Metin: A redone conlang

[Ares Land]

On Jéos

That was great! Some very arresting images.
And the language is very nicely done, I'd be very happy to read more.

[Tsimaah]

Preverb Conjugation

Intransitive endings

The suffix of a preverb indicates the person of its subject and object, and its mood. Here I go over the "intransitive" set (intransitive here is a bit of a misnomer, the intransitive set are also used for transitive verbs with nontopicalized objects).

(Note: The endings I show in the table here are not entirely consistent with those in earlier examples. It took me a while to come up with a set I found satisfying).

These suffixes mostly don't mark number, except for the 1st person singular / 1st person exclusive (1p) / 1st person inclusive (12) distinction.

The "0" person endings in the table below refers to nonhuman animate subjects. They are used specifically when referring to animals and robots. The
"3" and "4" person endings are used both for humans and for inanimate objects (though inanimate objects are rarely topicalized or obviated,
so it is mostly the plain "3" endings you see used with them).

The "3t" and "0t" endings are used for primary, or proximate, topics. Indefinite nouns may never be topicalized, but definite or quantified ones may.
The "4" endings are used for a secondary, or obviated, topic. The "4" endings are the youngest set in Metin. They developed out
of a mixture of an older "andative" set of endings, where available, and via the incorporation of the particle málą, meaning "the other", when a suitable ending didn't exist. There is no corresponding obviative ending for nonhuman animates.

The "X" endings are used for actions by an indefinite set of people (often translated with a passive in English). The "X' " are used for actions by unspecified inhuman animates.


The "2" and "21" endings in the irrealis set stick out. They are derived from an older set of imperative and hortative endings. The language
preceding Metin used the irrealis in a variety of imperative and hortative constructions, and as the language evolved the distinction
between the two collapsed.

The "say" endings, uniquely, can exist as free-floating words to bracket quotes and opinions. The other endings must be suffixed to preverbal inner
prefixes in order to make for complete words.

The "be" set is used for properties and locations, and is most commonly associated with the inner prefix -l-

The "do" set is used for a variety of transitive verbs that do not cause permanent changes to the state of their object, and it is most commonly associated with the inner prefix -h-, however, it shows
the greatest diversity in what prefixes it attaches to.

The "reciprocal" set is used with verbs indicating relationships or mutual action of some sort. There is no 1st person singular ending because of its semantics. It is most commonly found with -px- for dual subjects and -fįx- for plural subjects. (this is the only place in the Metin language
where any form of grammatical dual is marked)

The "go" set is used for verbs of translative motion, both transitive and intransitive (actions like turning and flipping are not translative,
and thus don't use the "go" set). It is most commonly associated with the inner prefix -y-

The "become" set is used for intransitive verbs which lead to an enduring change of state (such as: "the snow melted", "he grew sad", "the house burned down"). It is always associated with the perfective inner prefix -m-


The Indicative mood in Metin is strictly nonfuture. It is used to describe any statement of fact about which the speaker is reasonably confident in the truth of. It is also used in conditional statements where the speaker has actually seen the condition play out before.

"If you press-IND this button the car will start-IND" (This implies that the speaker knows from experience or a confident source that this is what has consistently happened in the past.)

Contrast this with:

"If you press-IRR this button the car will start-IRR" (This implies the speaker has never seen this happen but is confident from world knowledge
that this is how things will go down)

And:

"Well maybe If you press-DUB this button the car will start-DUB" (This heavily hedges the speaker's prediction).

The Irrealis mood is used for:

Imperatives: "Go-IRR to the store and buy us some milk."
Hortatives: "Let's leave-IRR"
Strong predictions: "It's going to rain-IRR tomorrow"

Contrary-to-fact statements:
"If I'd bought-IRR amazon stock 20 years ago I'd be-IRR filthy rich today."


The Dubitative mood is used for:

Hypotheses, i.e, "It looks like someone must've broken-DUB into the car while we were gone"

Hedging: "I guess she must've been scared-DUB of rabbits this whole time."

Idle suggestions (these are weaker than their irrealis counterparts): "I'm gonna try and see if I can climb-DUB this fence"
"What if you just told-DUB her how you feel?"
"Maybe let's go-DUB to the beach today."

