The Sounds of Saturn

Mysterious. Billions of miles from the sun, the ringed planet emits electromagnetic frequencies which, if attuned to audio speakers, produce an eerie sound. If one removes the static, even further, what you are left with is a strange series of unearthly noises. Some have likened this to "alien language", though no one knows exactly what these recordings are. They were taken by the Cassini space probe.

The vacuum of space, although a virtual void, is filled with electromagnetic frequencies which emanate from all heavenly bodies and in many different forms. In our own solar system, a thin gas medium existent between most of the planets and their moons allows further recording of sounds in the planets' ionospheres, and even the sounds of the rushing winds on the planets themselves, such as those of Neptune. Electromagnetic radiation from these bodies also lends a variety of strange and curiously audible sounds... everything from the planet's moons to the planet's rings ring with some kind of cosmic song, and that is not all - stars too produce this alien music, even all the way in the furthest reaches of known space, their cosmic song rings across eternity...

Saturn's Rings:

Uranus' Rings:

The Black Speech (First Article)

Everyone who's had contact with Tolkein's Black Speech (and are not Elvish fans) have tried their hand at providing a reconstruction of the ancient tongue. Only the ring inscription and some place-names are left to use as examples of Black Speech. Some include the one that was posted on the LandofShadow website... there was also the slightly expanded version used in the movie. I, however, chose a different approach; I used a reverse-engineering process to derive words in Black Speech as if it were a lost, Indo-European language. This inspiration came from the black metal musician and paganist writer Varg Vikernes of Norway, who claimed that Tolkein had used Old Norse and the Indo-European language of the ancient Viking Berserkers to create what was called the Black Speech of Mordor, offering up evidence such as the Viking-like nature of the Orcs and that the word "Orc" itself was derived from an old Norse word.

What I got was the following: a short compendium of roots I derived from Proto-Indo-European, specifically the Germanic division as Vikernes had said, and applied the sound change rules that had occured between the samples of Black Speech and the original P.I.E. roots.

Malburz (Black Speech)

-at   towards or at, cognate to Latin ad, it is used to mark the infinitive of verbs as well as the adessive case for nouns and verbs.
   e.g. ulukat - at all of them/towards all of them/to all of them

-um   -ness or -ment, expresses the quality or state of said word.
  e.g. durbum - ruling, rulership, kingdom, reign
         gimbum - the finding, the search
         ashum - one-ness, unity
         ukum - totality, total-ness, all-ness, everything, whole

Lexicon:

agh       and (conjunction) (Scandinavian og, och)
ash       one (counter number) (Germanic ans -> as -> ash)
azg       ash, man, a human (Norse root askr)
bazg     cover, fortifications
bizg     fish (P.I.E. root pisk)
bol       wicked, wretched (adjective) (Norse root byl)
burz     dark (adjective)
darz     dumb (adjective)
duzg    sunset (P.I.E. root dhuus, English dusk)
ghash   fire
ghurz   earth, ground, soil (Scandinavian jord)
gul       spirit, wraith
hagh    folk, race, breed, class, group
hugh    thought, idea
hur      army
lug       tower
mal      speech, language, word
mirz     water
mun     memory
nar       corpse
nazg    ring, circle, cycle
rum     room, space, layer, place
sind     elves
sot      hundred (counter number)
surz    sharp (adjective)
thazg  objective, mission, order
thrazg trash, fodder
ugh      I, me (pronoun) (P.I.E. root egh)
uk        all (counter number)
ul         him/them (accusitive)

bukat      to awaken
bimbat    to wait, to wait within
brakat     to break, end
durbat     to rule
gimmat   to entice or captivate
gimbat    to find
grakat     to crack, split open
kimpat    to lurk, to lurk within
krimpat   to bind
simpat     to sleep, to sleep within
sughat     to say or speak
surzat      to sharpen, develop or improve
thrakat     to bring (Latin equivalent tracto)
thrazgat   to struggle, endure or persist
uzgat       to use, employ

Gurzum   the ground
Hughsurz   a clever thought
Lugburz    the Dark Tower
Malburz    the Dark Speech
Narsurz    a fresh corpse
Nazgul     Ring-Wraith
Surzrom   the Armory (lit. the room of sharpening)
Thazgrom  the headquarters
Uzgum      the use, usefullness

