Talk:Khangaþyagon

Comments on Khangaþyagon

I'm always keen to receive feedback about Khangaþyagon, so if you'd like to say anything about it, please add your comments here. To get the ball rolling, I've asked permission from a couple of people who've followed Khangaþyagon in translation relays to post the feedback they gave me.

Sally Caves, who followed Khangaþyagon in The Primordial Soup Relay, wrote

I think ⁅Khangaþyagon⁆ is very interesting; I like the VSO structure --being a Celticist-- but one thing I would drop is the repetition in the adjectives. It makes for a kind of repetitive wordiness, and this is why I don't particularly like agglutinating languages.

I replied: I chose VSO because Khangaþyagon is a magical language - indeed, the name translates as "magic language". I therefore thought that there should be an emphasis on action, so therefore the verb should come first.

Sally said: Hmm. Isn't that funny. Among the Teonim, it's the last thing that has emphasis, the newest sound in the air. So the verb comes last, Teonaht being an active language, with emphasis on volitionality.

I also said: I don't quite know why I chose adjective agreement - although in a VSO language with no accusative marker, it probably makes the sentence structure easier to follow.

Sally replied: Not really. Welsh doesn't have much adjective agreement; only in a few cases. Nor is it an inflected language like Irish.

Later on, Sally asked me a few more questions about Khangaþyagon. Here they are, with my replies

1. Did Khangaþyagon emerge from a Role-Playing Game?
   • No, it's part of a fantasy novel which I'm in the process of writing.
2. What are the features of Khangaþyagon such that it is a magical language instead of a regular conlang?
   • In its concultural setting, Khangaþyagon is the original language of the world in which it was spoken. The Creator of the world came into it and walked among the first people for a while, and that was the language He spoke with them. When one of them defied Him, seeking to make himself ruler over the people, and declared that he would rather not be than submit to the Creator, the Creator granted his wish not so be so as to restore peace. However, this created death, which grieved the Creator, so he resolved to withdraw from the world, so that His presence would cause no more harm. However, He left a remnant of His powers in the world for the benefit of mankind. Wizards are those who have the ability to use these powers, have attained the "true knowledge" of magic, and use them for the benefit of others. When other languages began to diverge from the first language, they lost their magical potency. Wizards therefore preserved its use amongst themselves, and named it Khangaþyagon. It is necessary for a wizard to be able to understand and communicate in Khangaþyagon - simply reciting spells by rote doesn't work, and would neither enable the practitioner to attain true knowledge nor to formulate his own spells.
3. Is your choice of an agglutinating language important to the magical quality of this language?
   • It's influenced by the runic inscription that I used for my first source material. The ring was believed to be a talisman against bleeding, so I gave it an appropriate meaning, and then analysed the words to give that meaning. The length of the words made an agglutinating structure seem likely, so I parsed them accordingly. Since then, I've been largely guided by instinct - certain things seem right for Khangaþyagon, and that's my main design principle. I was also influenced by the large amount of compounding in German.
4. Is your choice of adjective agreement important? If so, is it because of the repetition?
   • The repetition does give a certain incantatory feel to the language, I find. The poem that I posted on the conlang list illustrates this particularly well. This seems to be aesthetically right for a magical language. I suppose that it's partly a Latin influence (Latin was the language that first made me realise that a language could work in a significantly different way from English, and has a long history of sacred, scholarly and magical use) although in other aspects I've tried to avoid romance influences.
5. Where did you get the Anglo-Saxon runic inscription on the ring? I'm sure it's not nonsense; just not West Saxon.
   • I was hoping for a Germanic, Saxon feel for Khangaþyagon, but not for a lookalike of any existing language. I was looking for information about Saxon runic inscriptions on the internet when I found the inscription, which I believe is the oldest runic inscription found in England. The fact that it seemed to be for magical purposes fitted what I wanted for Khangaþyagon exactly, so I'd found my starting point. Interesting that you think it's not nonsense. I wonder what it could be? The page where I found it didn't suggest a meaning.
6. How influenced are you by Anglo-Saxon as a language?
   • I'm interested in the Anglo-Saxons as a culture. They were a significant proportion of my ancestors. They had a prototype democracy, they were a warrior culture but once they came into contact with Christianity they developed a thriving academic tradition practically overnight. I was at Durham University, at the College of St. Hild and St. Bede, named after two particularly important Anglo-Saxon scholars. William the Conqueror's other epithet describes his character as much as his parentage.

Jörg Rhiemeier, who followed Khangaþyagon in Conlang Relay 15, wrote

It is a nice, well-developed conlang with very rich morphology, which I like. I especially like the segunkar system, which reminds me of the Daghestanian "case construction kits"; I am going to have something similar in some daughter languages of Old Albic. The language seems somewhat pristine and artificial to me, but if I remember correctly, it is meant to be the first language from which all other language evolved in a fantasy world, so the lack of diachronic depth positively makes sense.

Roger Mills, who followed Khangaþyagon in Conlang Relay 16, wrote

gevont: ge- 'true' + v- know + pres.part. "true knowing??" I translated it literally as "true knowledge (of)..." but wonder if it could have meant 'to recognize' or 'to be aware of'

I replied: I generally use it as "understand". ge and v- are two of the first Khangaþyagon roots I created. Actually gevont should mean "One who understands", but I forgot about that little semantic irregularity there when I translated.

sabegrontol: by tolerating? or "with toleration"?; same for mezzalesardlol 'together+feeling+ADJ+by' = with sympathy, sympathetically??? anyhow it led to a comparable compound (feel+with) for 'sympathy' in Gwr.

I replied: Most words for sympathy or compassion in natlangs can be translated as "to feel or suffer with", so I followed the pattern.

paðiltar -- do,act + 3 +IMPER + pl. A 3rd pers. imperative?? "let (them) act...??" I translated as (they) must act

I replied: Strictly speaking, the Khangaþyagon imperative is also an optative or hortative, but grammatically it's all the same form. My smooth English has "Let them..." but "they must..." is perfectly valid.

snaug 'fault' -- now, that's one ugly word ;-)

I replied: Deliberate phonoaesthetic choice there.

and the last phrase: gevir yir yi 'true-know-3-pl they __? is the last yi = it? as I assumed

I replied: Yes

And what about that last sentence: "I am not sure" ????????

I replied: Well, I translate and send on what I get, but I imagine that originally the last two sentences might have been one, along the lines of

"Few people doubt that they understand virtue, but I am not sure."

--PeteBleackley 13:16, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

Sylvia Sotomayor, who translated into Khangaþyagon in Inverse Relay 2, wrote

I enjoyed it. I find it kinda fun and weird at the same time that 'on' is a combination of 'above' and 'in contact with'. That is neat.

--PeteBleackley 16:47, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

David E, who followed Khangaþyagon in Conlang Relay 17 said:

When I first found out I'd be translating Khangaþyagon, I dug into your materials on Frath wiki and thought the premise was really cool. The language certainly seems to fit its role; it was pretty easy to pull apart the various segunakar and construct the meaning of the passage, and I can see how you could string things together to form some cool magical formulas. The relative simplicity of the grammar is a plus as well (the lack of irregularities was a godsend, thanks for that!), since any fans of your novel won't need to be linguistic buffs to dig into the language.

--PeteBleackley 12:52, 5 May 2010 (UTC)