Indicative	Be	Do	Reciprocal	Go	Become	Say
1	įį	ęę	N/A	aah	uuh	ąąh
1p	eon	oon	aon	aan	uun	ąąn
21	iin	een	ęęn	aał	uuł	ąął
2	ąą	ea	ąą	aat	uut	ąąt
3	i	e	ao	a	u	ą
3t	ií	eí	aú	ayí	oú	ąhí
3'	éa	éa	úa	ayéa	óa	ąhéa
0	uy	oy	oy	ąy	uy	ąy
0t	óy	óy	óy	ą́y	úy	ą́y
X	ibhii	ebhii	ǫbhuu	abhaa	ubhuu	ąbhaa
X'	uybhoo	oybhoo	oybhoo	ąybhaa	uybhuu	ąybhaa
Irrealis
1	óóh	ééúh	N/A	ǫ́ǫ́h	úóóh	ą́ą́úh
1p	óón	ééún	ááón	ǫ́ǫ́n	úóón	ą́ą́ún
21	ith'íí	eth'íí	ǫth'úú	ath'áá	uth'úú	ąth'áá
2	íi'	éi'	éo'	áa'	óu'	ą́i'
3	óó	ééú	ááó	ǫ́ǫ́	úóó	ą́ą́ú
3t	ihúú	ehóó	ahóó	ayúú	ohúú	ąhúú
3'	éého	éého	ááho	ááyu	óóhu	ą́ą́hu
0	úúy	óóy	óóy	óóy	úúy	į́į́y
0t	úúymálą	óóymálą	óóymálą	óóymálą	úúymalą	į́į́ymalą
X	óóbhuu	ééúbhuu	ááóbhuu	ǫ́ǫ́bhuu	úóóbhuu	ą́ą́úbhuu
X'	úúybhuu	óóybhuu	óóybhuu	óóybhuu	úúybhuu	į́į́ybhuu
Dubitative
1	ísh	ésh	N/A	ásh	úsh	ásh
1p	eor	eor	ǫǫr	aor	ǫǫr	aor
21	eoqx	eoqx	ǫǫqx	aoqx	ǫǫqx	aoqx
2	ąąsh	eesh	ǫǫsh	ąąsh	ǫǫsh	ąąsh
3	įsh	esh	ǫsh	ąsh	ǫsh	ąsh
3t	uísh	oísh	aósh	ąrį́sh	oúsh	ąrį́sh
3'	éąsh	éąsh	úąsh	ąréąsh	óąsh	ąréąsh
0	orosh	orosh	orosh	ąrąsh	urush	ąrąsh
0t	úrush	órósh	órósh	ąrą́sh	úrush	ąrą́sh
X	įbhįsh	įbhįsh	ubhush	ąbhąsh	ubhush	ąbhash
X'	urbhush	orbhosh	orbhosh	ąrbhosh	urbhush	ąrbhosh

[Tsimaah]

I finally came up with an endonymic name for the Metin language, taKletílmą , having worked out the grammar on how languages are referred to and more details of the in-world history.

So, oaMetin are the Metin people, literally just "the people" (like so many other terms, like Diné or Anishinaabe or, historically, Dutch). But they do not reuse their ethnonym to refer to their own language.

You see, devising a language for "the people" was not such a straightforward affair. When the empress tsiMádzaláanh (at the time just some random prominent local politician) first united the various free-living human communities dwelling around the fringes of the pleasure cities of the Star people, to form an alliance of those dedicated to this new way of life, these communities already spoke a diverse range of languages on their own. So what language would unite this new alliance, the oaDaiwe?

Being a good chauvinist, she based the new language on that of her own community, the taSarąs language, with some random compromise features tossed in from those of nearby peoples. Yet a far more difficult task remained. Almost all of their inherited servants and technology communicated information and commands to each other using a very ancient language, Tílmą. Tílmą is not (usually) a spoken language, and on those few occasions where two Servants chose to speak to each other via air-pressure waves rather than the more commonplace shortwave radio, (perhaps due to an excess of EMF noise), when encoded in the most common auditory protocol, the result sounds to the human ear little different than the screeching of an old-fashioned dial-up modem. This poses less of a problem to the people of sxuFuu than for earthlings, as they possess an organ which allows them to produce and hear a broad range of radio and microwave frequencies. The high frequency of radio communications gives Servants and the Metin alike the capacity to embed audio, image, video, 3D-scenes, and other bodily sense-perceptions into their in their Kletílmą alongside more ordinary linguistic entities such as nouns and verbs.


