Honestly, as a German I can not quite understand the obsession of the English speaking world with the question whether a word exists or not. If you have to express something for which there is no word, you have to make a new one, preferably by combining well-known words, and in the very same moment it starts to exist. Agree?
Deutsche Freunde, could you please create for me a word for the extreme depression I feel when I bend down to pick up a piece of litter and discover two more pieces of litter?
um = around
die Welt = world
die Umwelt = environment
ver = prefix to indicate something difficult or negative, a change that leads to deterioration or even destruction that is difficult to reverse or to undo, or a strong negative change of the mental state of a person
der Müll = garbage, trash, rubbish, litter
-ung = -ing
die Vermüllung = littering
ver- = see before
zweifeln = to doubt
-ung = see before
die Verzweiflung = despair, exasperation, desperation
die Umweltvermüllungsverzweiflung = …
This is a german compound on the spot master class and I am LIVING
vulcan naming conventions are inconsistent, but the surakian tradition is generally two-syllable names, men’s s____k, women’s t’p___. so, yeah, t’pose is a completely reasonable english transliteration of a traditional vulcan woman’s name
to expand on this a little, the original memos actually say that vulcan mens’ names should be five letters, s???k. this is where you get “shrek is a vulcan name” discourse.
however, that doesn’t really scan. vulcan names aren’t meant to be written with the latin alphabet, after all, and vulcan script looks like this —
— if you can find anything that’s clearly a letter here, never mind delineating five of them, you’re a better man than me.
rather, i’d like to suggest the typical transliteration of a vulcan man’s personal name will most likely fit a {C}CVC.vc format, transliterated S[VC.v]k, assuming a traditionally minded family as well as modernity not fucking with pronunciation too much—remember young diot coke, born 1379? her name written today would probably be denise cook.
assume for a moment that surak is a good example of a traditional name; sarek, then, is uncorrupted in modernity. [ˌsʊɹˈʌk] and [ˌsaɹˈɛk], i guess? ipa will be the death of me one day and i’m absolute shit at vowels. but both of these names are S[VC.v]k, if you’ll accept some very ad hoc use of standard symbols.
there are names that don’t fit this model, though. spock; tuvok; stonn. we’ll throw shrek in here too.
tuvok is the easiest one to consolidate, of course: CCVC.vc, and the name [ˌstʊvˈɑk] drops its /s/ over time to simply [ˌtʊvˈɑk]
spock, stonn, and shrek are single-syllable, five-letter romanizations. immediately a problem becomes apparent, though; spock’s romanized /ck/ is the same as what is elsewhere romanized simply /k/ — the generalization of {C}CVC.vc as “five letters” throws off what would otherwise be romanized as “spok”; similarly, stonn is… presumably not displaying gemination, as romanizations typically drop it (see óðinn -> odin or the names of the dwarves in lotr for examples of consonant reduplication denoting gemination being dropped); as such we should probably see his name romanized as “ston”.
spock and stonn, normalized as spok and ston, are both CCVC. shrek is CCVC as well; remember /sh/ is /ʃ/ in ipa. so you have, in order, [spɑk], [stɑn], and [ʃɹɛk].
i would argue that spock and shrek are names which, over time, experienced vowel reduction; they’re not invalid names, they simply aren’t the original forms of them. diot and denise.
spock, then, would be derived from the name [ˌsʊpˈɑk]. the vowel loses prominence until it’s no longer pronounced at all, or only barely pronounced.
possibly this is due to a slight complication of the guidelines; not simply {C}CVC.vc, but {C}C’VC.vc. that is, not [ˌsʊɹˈʌk] but [ˌs’ʊɹˈʌk]; not [ˌsaɹˈɛk] but [ˌs’aɹˈɛk]. [ˌst’ʊvˈɑk] becomes [ˌt’ʊvˈɑk]*, and spock maybe originally was [ˌs’ʊpˈɑk].
see, /p/ really loves turning into /p’/; it probably happens in your speech all the time. so [ˌs’ʊpˈɑk] maybe gets functionally pronounced as [ˌs’ʊp’ˈɑk], and that’s a lot of ejectives in one syllable, so down the line it becomes simply [sp’ɑk].
shrek experiences a similar, but not identical, vowel reduction, with the likely protoform [ˌʃ’ʊɹˈɛk] becoming [ʃ’ɹɛk].
stonn is a bit of an odd case, obviously, as it doesn’t end in /k/ at all. i might argue that it’s diminuitive; like naming your kid joe or joey instead of joseph, you might name your kid [st’ɑn] instead of [ˌst’ɑnˈɛk]. this may be especially common if it’s typical vulcan pronunciation is actually [st’ɑŋ] and indicative of a dialect shifting word-final /k/ to /ŋ/; in a dialect where [ˌst’ɑŋˈɛk] is being pronounced [ˌst’ɑŋˈɛŋ] anyway, fuck your _# /ŋ/, who needs it? thus, stonn still feels complete as a name despite technically being a diminuitive.
*note that ipa /t’/ and the element /t’/ in traditional vulcan women’s names are not the same thing; /t’/ designates what in ipa is written /tʔ/ or /t’ʔ/. t’pose is [tʔpoʊz] or [t’ʔpoʊz] and, structurally, i suppose, C.CCVC, where women’s names are likely constructed C.CC{C}V{_C}; that is, T’P[{C}V{_C}], allowing t’pau ([t’ʔpaʊ]), t’pring ([t’ʔpɹɪŋ]), t’pose ([t’ʔpoʊz]).
Sometimes i think about the idea of Common as a language in fantasy settings.
On the one hand, it’s a nice convenient narrative device that doesn’t necessarily need to be explored, but if you do take a moment to think about where it came from or what it might look like, you find that there’s really only 2 possible origins.
In settings where humans speak common and only Common, while every other race has its own language and also speaks Common, the implication is rather clear: at some point in the setting’s history, humans did the imperialism thing, and while their empire has crumbled, the only reason everyone speaks Human is that way back when, they had to, and since everyone speaks it, the humans rebranded their language as Common and painted themselves as the default race in a not-so-subtle parallel of real-world whiteness.
In settings where Human and Common are separate languages, though (and I haven’t seen nearly as many of these as I’d like), Common would have developed communally between at least three or four races who needed to communicate all together. With only two races trying to communicate, no one would need to learn more than one new language, but if, say, a marketplace became a trading hub for humans, dwarves, orcs, and elves, then either any given trader would need to learn three new languages to be sure that they could talk to every potential customer, OR a pidgin could spring up around that marketplace that eventually spreads as the traders travel the world.
Drop your concept of Common meaning “english, but in middle earth” for a moment and imagine a language where everyone uses human words for produce, farming, and carpentry; dwarven words for gemstones, masonry, and construction; elven words for textiles, magic, and music; and orcish words for smithing weaponry/armor, and livestock. Imagine that it’s all tied together with a mishmash of grammatical structures where some words conjugate and others don’t, some adjectives go before the noun and some go after, and plurals and tenses vary wildly based on what you’re talking about.
Now try to tell me that’s not infinitely more interesting.
i find it fascinating how you said to stop thinking of common as “english, but in middle earth” and then proceeded to… precisely describe english, but in middle earth
‘downright’ is a synonym of ‘straight up’, they’re both intensifying adjectives, they’re also both words only made up of directions. how did this even happen
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