And now for something completely different: the Orcish language (Fantasy Friday #15)

Orcs in my fantasy world have their origins on the continent of Aoqina.  Some time back, a group of elfs came to worship beings they called the Sow Mothers.  A herd of goddesses that suckled their followers on the rich milk of fertility and wealth, the Sow Mothers called their followers to form their own communities in the face of rising intolerance against them by the larger elfin culture.  Soon, the villages and towns and groves of the elfs could no longer be called home by the followers of the Sow Mothers.  When home becomes wild, the wilderness becomes home.  Roving bands of Sow Mother worshipers wandered Aoqina, and with separation came individuation. 

These pig-elfs began to explore new ways of living, new forms of culture centered around their matrons.  They sought to know who they were and who they could become, reshaping their society around a religion, fueled by curiosity around how that religion and its consequences could engender new forms of art, new social rituals, new politics, new family dynamics.  The one thing they never sought was a settled home, a single place for them to reside.  They kept themselves wandering and homeless in order to preserve their distinction from other elfs, their alienation from that culture that spawned them.

A movement grew within the pig-elfs that proclaimed them to no longer be, in fact, elfs.  At first a small seed within the soil of a porcine counterculture, it grew over many years.  As they became a decisive force among the followers of the Sow Mothers, members of this movement delved into esoteric magicks.  Some even traveled to the spirit realms where the Sow Mothers and their children squealed, divining strange new prayers from the oinking cacophony.  Rituals were developed that would sever the pig-elfs forever from their ancestral race.  Casting these spells, reciting these prayers, changed the wandering bands of the pig-elfs, brought the essence of their goddesses into them.

Fey features grew hairy and plump.  Small noses sprouted into snouts.  Teeth became tusks, and delicate ears grew wide, floppy, an impossibly soft.  Orcs had birthed themselves, creating themselves in the image of their goddesses.  Individual sovereignty and self-determination has been central to who they have been ever since.

The magicks that created the orcs were later adopted by a group of gnolls obsessed with liberty.  When they adapted them towards the goal of excising all that was obedient from their essence, they ended up splitting the bestial parts of themselves from the rational, cleaving the souls in twain.  Thus, were humans and hyenas first born.

I’m going to use a relatively simple formula to create the Orcish language.  The basic lexicon will be stolen from Quenya in recognition of their elfin ancestry, but the grammar won’t be the inflected forms of a language invented by a British philologist.  Rather, the forms and the modulations of the words will derive from tlIngan Hol (that is: Klingon), that melange of weirdnesses that is Marc Okrand.

I want the language to sound like, well, the noises pigs make, so I will be replacing many of the phonemes from each language with the phonemes from the English words “oink”, “squeal”, “grunt”, and “snort”.  This will also allow the two languages ~ who have very little in common phonetically ~ merge more seamlessly.

From this simplistic beginning, I can later go in and make changes to evolve my Orcish into a language that can really stand on its own.  But, later ~ functionality before obsessive tinkering, right?  ;-)

I’ve been a major linguistics fan most of my life, so I will be using a lot of funny characters in these posts.  They are from the International Phonetics Alphabet, a tool developed by the international linguistics community to record the exact sounds used by people when they speak.  Please forgive me if it seems esoteric to you; a description of the various sounds of Orcish in layman’s terms will appear later in this post, as well as how to write them without all those funny letters.  The IPA will always be written between some sort of brackets, usually between two slashes (which is standard IPA practice).

When importing Quenya words, /ŋ/, /n/, /r/, /g/, /w/ /l/, /kʷ/, /i/, /oi/, /ai/, /au/, and /ui/ will all just stay the same.  I’ll change /t/→/tʰ/, /s/→/ʂ/, /m/→/ᵑk/, /v/→/ʂ/, /j/→/kʷ/, /d/→/l/, /k/→/g/, /h/→/r/, /rj/→/n/, /p/→/tʰ/, /f/→/q͡χ/, /b/→/x/, /a/→/oi/, /e/→/i/, /u/→/ʌ/, and /o/→/ɔ˞/.