Examples:

Simpul
They sleep

Kimpul hughrom-ishi
They lurk in the realm of thought

Ghurzum-ishi gimbut nazguk
They will find all of the rings in the ground

Sot duzgburzunt ugh brakuluk Durbumburzat
Under a hundred black sunsets, I break them all for the Dark Kingdom

This of course, is incomplete. These are only the notes I took on my phone... there is a more complete version somewhere on my computer that I can't seem to locate :( Anyways, that is my shot at the dark language of Mordor.

Happy Birthday HPL

In light of recent events (id est the birthday of the revolutionary author H.P. Lovecraft), I've been sifting through the old books of his in my library, and today I came across the little black Del Ray edition of "At the Mountains of Madness", which was actually the first story I ever read of his and made a big impression on me. The edition I have is from the '60's, and belonged to my father many years ago. That was when I was first introduced to the entity of Cthulhu, and soon after I'd read The Call of Cthulhu, in which Mr. Lovecraft mentions the ancient and cryptic language which Cthulhu's cult speaks, including an excerpt from the language:

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."


In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu lies dreaming. I don't know if Mr. Lovecraft simply made this up, if he actually devised a language behind this or if it was in fact transmitted to him through a dream, which perhaps he came to know enough of to parse or translate the phrase into English. In any case, there have been many attempts to interpret and create a constructed language based on this sample and various others throughout his writings, so-called "R'lyehian".

In typical Lovecraftian fashion, the language is given no normalcy in features that are usually present in human languages; as such, it is very alien and comes off as something very strange and foreign. An example of the aforementioned sample being parsed comes from the Yog-Sothoth forums online.


For example, they translate the last word fhtagn as sleep, and it is commonly accepted that the verb-final position corresponds to the clause's central verb. The R'lyeh wgah'nagle is interpreted as in his house at R'lyeh. An example of more atomic parsing is interpreting, for instance, the agl of wgah'nagl as a locative suffix that denotes the place of R'lyeh, such as the English preposition in, while wgah'n is the verb to reside or wait. Of course, this is all conjecture; the radical assessment of these sparse fragments are necessary for those who want to form an entire conlang after it. Perhaps those whose dreams take them distant places won't need to search that far at all...


One can devise one's own interpretation of the phrase, as I personally believe Mr. Lovecraft would have wanted his readers to :)

So, Happy Birthday Mr. Lovecraft. You are probably dreaming somewhere, existing in the far dream worlds beyond the threshold of our world. Much like in The Silver Key, you saw your fate coming, and you left this world voluntarily for the ones beyond...

Happy Dreaming.

 Howard Phillips Lovecraft, born 20 August, 1890. † 15 March, 1937.

Lamian Cases

The case system for Lamian, my conlang, is standard throughout the entire language; they act more as a suffix would than a true declension, even though they carry the full implications of case markings.

Example: Lamas - Light

Nominative    Lamas     pl. Lamia
Accusative     Lamam   pl. Lamia
Genitive         Lamai     pl. Lamiai
Locative         Lame      pl. Lamie
Vocative         Lam       pl. Lamai

Locative case is used to express the location of the event taking place. For example, lore is the locative form of lor, which means shade or shadow, thus meaning "in the shade".

The vocative is not only the case one would use if addressing the object, but in some cases of genitive as well. For example, the vocative form of the word is added after the object, such as "Yaras Lor", meaning "Land of Shadow". It's usually for either place names or names of great importance, unlike the usual genitive case which can just casually describe any given noun, such as "Yaras Lorai", which would mean "a land of shadow".

Waning of the Stars

Gamageat Galith - The Waning of the Stars

::
lore emlai eleaste
gerenai miras more
yolie more epadeas
::

galith ostai dumie
gelemodith gamageas
morai mith yabie
elai aithia yey gathin
per mui alue
galai nal degin

Embers of light in the depths,
Cold worlds expending heat -
Fields of stone floating in void,
Aetheral souls dancing now,
But not for eternity
Do soft embers burn.