Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Ancient Bactarahad

Ancient Bactarahad was spoken before the current version such in the post I made a while back. It was closer to the root language and has a different system of declension.

Anaxus - circle/cycle
Braga/Braxus - brought
Daga/Daxus - day (New Bactarahad jaa - time/eternity)
Maga/Maxus - power
Naxus - night
Paxus - festival
Prag-ya - guardian
Praxus - guard
Rag-ya - king
Raxus - reign
Uxus - junction


For -xus words:
-xus    nominative
-x       accusative
-xi      within (inessive)
-xa     from (ablative)
-g       compound
-c       dative


For -a words:
-a       nominative
-a or -an     accusative
-e       dative (to, towards)

-un  -  her (possessive) ex. naxun - her night
-u    -  his (possessive) nominative -u, accusative -unu

Sunday, October 16, 2011

A Journey of Scales

"Did you know the sun's 1,300,000 times bigger than the earth?" my father said to me in a dream. I thought it was real, like a normal day, since he never usually talks about astronomy. In response, I said, "If you think that's amazing, I'll show you the scales with comparisons of everyday objects."

For a moment, I told him to imagine what I was saying.

"If the sun was the size of a basketball," I said, shaping my hands into a ball-form, and then pulling out a bluish marble from my pocket. My father finished the sentence, "Then the earth would be the size of the marble."


"No," I said, "In fact, it would be Jupiter that would be the size of the marble. The earth would be the size of a grain of sand."

Moving on, I said, "Now, if we want to see just how far the planets are from the sun, and not just their sizes, we have to make the scale even larger."

I told him now to imagine that the marble was the size of the sun, the grain the size of Jupiter, moving the scale down by one unit. Setting the Sun-marble in the center of the floor, I stretched my arm until it was three feet from the marble. Setting my imaginary sand-grain there, I said, "That's where the FIRST planet would be, Mercury. The others are still farther. So even though they're extremely small compared to the sun, they're also extremely far away, so they don't become overwhelmed by the sun's energy."

In this situation, sand-grain Jupiter would be some ten feet from the marble, if I remember correctly. The Sun is still hot enough and powerful enough to radiate its heat even across such a distance, spanning many times its own width.

I woke up at this point, disappointing this conversation had only taken place there and not in the waking world. You should visit here if you're interested in learning more about Solar System scales:
http://www.noao.edu/education/peppercorn/pcmain.html

And that's just the Solar System.  The Solar System. That's just the Heliosphere, which is the sphere of our sun's influence; past this tiny shell, which itself is like a grain of sand compared to the nebulae and clusters of our galaxy, lies an entire cosmos filled with progressively larger and larger structure, past the realm of human comprehension.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Journey Through the Stars - III

Your ship is old now. For countless eons, more than you can count, you've been traveling the void of space. Off on the starboard a pulsar comes up, emitting its constant beacon like a lone lighthouse on the edge of the infinite sea, radiating its light in a constant spin. You hear its pulsations on board:

"Oh God, it's beautiful," says the Captain, still weary, old in age and hardly there, it's felt. No one knows what goes on in the mind of the old man, only that he sits there looking at the stars, rarely breaking his slumbering, eternal gaze to issue a word or two. For the most part the mission takes care of itself; it's almost at mission's end. Home no longer exists; space is his home.

The racketous beating leaves the hull, and the distant, spinning light fades away from the dark view of the inner hull. It fades away into the myriad of off-colored stars, tinted with the decay of countless years like a silent graveyard whose lights are the spirits of the dead through which we wade. The ship is old, and she's been good, carrying out her assignment to the last, at one with the aging Captain of whose secrets she alone is shared. How beautiful the journey has been, now to die among the stars; one more light fading out.

The trip has been long and hard. Silence has settled around most of the ship; few of the original crew are left. For the old generation which left ages ago, it is the end.

Now you are deep. There is no sun here, no stars to light the path. You are so deep that there is nothing around you for hundreds of light-years. Color fades. Surrounded only by darkness. You are so far out... your eyes begin to see. In the distance, a luminous band comes to light; the Milky Way, slowly rotating in her cosmic path, and then another light; Andromedia. The skies are full of stars; of galaxies, sweeping and vast, of stars and pulsars, of nebulae shifting in the vast void, of countless stars and lights which you cannot account for.

