How Zajen Culture influenced its language
I am currently in the works of designing the Zajen language for my fantasy world, Elekheldýr. The language itself is highly aggulative (you can stick most of a sentence into one word and it's fine).
Without going much deeper into the workings of the language, I wanted to explain things I came up with when considering the influence of Zajen culture on its language.
Most of an individual Zajen's life is dominated by the natural tendency of a Zajen to never settle in one place: a Zajen's mind cannot find rest in staying to live in one house for longer than usually a decade or so, and most if not all Zajen tend to move from town to town every five to ten years. To account for this in the language, I simply made it so that the Zajen language has multiple words for the verb "to travel", depending on what the purpose of said travel or voyage would be.
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huemaaurets /ɰʷɛma:ɹɛd͡z/ means "to travel with the added intention to move somewhere else
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cjaarol /ʃa:rɔl/ means to travel to trade
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letlyucol /lɛtɬi:wxɔl/ means to travel with the intention to return at a later point in the not-so-distant future. This is something you would say as in: "I am travelling (going) to a friend, but I'll be back for dinner".
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huelyucol /ɰʷɛli:wxɔl/ is the opposite of letlyucol: it means to travel back, it's the "I'll be back for dinner" kind of travelling.
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Then finally, there is the word lyucol /li:wxɔl/, which means simply to travel, where the reason for the travel will (have to) be clarified by appending different words: as in "I am going to visit a friend", you would say huilyucolnenynanmatlaukeetl (hui-lyucol-nenynan-matlauk-eetl = 1st Person-to travel-to visit.PTCP-friend.CST-[obj]) /ɰʷɪli:wxɔlnɛni:nɑnmɑtɬɑwge:tɬ/.
But a second example of the influence of culture onto the language is the way Zajen language handles possessive pronouns. Because a Zajen tends to not stay in one place, most if not all villages and towns with a large group of Zajen tend to have some kind of "communal ownership" for their goods. A Zajen living in one village shares most of his possessions with the community. Therefore, Zajen language has two kinds of possessive pronouns: regular personal possessives and communal possessives.
The first kind of possessives is used for things that are strictly and undeniably the property of one person: my eyes, your hands, his thoughts. However, the moment he expresses his thoughts, it becomes something we can all share with the community: it becomes our thought. For this reason, the communal possessives also only exist in a plural form: our, your (plural) and their. The personal possessives exist as mine, your (both singular and plural), his/her, their and our: the plural words express things like our dog (necjour /nɛʃɔɹ/), because the dog likes us and lives with us, we can sort of say it is undeniably our. Although if multiple people or families were to take care of our dog, we can say that it is our dog as in the community's dog, and we call it ruolicjour /ɹɔlɪʃɔɹ/.
Question (to feed a discussion): Do you have a language where you thought about how the culture influenced the language (either the vocabulary, the grammar or script? Zajen language tends to be carved on the inside of tree bark, so the script is formed from long, horizontal stripes with few circular or vertical distinctions as that would go against the structure of the bark), and how does that show up?
Posted Aug 17, 2017, 7:32 PM UTC · edited