Waiting for the baby to arrive gives me some time to work on Dira in a bit of a different way. I work on it to keep myself occupied while my wife is asleep or a way to release from the day. My boss and I are trying to get a lot done for actuaries before I leave to spend time with mom and baby, so it’s sometimes hard to get a break from my work life and not take it home.

In Dira, I want to make sure that the various cultures are not two-dimensional. To that end, I figure that if their language is more detailed and fleshed out, more can be inferred about their culture. For now, I don’t want to necessarily create a language from scratch, though I have some tools that would help me do that. I want the Hesberian to feel somewhat Roman. So I decided to use Latin as a base to make a language. I added a sound or two and eliminated some others, but the result is something I hope will vaguely sound Latin, thus feel a little Roman.

For example, Sinber Sisarokiris sounds almost Latin. It means, “Always armed with an axe”. This sounds like a better way to describe the Tolkien Dwarves (Sisarokiris) instead of trying to make up a name (which I did, but have changed my mind) . I could also use Bakmis ( a word that came to mean short in stature) or Birbitis (Bearded like men of antiquity). Granted, there are no Tolkienese Dwarves in Dira, but I think you understand my point. Hesberians call things by Hesberian words, not translated or transliterated English words. It’s like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis reverse engineered.

So, in time where I want to be creative and disengage without having to ‘finish’ something, I play with the Hesberian Language a bit. I’ve got the vocabulary generated, but I’m working on the noun declension system and verb tenses right now. Thanks to the use of Words by William Whitaker, I am able to break down the declensions into variants. For example, Latin noun can decline in one of five ways. However, within first declension nouns, there are quite a few variations. With Whitaker’s approach, those variations are arranged systematically. It doesn’t have to be 100% accurate, but it does allow for a bit more diversity. After all, I’m not trying to re-create Esperanto which has NO exceptions.

Outside of that, for the really strange, I look at the Ilosian language. The Ilosians have a voicebox that can produce two sounds at once. However, they have only one mouth. This would allow them all kinds of consonants that the human voice system cannot produce. If they produce sounds similar to thrushes (which also have two voiceboxes) you can imagine consonants that feature a trill and any other consonant sound at the same time. Can you imagine having a device similar to bagpipes needed to allow a human to speak this language? They can also produce the same consonant in both voiceboxes in such a way as to sound like two people speaking in unison. Of course, they could also sync the two exactly and sound like one person speaking.

Then when I add in (for no real reason) that their language is probably tonal, all kinds of possibilities open up. Add to that the fact that their language is usually spoken by repeating phrases three of four times, and other possibilities open up. How can a person born blind tell that a ken is Ilosian? The Ilosian repeats himself rather annonyingly. For now, I haven’t devised a way to write in their language, so giving examples is difficult. The best way I can think of the describe the repeating nature of their language is Mojo Jojo from the Powerpuff Girls cartoon series.