It is a fitting song for your last moments. The vision burns into your eyes, the last light transmitted to your eyes a mirage of a million worlds and stars, of grand formations of cosmic medium, of the vast voids and vantage points from which your solitary ship now wades ever slowly through the infinite gulfs, to drift forever through time and space without end. No regrets, my friends. Old Captain sits in his throne, neither alive or dead, simply sitting there as if waiting, and petrified, for whatever he's been searching for. You look upon from the command deck for the last time, and then close your eyes. The music comes back to your ears; you remember all those times aboard when you heard the universe's song. Then it all turns to silence, like the ever void itself.

... the end

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Journey Through the Stars - II

Your ship continues on. The darkness has taken you, the void all around. The sun is but another star now, fainter by the day. The last you see of your own system are those two little marbles floating on the edge, Uranus and Neptune, which in their separate systems live their isolated and dark existences on the edge of an abyss. Beyond here is the Kuiper belt, more distant and wide-spanning than the one further in, with cold dark bodies, some large, some small, hanging over their distant center like an intricate mobile. Further on feeds it into the Oort cloud, the shell of silent comets, beyond which lies the limit of the heliosphere, the final departure from the sun's influence and into the influence of interstellar space.

Even out here on the edge of the void already, the sounds of the hewed giants, last stops of the solar system, hang ever in the air of your passing ship.



Now on the solar system's last stop, Neptune. After this, there will be no more giants of color and moons; just a dark void of silent comets and asteroids tumbling in the black vacuum.

From here on out, you are entering the interstellar zone. From here on out, you are entering the infinite.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

The Importance of Sound

Audio is life.

The universe itself is made of vibrations - super-strings resonating at different levels, defining their existence - different frequencies of energy and existence standing out as forms manifest in the universe. All exist as vibrations, although on subtle and unknown scales - probably stretching to infinity - at the cosmic center of chaos. These waves give things their definition and nature - everything resonates on a certain level, whether distinguishable in the material universe or in a dimension beyond. When waves cease, so does the Existence - it fades into death and nothing. All that exists exist as a combination of waves emitted across the universe. Everything from the tiniest of atoms to galaxies emit these waves and frequencies according to their own nature.

Even you exist with waves. The planets emit waves, though there's no air to transfer sound through - it merely travels as radiated energies, pulsing like silent but active beacons shedding their energy. They emit their own sounds, songs and frequencies as surely as they exist themselves - the natural resonance of the universe and all of it's manifested and fragmented forms (that is, fragmented from the primordial source, the Monad).

As animals, a certain sensory function we have is hearing, which can pick up audible manifestations of these waves. Every sound is a vibration or a combination of vibrations causing something in the world - even hearing a skillet clanging against a frying pan is hearing these vibrations, since it is a physical product of these two things' existences and interactions with each other. We hear sound everyday, and often times we take it for granted - music is humanity's great delight, for it helps us comprehend the rhythms of existence. Like our own breath, the universe's rhythm is a steady pulse, a beat which is eternal and emanated in a million forms, all of different speed and depth. Good music will have synchrony with these things, while bad music is chaotic and often artificial in its conjectured and ephemeral noises that lack a foundation in pure emanation.

When men sit down by the sea and watch the waves come and go, they hear the sounds of the sea, the howling and the waves, but most of all they hear the gentle ebb and flow of the water, the back-and-forth rhythm of the sea. Even the sea, that vast ocean much like the void, resonates on an easily audible level for mankind to hear.

So then, whenever we listen to the sounds of the universe, it is a reconnection with things more ancient than humanity; with the original universe itself. These primordial sounds help us to synchronize our focus into the greater picture, the metauniverse so to speak, on a stage higher than this existence and beyond the pale of human perception. Once the humanist perception is abandoned in favor of the wider one, the natural rhythms are recognized and man can finally become one with everything - through sound, he is able to reawaken, reconnect to that which was once lost to humanity through its ignorance and fallen-ness.

