⁽³⁾ We don’t have any others on record for classification, this is the full tally.

Vashoth names seem to be a mix of professional titles (Kaaras, “navigator”), possible protest names (Issala, “dust”), while others are concepts or qualities (Herah, “time”, Taashath, “calm”). Many use Qunlat, like Adaar (lit. “throw-fire”, a compound meaning “cannon”), and some appear to use Qunlat but don’t–Apologies to any Qwydion fans thought her name was a Qunlat word, hopefully the phonological analyses in previous entries show that it’s not.

Many of the concept/quality names are closer to what we’d consider “conventional” names: descriptors and aspirational qualities. Within canon, we can guess these likely grew out of the Qunari use of nicknames, but Vashoth have their own culture–or at least we can assume we do, canon has not actually shown us Vashoth culture at all. The wordbuilder in me is both sad about that, and gleeful, because it gives people more license to get creative with it.

Because that’s my goal here. While I can give people pointers on how to make this work and sound consistent with Qunlat as we know it, what you do with all this is your own. Whether you’re naming a character to play for the games or writing Qunlat for artistic purposes, I can’t tell you what fits you best. 

And… that’s it for canon Qunlat, really. We’ve covered all the stuff we can say for certain. The last post in this series will be a condensed summary post so that people can have a reference document for everything, but apart from that? Done with canon.

There are other unexplained things, sure. The most substantive missing pieces are anything to do with grammar: we have translations that imply things like “if” and “then” and “because”, that something “must be”, building similes and comparatives and using ditransitive verbs and evidentials and grammatical use of multiple different word orders and and and--

But I can’t definitively say any of them have been canonically established. They appear mostly in the translations of Philliam, a Bard!, and for reasons grumpily expounded upon before, these are not strong evidence for their existence. We are left with a limited corpus of grammar, and 232 words I’ve been able to collect, and about 40 of them can’t be confidently defined. It’s a language that sounds good, has some interesting vocabulary, but it’s a small thing.

And I decided that I wanted to experiment with it. I took the words we had, made more tenuously educated guesses about the meanings of many of them, and turned my attention to the sentences we had. The English translations implied so much more linguistic depth than I could actually see in the Qunlat, if one assumed the language continued to be very Indo-European. I wasn’t convinced the sentences were soundly constructed.

So I started fashioning grammar from the bones of these sentences, shoring them up into something that could stand on its own as a language, and express complex ideas. If a translation told me that some grammatical feature was in a sentence, I would make it happen.

The result is an extremely different language, using the same sounds, but under the hood it functions unlike any Indo-European language I’m aware of. But among my small group of conlanging friends, it’s been popular. Without trying, I’ve gotten multiple people interested in using it, despite having no prior experience with Dragon Age. We’re able to hold untranslated conversations in Qunlat, with people able to describe ideas I didn’t explicitly build into the language. That means it’s functioning as a living language, albeit a small one.

And I will be detailing how it works. People who want to stick to just canon are encouraged to do so! In the coming days, I’ll be digging into my personal Qunlat project, and how to use it as a language...

...Once I take a bit of a break. This has been a lot, and I have to do a bit of catch-up.

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Footnotes

(1) I remain sad that we’ve yet to canonically see Tal-Vashoth who didn’t reject the Qun, they’re just so intensely heterodox in their practice that they became irreconcilable with the mainstream faith. That’s bound to happen, with a religion that has a central governing body, a large swath of territory that’s difficult to communicate across, and a gradient of permissive-to-strict practice that runs from the edges of their territory to the core.

The fantastic fic Our Daily Bread makes a strong case that the Arishok in DA2 had technically gone Tal-Vashoth by engaging in conversions–something the Ben-Hassrath and Tamassrans would normally do. But that hasn’t been touched on at all by canon. We could have practicing Qunari with radically different theology! Have ones that are basically in line with everything except for one detail that seems insignificant to outsiders and those outside the priesthood, but has huge ramifications for their entire cosmic order. Give! Me! Spicy! Heresies!!

(2) We don't have a strong definitional difference between -aad and -ari, but we know -aad is used for names of Antaam roles (with minor exceptions).  Ari is a more general term that can apply to nearly everyone, including kabethari and imekari, or refer to the entity of a culture. So Katari could mean “the person who kills”, but could also mean “the person who dies”, which might be more likely given the general -ari suffix. Theoretically it could also mean “one who kills a people”, but that wouldn’t be the primary reading. 

So, how might I tweak this? Using the agentive -(a)ad could create Kataad, meaning “one who kills”. But Kata usually means “die” if it only has a subject, and only means “kill” if you give it an object. How would you say “one who dies”? Well! Canon actually gave us a suffix for that, and then seems to have forgotten about it: -(a)th, the passive derivational suffix. Kataath would thus mean “dead or dying person”, or “corpse”. 

(3) We’ve established from Arvaarad that Ar means “to hold back something”, so Armaas could be using the same root word. …I also just noted that Armaas is an anagram of Maraas, which is odd. New names formed via the Daily Jumble, perhaps?