Language

The language of the continent.

Categories: Humanities, Language, Lore

Due to literally being one Bauhinian Empire for thousands of years, everyone on the continent speaks one language. Though topolects and accents exist, the foundations of them are the same, and they always remain mutually intelligible.

History

Ancient Bauhinian is split into two forms: Noble Bauhinian and Common Bauhinian (think Latin and Vulgar Latin). Modern Bauhinian is developed from Common Bauhinian (difference is paramount to modern Chinese and Ming and Qing Dynasty novels), while Noble Bauhinian is taught as a school subject to torture students all over the continent. In most places, these two languages (the old Noble one and the modern one) are now called Ancient Bauhinian and Modern Bauhinian now, to rid the idea of an aristocrat-exclusive language, although in Fanton they still call it Noble and Common Bauhinian.

As far as we're concerned, there existed 3 languages on the continent:

• Noble Bauhinian, used mainly by aristocrats, has extensive written records and documents
• Common Bauhinian, no written documents until pretty late; linguists can only speculate on how it was like further back
• Modern Bauhinian, spoken by everyone now, developed from Common

By the way, since the TIR people have only one language, there isn't really a concept of "languages." The word simply doesn't exist. To talk about the grammar and things of Bauhinian, they say سەث (seth), which roughly means "way of speech" or "rhetoric."

Features

Here are some important features of Bauhinian. Most will probably not make it into the speak-able version of the conlang, but we can pretend they exist.

• There are like a billion terms ranging from "this person annoys me" to "this person is my arch-nemesis."
• Espionage jargon is baked into the language.
• Questions are worded completely differently when in normal contexts and in interrogations. Grammatically they are called "asking questions" and "requesting information," respectively. Exams are usually worded like "asking questions," except the exams at Ministry Affiliate which like the tone of "requesting information."
• There are a shitton of different ways to say someone died, depending on the identity of said dead person and the way they died.
• Sounds like j, q, and x are more common in Ancient Bauhinian, and are used in Modern Bauhinian mostly as more archaic and literary words. Saying "can't even pronounce j, q, x" is used to insult someone's intelligence.
  • Ancient Bauhinian words in Modern Bauhinian are also often spelled with double consonants in random places for no fucking reason.
• Adjectives in Bauhinian can be emphasized by repeating the first syllable as many times as you'd like. For example, take the adjective "tungsahur." If someone says "tung-tung-tungsahur," it means "very very tungsahur."
• In different contexts, "please" is expressed differently. Examples include
  • "If you don't mind" (inquiries)
  • "If you would be so kind" (requests)
  • "I implore you to" (imperative please)
  • "I beg you" (pretty please with sugar on top?)
• There is no habitual aspect to verbs. If you want to say something like "Nightsun spies on people," you say "Nightsun is a people-spier."

My end goal is to make the language somewhat speakable and consistent, at least for myself only. Then I can scatter character quotes around as fun little translation exercises for y'all (or just include the translation in a tooltip or something because I hate subtlety). The most important goal is translating Spy School into Bauhinian. Which comes after translating it to Chinese. Which comes after finishing the damn thing first. Oh and maybe self-referentially make a Bauhinian version of the website.