Music has a function too. Like every other medium, it can be used for manipulation of mood changing; the mass media of today often blare loud chaotic music in order to frenzy the consumers up at the cost of their organic spiritual connectivity. Marching music instils powers of pride and morale, even when faced with absurd opposition; Bach's abstract artistry invokes a particular set of mind too. Classical Music is revealed to enable the creative process to a greater degree when exposed to the human mind during infancy; and often times music becomes a man's last and only solace from a world of pain, their only joy in a bleak and joyless world, the only thing keeping them going. Music should be used wisely, to the greatest of our benefit - to reconnect, to understand, to motivate and better ourselves.

Also like media does, with delicate artistry Music can transport people to another world, the world of the song. Enya's Only Time was one of the first songs I heard that really affected me - it transported me to an entirely different reality, removed from the bleak world in which I lived. As a child, my imagination went far off, to far sunny island among crystal blue waters, with turtles and dolphins, with soft sands and cool air, things that in the recesses of my mind I was not afraid to experience, and it was only able to be discovered and accessed by this song. I didn't know it at the time, but I had discovered the power of music on the imagination. I still remember the first time I heard the song, on the crackling radio in a daycare bus. No one really said anything about it, since it was just some hit at the time - but secretly I really liked it, even though I didn't know what it was called. Book's often have the power to transport readers to other fields of experience from which their humanly limitations often prevent from ever knowing, and the same goes for music. With the aid of music, a whole range of experiences are possible.

Audio, as a holy manifestation of vibrations audible to the human ear, is also intrinsic in meditation. This goes for language as well; contrary to the contemporary notion that language was random and relative, language was originally ordered from the issuance of vibrational correspondence to real-world objects and concepts, not the chaotic memorization-system of today. Language was built rather on what people naturally felt inclined to describe an object as, since it's transcripted audible sound was universal - only in this latter day and age, with its degeneration, have languages become a subject of pure relativity with the only vestiges of holy resonance being their dying heritage.

The Vedic school of Hinduism still teaches the importance of sound resonation, and it's also why Sanskrit is considered a Holy Language; it is purer and closer in its sounds to the original vibrations than modern day languages are. The holy sound "aum" is also to be closely inspected here. This goes without saying that sounds have a particular holy value; when strung in a certain way, they resonate and it creates synchrony with certain fluctuations, which is the basis of all magical and meditative acts. That is how spells and incantations worked and why meditation was often associated with certain sounds. Sound a key ingredient in helping meditation.

Listening to natural rhythms is an humbling experience. It is important to the human body, since it responds to sounds the same way it does to the changing of the seasons or the tides of the moon. Sound has the power to help our consciousness to new levels. It is one of the senses that, if used wisely and not self-destructively, can help bring a great advancement in spiritual and mental understanding.

Sound is important, sound is indispensable - it is a way of observing the known universe. Rhythms we can recognize on a primal level - the realities of the cosmos resonate throughout.

Monday, October 3, 2011

Journey Through the Stars - I

You are about to embark on a journey that will take a whole lifetime. Your ship will be heading out of the solar system - beyond to the stars of the galaxy, to the core and then to the cold and quiet void of space. But even in these frozen depths, silent waves silently grind like the pulsing beatings of an ethereal sea, echoing through the radios and receptors of your ship in the vastness of the void.

Your mission will encompass many sights and sounds - the quantum waves of the planets will be broadcasted across your ship's radio. You will pass by the outer planets on your trip; using Jupiter to swing around towards Neptune while meeting Saturn and Uranus along the way - then out of the solar system, where beyond the Oort Cloud of sunless floating masses, you'll be amongst interstellar space - the first step in your long journey. There you will progress past an array of nearby stars along your path, until finally you've reached the immense propensity of the void and the sum of your journey. The natural rhythms of the universe.

Before embarking for the first step out of the solar system, the captain's only words before takeoff are: "So begins our nine million mile trek out of the reaches of our solar system."


Embarking

For days you go by. Nothing seems to move; earth is all but gone now, soon reduced to a small lit orb in the distance of the window, and then not there at all. The orbit of Mars has been passed, and now your ship is lumbering through the asteroid fields. You don't see any asteroids, because they're so far apart - even as you accelerate, none come in view of the ship. Even though countless swarms of asteroids inhabit this vestigial and forgotten belt, the vast distances of space make you truly see their greatness.