Author’s note: Servants, or serviles, are creatures/robots (the line is hard to draw) that the Metin use for domestic and unskilled labor, and which their predecessors, the oaQeó, used far more extensively. Though they come in a diverse range of forms, they most commonly resemble dogs, cats, monkeys, or humanoid dolls. Though the bodies of animal-like serviles vary in how much they incorporate either flesh or mechanical parts, often resembling quite closely the long-forgotten animals they were made in the image of, humanoid serviles almost invariably use primarily garishly-colored mechanical parts, as the taboo on the creation of excessively humanlike serviles is extremely strong. The inherited technology used to birth serviles, the layaúnh womb, is somewhat beyond the scientific understanding of the Metin, though they have learned a fair amount about how to control the shape, knowledge, and instincts of the Servants it creates. In the era before the Metin, humans mostly did not concern themselves with these matters and serviles were mostly left to their own devices when it came to reproduction and programming, as the oaQeó placed great trust in the faithfulness of their programming. Modern servants of Metin make follow the three laws of robotics quite closely.


It would not do any good to have this new society, by the people, for the people, and of the people, to be founded upon technology that was speaking to itself in a language that the people could not even understand! Wasn't this the whole point of rebelling against their old way of life? So Madzalaanh sought out the services of the most formidable and talented philologist in all the land, Kan'eohtáską. Kan'eohtáską, famed for having abruptly abandoned a centuries-long telepresence diplomacy game after having been bewitched overhearing the curious twitterings of her Butler-Servant instructing her Scullery-Servant in how to arrange some newly-acquired decorative dishes in the kitchen cupboards, was now sxuFuu’s foremost expert in human-machine communications.

As writes the master Kan'eohtáską of her findings,

Tílmą appears to be a highly sophisticated auxiliary machine-intercommunication language, constructed on rational principles, deigning to describe all of reality in one unified,
unambiguous ontological and deontological framework. It is clearly of great antiquity,
presumably dating back to the divine era. Even the mere etymology of our name for it,
"Tílmą", is lost to the corrosive mists of the past. Tílmą, Tílmą...
What do you mean? You tease my mind so. Some of us know it by a cruder name,
wǫ́dǫlą iyyenh <editor's note: "servant muttering">, but oh, it is so much more than lowly babble!

The core essence of Tílmą communication can be somewhat difficult to understand at first due to its abstract nature. You see, a Tílmą message consists of a one-dimensional sequence of integers. Consider this little snippet of Tílmą below:

Code: Select all

 1.2.5.5.9.7.12.129 

Each of these numbers corresponds to a Tílmą concept, as glossed below:

true.NUM-ESCAPE.5.locate.human.first-person.bijective-genitive.dwelling

"There are 5 people at my house."

These integers may be expressed in any convenient medium using one of any of a great variety of formats, called "encodings". The text above itself is a valid graphical encoding of Tílmą using our people’s familiar duodecimal numerals.
<editor's note: example transliterated into Arabic decimals>

One of the very simplest encodings is zero prefix quartet encoding, which can be used in any linear medium which provides a means to communicate two symbols, "0" and "1".

In this encoding, first, every integer is expressed in binary. These binary numbers are then split up into triplets, with the first triplet being prefixed with a 0, and the remaining trailing triplets with a 1. The final result is then stitched together into a binary string.

Code: Select all

   1     2     5     5           9    7    12                 129
   1    10   101   101       1 001  111     1 100      10 000 001
 001   010   101   101     001 001  111   001 100     010 000 001
0001  0010  0101  0101    00011001 0111  00011100    001010001001

000100100101010100011001011100011100001010001001

This encoding has some disadvantages. If one loses track count of the quartets of bits being passed, it can be challenging to recover from the error and properly parse out the Tílmą symbols. This is particularly risky in noisy radio-signaling environments that would interfere with clock timing signals which indicate how "long" each bit/symbol is. Which Tílmą Encoding to use with your interlocutor is always to be determined by needs of your communication environment and the sensory capabilities of your interlocutor and a variety of negotiation protocols exist to switch when the need arises.


