Languages

Firstly: There are two major languages in the Empire, the Old Tongue and the Common Tongue. The Old Tongue is the original native language of the original Union of Five, later known simply as the States after the Third Crusade. Now, the Old Tongue is spoken mostly by Priests, and the Common Tongue is a creole formed by the assimilation of at least a dozen other languages, though the Old Tongue is the largest influence.

Both tongues have a system of natural gender with three genders: Divine, Animate, and Inanimate. The pronouns in use for each gender have remained the same in the Common Tongue, but they are not translated in this document because they lack good English equivalents. They are: "Ail", meaning "divine", "sur", meaning "life", (In Corasur, fire is considered to be alive, and is referred to with sur.) and "fol", meaning "thing". Unlike the other two, fol is not commonly seen in words, but its use is mostly confined to that pronoun. Rather than having entirely separate pronouns to refer to groups, you instead add an A to the end of the pronoun, and for mixed groups, you "round up". To form the reflexive, you suffix the pronoun with "ja". For posessives, you use the construct "ko <pronoun>".

To recap, "Sur lent me ko sur horse.", (<Person> lent me <person>'s horse.) "Ailistiff constructed the World Seed Ailja.", (Ailistiff constructed the World Seed itself. (Note that Ail is not like it at all, but it's even less like he or she. I could use they in a singular sense, but that would just muck it up because Ail is syntactically singular and the plural form is Aila.)) "Pick fola up." (Pick those things up.) "Sura invited me to ko sura feast." (They invited me to their feast.).

This is somewhat oversimplified and further information can be found in Appendix C.

For convenience, the Common Tongue is always translated to English, while the Old Tongue is preserved because uneducated people in Corasur likely can't understand it that much better than you do.

Corasur means "Land of Life", and so the title of this page is redundant in a similar way to "Mount Fujiyama" or "naan bread". However, I'm going to leave it and consider this note to be enough. Another nitpick: Corasur is not a planet, but a flat plane, and you do not live "on" Corasur, you live in it.

Inspiration for this language comes mostly from whatever I decide sounds good, but some roots are from Greek or latin.