The bright orb of the Giant has loomed for months now. It grows slightly by the day, like a star, until finally you can see it's swirling eye and the bands of clouds. Faint glimpses of moons can be seen here and their, satellites flickering in rays of distant-traveled sunlight just right to see. The faint pattern of Jupiter's mutter crackles faintly, for even out here the signals begin to become audible. Even so far out here, the faint and silent breath of the Giant continues on like a ceaseless tide, an immersed rhythm of waves and frequency.

The vibrations of the planet become stronger, and as you get closer, the Giant fills the viewscreen with its enormous, lumbering presence, imposing and mighty, and now the song of Jupiter distinctly rings its murmur across the ship:
Jovian song rings in a quiet murmur across the ship, like the muttering and hooting of a sleeping giant. The eye whirls steadily past, enough to engulf a thousand worlds, your ship to say the least. The faint roundness of Europa gleams yellowish in the distance, yet the approach will not be closer. The mighty giant passes you, as surely as it came, and again you are left with no indication of your own movement. The eternal sounds fade away with distance back into silence, only a steady and constant hum of the on board receptors; background radiation. The ringed planet is still too far off in the distance, but even from here you immediately recognize the two protrusions of the disk shaping each side - the sides of the rings. The boost from Jupiter's gravity has given us an additional lift, and from here it's smooth sailing until we reach Saturn.

Over the weeks the calm orb comes closer. We see, as opposed to Jupiter, the calm and placid bands of Saturn's cool sandy clouds, it's shape elongated from a peculiar formation. The rings are vast and sharp; we soon enter in range of Saturn's song.

First it is a hum. Then a steady rumble. Like the sea at night, the ceaseless grinding of the orbits continue their well-known paths - the mighty god's waves strike the ship, eerily floating across the bridge. You and the captain hear it; all take a break from the controls to listen as the receptors pick up. They dim the lights, so that only the LEDs of the monitor lights continue to glow. Outside the vast window of the observation deck, spanning around the bridge, Saturn looms silently in the distance, her wave's sounding across the bridge. Soon we cross the rings; they are under us, and the immense size of Saturn becomes appearant. With proximity grows the intensity of the noise - we sleep with it day and night. We simply sit on bridge and listen to her eternal song:

The sun is so distant now. Only the outer plane gives solace.

The immense span of the rings floats beneath the ship. Below, you see the crystal thin disk slowly rotating beneath. The inside of the ring is only meters thick, composed of various ice crystals variously spaced and sized, from grains of sand to the size of cars. You imagine going to retrieve ice from the rings for water - of walking amongst the ice forms of the rings, of dipping in and out of the immense disk's plane. Yet you know such pristine beauty shouldn't be touched by man's orders - and further yet, that all your provisions for the rest of your life are stored aboard for safe keeping. Still, the ever present rings merge closer, and their particular sound can be heard too:

Come take a journey with me-
To beyond the stars where man can't see.

Saturn's form drifts away like the others, a lone giant.
Once again the sounds fade out, left with the sounds of the ether and the ship.
So ends the first part of the journey.

Continue to Part II

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Bljaidi

It came to me in a dream; the faint picture in my head remembered from a whole night's worth of dreaming, a crepuscular digital screen with the words typed " bljaidi " on it, and I understood what it meant; at least in some of the words I knew what they meant without ever having seen them before.

That morning I recorded the occurrence in my journal (dream diary), and began to work on the language. It was a Germanic mix of Baltic and Slavic phonology and influence, taken from the basest roots of the proto-Germanic tongue and applied to an estranged Baltic people on the Baltic coast. Perhaps they were conquered by Teutons? In any case, the more I wrote down things about the language, the more it came to me the words and the constructs that I'd seen in my dream. From what little I had I built off of it to create an entire lexicon for use, and I consider it one of my better conlangs. It was kind of the executive product of my maturation from Lamian, the conclusion of that current; I don't have a name for it, and I've been using Bljaidi since it was the first word I saw (it means bright) and Dyliht (which means twilight).
Some samples:

Ej studan - I study
Ej studans - I am studying
Eje studans - I was studying
Eje studan par Gotisk - I have studied for German, I studied German
Eje studans par Gotisk - I was studying German, I've been studying for German

All verbs end in -an, (some end in -ain), equivalent to the Germanic -en and the Latin -um, and often time this follows a vowel deletion between the letters of the Germanic root; e.g. beran - to bear or to have becomes bran. The Germanic feature ge-, corresponding with Old English a-, has instead transferred from the verb to the Subject and becomes a Subject suffix; for example, Ej estudan, "I studied", became Eje studan, and it stuck that way. Therefore, the Past Tense is made by affixing an -e to the end of the Subject. The verb itself does not change for Past Tense.