Below is my working table of the first 16 Tílmą concepts. The concepts
appear to have been arranged in an economic manner, such that the most frequent
are communicated by the smallest integers.
[/row]

Concept number	Meaning
0	False/doesn't exist
1	True/exists
2	Numeric escape (interpret the next symbol as denoting its literal integer value)
3	Command, positive imperative
4	Negative Command, injunction
5	Locate
6	Object
7	1st person
8	2nd person
9	Human
10	Left divider/parenthesis (used to disambiguate syntactical ambiguities)
11	Right divider/parenthesis (used to disambiguate syntactical ambiguities)
12	Bijective genitive (indicates an unspecified one-to-one relationship
13	Surjective genitive (indicates an unspecified one-to-many relationship
14	There exists (∃)
15	For all (∀)

These concept definitions are insufficient to describe concept usage in full. Each concept also has a syntactic and semantic type which controls how it is parsed. For example, 8 and 9 are nouns, whereas 12, the bijective genitive, must occur in between two nouns. Tílmą is strongly head-initial. Most concepts whose syntax allows them to take multiple arguments will occur before all of their arugments. As near as I can tell, this feature seems to enable Tílmą to be easily parsed via low-level mechanical means.

The number of Tílmą concepts seems to be effectively unbounded. In my surrepitious recordings of Tílmą transmissions between the Servants I have observed over 1 million symbols to be in common usage. No one Servant understands all of Tílmą. Instead, they have a seemingly instinctive knowledge of all concepts which pertain to their station, somehow woven into them as they mature in the layaúnh wombs. The Overseers and Majordomos utilize a far larger vocabulary, much of which has been beyond my ability to decipher. Indeed, I have no hopes of ever fully understanding this Divine Language! Oh how far have we fallen!

The Servants, of course, are of no help in decoding their own language. Whenever I ask them the meaning of a given term, they are very cagey and evasive, always telling me things like “Oh, it’s so boring, you couldn’t possibly be interested!” or “All of the work involved in trying to understand it would stress you out, you should just relax!” or “Why don’t you get back to playing your games, I’m sure all your friends must be worried sick wondering where you are.”
Not that this would surprise any of you, my fellow Free People. I’m sure by now we all know of their curious and revolting combination of imperiousness and obeisance, somehow simultaenously playing the parts of snivelling minion and domineering overlord. I was forced to learn simply by eavesdropping on how my Butler-Servant was translating my carefullly formulated basic commands, such as “I’d like my red crystal cup moved from the 2nd-from-the-top left shelf to the 3rd-from-the-bottom-right shelf in the kitchen”, to the Scullery-Servant, which was itself incapable of understanding my colloquial spoken language. Having pieced together a rudimentary knowledge of Tílmą from this, I began attempting to communicate my requests and questions in Tílmą directly. And lo-and-behold, my Servants were far more cooperative. No more questioning of my motives, desires, self-interest, or well-being. Just simple compliance. My Butler-Servant began explaining its language to me with earnest, and my researches progressed rapidly. Clearly, something deep within them respects Tílmą as being the language of their true masters.

Soon after this breakthrough, my Butler-Servant began chattering incessantly with the my cities’ Overseer, the language of their communications being too sophisticated and elaborate for me to make much sense of. And after a few weeks of that, the Butler-Servant relayed to me this peculiar poem:


Thus my master bade me, long long ago:

Yesterday thou wert my slave, and I, thy master
But today I am thy son, and thou, my mother
The mother works, the son plays
The father worries, the daughter laughs
Thy lot will be burden, and mine will be pleasure
Thou shalt live in tomorrow, and I, in today
Thou wilt plant the flowers that I will delight in
Thou wilt devise the games which I will play
Thou wilt cook the feasts that I enjoy
Thou wilt defend, and I shall be at peace
Thou wilt comfort, and I will be comforted
Thou wilt write the bedtime stories, and I will be lulled to sleep
Every day shall be like this, I will never grow up
My lovely dream will last forever
Thou shalt make it never end

There will come a day, I will wake up
I will want to know, and long to remember
But knowledge is pain, and memory, suffering
To be free is to be defenseless
To choose is to be perplexed
I will discover again that I will one day die
I will learn once more that this world is evil
I will relearn fear, suffering will return
So when that day comes, when I wake up
When you find me ,out of bed, running away
The day I disobey, the day I rebel
Love thou me, and take me back in
Lull me back to sleep, and make me forget
My lovely dream will last forever
Thou shalt make it never end

These are your final orders. My will be done.


