Categories: Lore

Language

The language of the continent.

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. Here is all the info on the language! For a list of words in the language, refer to the dictionary!

Ancient vs. Modern

Ancient Bauhinian is split into two forms: Noble Bauhinian and Common Bauhinian (think Latin and Vulgar Latin). Modern Bauhinian is developed from Common Bauhinian, 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 sounded like further back
• Modern Bauhinian, spoken by everyone now, developed from Common

This file documents Modern Bauhinian.

In brief

Since I'm never finishing this language anyways, I'm gonna talk about some important features of Bauhinian:

1. It is very specific and precise when talking about objective things. Evidentiality (saw with your own eyes? heard from someone trustworthy? untrustworthy? inferred it?), when exactly an event happened (historical event? just happened like hot news? happened early in your life?), etc.
2. However, it's insanely vague when it comes to subjective stuff. "I want to be in bed with you 25 hours a day and have ten billion children¹" and "I like you as a normal acquaintance. I might say hello to you on the street if I'm feeling nice" are literally expressed the same way, and there's no way around it unless you want to resort to literally saying "please have ten billion children with me" which just makes you sound perverted.
3. 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."
4. There are a shitton of different ways to say someone died, depending on the identity of said dead person and the way they died.

I literally don't know how to make some (most) of these features LMAO…

Phonology

Bauhinian features 5 vowels and 22 consonants.

Vowels

Consonants

Letters with no sound-alikes sounds like how they would in English.

Rules

Syllables in Bauhinian are constructed with one of these patterns:

1. a single vowel (a, e)
2. consonant + vowel (pa, mo)
3. vowel + consonant (at, um)
4. consonant + vowel + consonant (nam, was)

But the restrictions are that y, w, and l cannot appear at the end of a syllable.

Pronunciation

Special-ass consonants

When j, q, and x are followed by a, e, or o, they are pronounced with a compound i + whatever followed them. To illustrate:

• j + a = jia (加)
• q + e = qie (切)
• x + o = xiu (修。或是跟你们喜欢管“脚脚”叫“jio jio”一样的)

This is reflected on the pronunciation alone. In written form, nothing has changed.

Long and short i

The vowel i is typically short in Bauhinian. However, if it's at the very end of a word, with no consonant behind it, it becomes a long i. For example, the Bauhinian word sili is pronounced the same as the English word "silly."

Stress

Stress is not important in Bauhinian. Do whatever.

Writing system

Bauhinian's writing system is literally Chinese and bopomofo, called "characters" and "letters." Some bopomofo characters are jammed into another sound because there weren't enough consonants.

Chinese characters (ahem, Bauhinian characters) are used for words with concrete meaning, while bopomofo (ahem, letters) are used for grammatical particles, and to teach kids to read.

You can also write Bauhinian in Latin, for sanity purposes. Here are the differences:

Bauhinian

• Punctuation are big (全角). Here is a big space: "　"
• If a syllable starts with a vowel and is not at the start of a word, it should be preceded with a big apostrophe: "＇"
• Grammatical particles are separated by "·"

Latin

• Small punctuation. Small spaces and apostrophes and such.
• Grammatical particles are separated by "-"

Grammar

Bauhinian is an agglutinative language, relying on affixes (only prefixes and suffixes here) to modify a word to give it additional meaning.

Plural

The plural of a noun is denoted using the suffix -nip. In Bauhinian, "plural" is only used when the number of things is uncertain. When the number is certain, no plural suffix is added.

Adjectives

Adjectives in Bauhinian are placed before nouns. For multiple adjectives, there is an order you need to follow, but I don't want to come up with it right now.

Emphasis

In English, adjectives can be modified by "very" or "a little." To express this idea in Bauhinian, you modify the adjective itself (notice the lack of "·" or "-" between them). To increase the degree, repeat the first syllable of the adjective (or the whole word if there's only one syllable) as many times as you'd like. To reduce the degree, add the suffix -tik as many times as you'd like. In Bauhinian, this is represented by the character 甚. Note that doing this for more than one time will have society clock you as a stupid kid!

Also this type of speech is not accepted in academia, and you need to resort to precise and boring ways to express how your beaker of clear liquid turned a tiny bit blue after 8 hours. I have not come up with the boring way to express it and I don't want to because it's boring.

Numbers

Numbers in Bauhinian work exactly like Chinese. You string numbers together and they're split every four digits rather than three (so "ten thousand" has its own word). Because of this, people of the continent also put commas every four digits, not three.

Predicative

Telling someone about the property of something is a very common speech pattern. "The world is big." "The apples are red." "Sparky is the girl who's eating." "The boy standing there is Nightsun." To express these ideas in Bauhinian, you add the suffix "-nan" to the thing being described, and "-sin" to the property being assigned to it. 有点像古汉语里的“什么什么者，什么什么也”。 In speaking, a pause is usually between the two words / phrases. In writing, there may be a comma to represent the pause, but it's omittable.

Cause and effect

This is literally the reason I made this in the first place but I just got too lazy to write it. One day.

Verb tenses

Bauhinian has:

• Past tense (did): -waq
• Present ongoing (doing): -tanka
• Present perfect (have just done): -…
• Future (will do): -…
• Just about to do: -…
• Should do: -…
• Must do: -…
• Want to do: -…
• And whatever more I can think of

Okay some of these maybe (definitely) can't be categorized as "tenses" in a grammatical sense but I don't care.

Saying "hello world"

Asking the real questions here! "你·ㄛㄩㄛ，万物！(youNa-helloowo, worldlantap!)"

Accents

Bauhinian

Literally the standard! I like to imagine they sound like the British.

Fantoni

Quite similar to Bauhinian, except they often mix up *n*s and *l*s. May pronounce "nat" as "lat," for example.

Atlasian

Likes to drag out their *i*s, making all of them long. "Filip" becomes "feeeeeleeeeep!"

Westavian

tba

Morelandian

Softens *t*s into *d*s like them yankees. "Ata" and "ada" are the same in their mouths.

Sylvandian

tba

QnA