Future tense is marked by an -e to the end of the verb, observe the following: (ex. ej bran - I have)
Ej brane - I will have
Eje brane - I was going to have

Passive Mood is achieved simply by dropping the -n at the end of a verb.  For example, bran becomes bra, and in a sentence, ej bran - I have, ej bra - I am had.

Continuous mood (English -ing, e.g. I am studying) is marked by an -s affixed to the end of the verb; studan becomes studans, and bran becomes brans (just like study becomes studying, and have becomes having). Continuous mood for Passive verbs adds an -ni to the verb: bra becomes brani - ej brani means "I am being had". Another example: Gotisk studani i Galjar - German is studied in France.

Nouns

Nouns come in a certain variety: ones that end in -ad, -eo, -i, -av and -t. The ones with the -ad suffix are the most common. Their declension is rather simple:
Blad - flower

Nominative - Blad, pl: Bladi
Accusative  - Blad, pl: Blaidi

Genitive is simply marked by placing the owner at the end of the expression, usually in Accusative Plural case, for example: stav draidi - stem of the tree, where stav is stem and drad is tree.
You thought that was easy? Most of the other endings don't even have declensions. There are some exceptions, such as words that end in -t:
Naht - night

Nominative - Nyt,   pl. Nahti
Accusative -  Naht, pl: Nahti
(**note that -aht is also spelled as -iht).
For the -v declension (e.g. stav - staff, stem) simply follow the -ad declension but replace the d with v (e.g. stav, staivi). Words that end in -i become -y for their Pluralization, but otherwise they do not decline.

Nouns also each have an Adjectival Form and an Additional Form; the Adjectival form simply placed a -j after the first letter of the noun; drad becomes drjad, and it makes it into an adjective. Therefore, drjad would mean strong or durable, since it is the quality of a tree. In order to add an adjective to a word, you must place the adjective behind the word and set it to the Accusative Plural case. If the Noun being described is plural, then the adjective must be in singular.
Example:

stav drjaidi - strong stem
stavi drjad  - strong stems

The Additional form is basically used for word building; whenever you combine two words to make a compound word, the Front word is in its Additional form. This usually is just replacing the last letter with an -i, for example, Drad becomes Drai. With this we can make words using tree and stem; Draistav means "trunk", literally meaning "Tree-Staff" or "Tree-Stem". Words that end in -i (like sti, meaning "grain")have the Additional form of -y, so Sti becomes Sty. Examples of compound words:

Blaistav - stem (like a flower's stem, the stalk); also letter or rune (bright-staff, the lines of letters)
Blaisti    - flower seeds
Draistav - tree trunk
Draisti   - tree seeds

Words that end in -av and -eo do not have different Additional Forms; the words would not change when you use them in compound words. Compound words are not only limited to nouns, but extend to verbs too:

dan - to do
blaidan - to bloom
draidan - to be strong

There are many other features of Bljaidi that are far too extensive to go over here. It is by far my most complete conlang, and I am proud of it; I built it naturally and instinctively. The first words in the lang were blad, bleo (which also means flower/bloom), and dry (meaning tree, in the context of a forest, not an alone tree).  For those of you wondering, the y is pronounced like the German ΓΌ and the -aidi is pronounced something like English "-ithey", imagine saying "lithey". Whenever there is an I near the D, the D is pronounced as a soft Th sound.
I also tried to make each Nationality-name unique by making it have a history behind it, thus:

Gal - French (Gaulish, Celtic)
Got - German (Gothic, Geat, Gotlandic)
Lav - Russian (Slav, with s- deletion)

Either -jar or -jum can be added to denote a country; Galjar or Galjum for France, for example.

I'll post more on the vocabulary lists later. Sample texts are easy to make; the creative versatility that this language offers is great.