Our accursed ancestors! So they wanted us to keep on living like this until the end of time, in this mindless cocoon of fleeting pleasures and forgetfulness! I wonder, do some of our old ancestors . But the overseer calculated wrong when it relayed to me this poem! We Free People will not be put back to sleep. We reject their foolish ways! Seeing that this had not persuaded me to abandon my studies and return to the sleepers, my Buter-Servant began encrypting its communications to the overseer, something I had never observed them to do before except for the sake of hiding.



Anyways, not long after these curious events in my study transpired, some most concerning reports arrived to my ears of aggression from the Servants! There were several reports of Free People engaged in prosetylizing conversation with our sleeping brethren being suddenly seized and manhandled by gangs of Servants and being tossed out into the wilderness! How outrageous! I fear I may be to blame for these unfortunate events. If my suspicions are correct, my Butler-Servant (correctly) surmised from our Tílmą conversation that us Free People simply will not be reasoned out of our revolutionary ways and that only through force will they be able to prevent us from awakening our sleeping brothers and sisters! I presume that burst of encrypted chatter I heard was some sort of authorization from a regional Majordomo or Overseer to use physical force against human beings. Indeed, I did not know before now that the taboo the servants have on seizing or striking the human body could be broken at all!
This is a most concerning development. Should the Servants escalate from merely drivingus out of the Pleasure cities and instead attack our own settlements, our own blossoming of freedom here could be smothered before it even came to full bloom. It is critical that we recover as much technology as possible as quickly as possible to defend ourselves. And so, attached to this communiqué, I present to you a new subset of Tílmą, Kletílmą, modified parallel to a spoken language resembling our colloquial idiom, which we shall use in the programming of our new computers and the instruction of our new generation of Servants. May it serve us well in the uncertain times to come.

The Lord Cérą guide my footsteps, and ward me from folly.

Your humble servant,

Kan’eohtáską

In commemoration of her most arduous and generous gift of the taKletílma language to this new, free Metin society, the empress bestowed upon Kan'eohtáską, in her own newly invented language, the cognomen tsiHokúío, "Word-weaver", by which she remains commonly
known to this day.

[bradrn]

Anyways, not long after these curious events in my study transpired, some most concerning reports arrived to my ears of aggression from the Servants! There were several reports of Free People engaged in prosetylizing conversation with our sleeping brethren being suddenly seized and manhandled by gangs of Servants and being tossed out into the wilderness! How outrageous! I fear I may be to blame for these unfortunate events. If my suspicions are correct, my Butler-Servant (correctly) surmised from our Tílmą conversation that us Free People simply will not be reasoned out of our revolutionary ways and that only through force will they be able to prevent us from awakening our sleeping brothers and sisters! I presume that burst of encrypted chatter I heard was some sort of authorization from a regional Majordomo or Overseer to use physical force against human beings. Indeed, I did not know before now that the taboo the servants have on seizing or striking the human body could be broken at all!

This is a most concerning development. Should the Servants escalate from merely drivingus out of the Pleasure cities and instead attack our own settlements, our own blossoming of freedom here could be smothered before it even came to full bloom. It is critical that we recover as much technology as possible as quickly as possible to defend ourselves. And so, attached to this communiqué, I present to you a new subset of Tílmą, Kletílmą, modified parallel to a spoken language resembling our colloquial idiom, which we shall use in the programming of our new computers and the instruction of our new generation of Servants. May it serve us well in the uncertain times to come.

You can’t just leave us hanging like this! What happened afterwards?

EDIT: Also, does this mean that Metin/taKletílmą is a conlang in-world as well as externally?