When importing tlIngan Hol words (well, endings and prefixes), /tʰ/, /q͡χ/, /ʂ/, /x/, /n/, /r/, /l/, /ʔ/, /t͡ʃ/, /d͡ʒ/, /ɣ/, /m/, /ŋ/, and /ɪ/ will all just stay the same.  I’ll change /pʰ/→/tʰ/, /qʰ/→/kʷ/, /b/→/n/, /ɖ/→/ᵑk/, /t͡ɬ/→/l/, /v/→/r/, /w/→/ʂ/, /j/→/g/, /ɑ/→/i/, /ɛ/→/ʌ/, /o/→/ɔ˞/, and /u/→/oi/.  As a curious etymological note, that means that /ʔ/, /t͡ʃ/, /d͡ʒ/, /ɣ/, and /ɪ/ will only show up in syntactical and grammatical affixes, but not in the lexicon itself.

This leaves Orcish with 17 consonants (a moderately small inventory; that’s as many consonants as Japanese).  They are as follows, with the simple spelling first, followed by the phonetic spelling in between the slashes:
n /n/
r /r/
l /l/
g /g/
m /m/
ch /t͡ʃ/
j /d͡ʒ/
qu /kʷ/
w /w/
ng /ŋ/ ~ these 10 sounds in Orcish are all pronounced as an English speaker would expect the letters to sound
t /tʰ/ ~ this letter has the sound of the t in the English word “top”.  If you put your hand to your mouth and say “top” and “stop”, you’ll notice a little breath of air in the former that’s absent from the latter; that pop of air is what the superscript “h” represents.
‘ /ʔ/ ~ this is the sound that often feels like not a sound in the middle of the English word uh-oh.  It’s a little catch in the throat.
q /x/ ~ this sound’s not in English, but it is in languages like Spanish (the first sound in “junta”, for example).  It’s kinda like a hard breathing at the back of the throat.
nk /ᵑk/ ~ this sound does happen in English (in “ankle”, for example), but we don’t think about it much.  If you try to say “k”, but start out like you’re going to say “n”, you’ll just about get it.
s /ʂ/ ~ this sound is exactly like an “s”, only you curl your tongue backwards when you say it.
gh /ɣ/ ~ this is kind of like a very soft “g”.  It used to be in English, but isn’t anymore; it does sometimes gets used instead of “g” in Spanish, though (“amigo”, for example)
kh /q͡χ/ ~ a rather rare sound, you probably won’t have heard it except on Star Trek.  It sounds a bit like choking momentarily.

and 8 vowels, including diphthongs (a large inventory; that’s as many vowels as Arabic and Turkish).  Neither tone nor nasality is contrastive in Orcish, but their baseline realizations of these phonemes (that is, the way they say these vowel sounds) are different from what English-speakers would expect, often spoken at higher or lower tones and often nasalized.  Non-orcs speaking the language can be easily understood if they get these things wrong, but they will sound hella funny to the orcs to whom they’re talking:
i /Ĩ˦/ & ee /ĩ˥ː/ ~ as the vowel in English “feet”, spoken as if with a cold (routing some of the air out through the nose) and a tone higher than baseline.  The only differences between the two are that the latter is twice as long as the former and is another tone higher.
oy /õĨ/ ~ as an English speaker would expect “oy” to sound, if spoken with a cold
ai /ai/ ~ not like “paid” but rather like “aikido”
ow /au/ ~ about how an English speaker would say “ow”
ui /u˨i˥/ ~ essentially the same vowel sound as the English pig call “suey”, starting a tone below baseline and ending two tones above
uh /ʌ̃˨/ ~ as in English “uh” or “cup”, spoken as if with a cold and a tone below baseline
o /ɔ̃˞/ ~ despite being spelled “o”, it sounds like the English word “or” or as in “lord”, again spoken by sending some of the air through your nose
ih /ɪ̃˨/ ~ as the vowel in English “bit”, nasalized again and spoken a tone below baseline

That’s a consonant:vowel ratio of 2.125:1 (a little bit more than twice as many consonants as vowels), which is moderately low.  That’s a tiny bit smaller than Korean and Ainu (both 2.2:1, I think) and Cree (≈2.14:1, I think), so our Orcish is in quite good company!