Baronh

Baronh
Project author	Hiroyuki Morioka
Year of publication	1996
Linguistic classification	Constructed language Fictional language Baronh
particularities	based on old Japanese
Language codes
ISO 639 -1	-
ISO 639 -2	art (constructed languages)
ISO 639-3	mis (not coded)

Baronh ( Japanese ア ー ヴ 語 Āvu-go [ baroɲ ], German 'Abh language' ) is a constructed language developed by Hiroyuki Morioka , which is based on ancient Japanese , as it was used until the beginning of the 9th century. The language is used in the science fiction romance trilogy Seikai no Monshō and works based on it.

origin

Baronh is derived from Old Japanese as spoken until the early 9th century and recorded in Kojiki , Manyōshū, and other ancient documents. The Kojiki , written around the year 712, is the first extensive written source in Japan and contains the oldest evidence of the Japanese language; The Manyōshū compiled around 759 is the first large Japanese poem compilation and comprises more than 4500 poems.

Strictly speaking, it is not the old, but a reconstructed language, which is called the Takamagahara language after the mythological sky in Kojiki .

Fictional development story

In Crest of the Stars , Japanese revolutionaries tried to remove foreign influences from Japanese and create a "purified" variant in which loan words and phrases were removed and old words and phrases revived. These revolutionaries, who named their language Toyoashihara after a poetic name for Japan , founded the colony that created the Abh and gave them their language. When the Abh were freed from slavery, within a few generations their language took the form found in Hiroyuki's fictional works and called the Baronh . The main reason for the rapid development of the language at this time is that the Abh had no writing systems during their slavery, as they were forbidden to write.

Examples of developing words

In the fictitious course of time, the pronunciation of the Takamagahara words (old baronh) changed to that of the modern baronh. The change in pronunciation can be divided into 3 phases. In the first phase, certain vowels were either dropped or replaced by another. In the second phase the same thing happened with the consonants. Roughly speaking, consonants that immediately followed a vowel remained unchanged, while the others have mostly changed as follows:

[ j ] → [ g ] → [ h ] → [ k ] → [ s ] → [ r ] →	[ n ]	→ [ d ] → [ z ] → [ t ] → [ l ]
	↕
[ w ] → [ f ] →	[ m ]	→ [ b ] → [ p ]

In the final phase, a nominative suffix was added to the words.

The pronunciation changes should be illustrated using four examples:

• jatagarasu (Japanese: Yatagarasu ) is a mythological three-legged bird.
• tacamagahara (Japanese: Takamagahara ) is the mythological Japanese heaven of gods.
• karasuci and subaru are two of the 28 Chinese constellations as well as the names of two of the 29 original Abh clans ( Orion belt or Pleiades ).

Output word (Alt-Baronh)	change			Hints
	Vowels	Consonants	Nominative suffix
jatagarasu	jatgars e	g at h ass	gatharse c	Suffix -ec remains silent
tacamagahara	tacmgahar	l acm h a c ar	Lacmhacar h 1	mh speaks [ ɸ ]
karasuci	karsc	s ar r c	sarryc h	I speak [ ʃ ]
subaru	sba u r	s p aur	spaur h

1) Lacmhacarh is the name of the Abh capital.

grammar

Baronh has a synthetic structure of language and has seven cases :

1. Nominative ,
2. Accusative ,
3. Genitive ,
4. Dative ,
5. Directive (in modern baronh locative ),
6. Ablative and
7. Instrumental .

There are four types in Baronh to a noun declension . In the first there is only one vowel whose position shifts based on the case, e.g. B. Abh (nominative) becomes Bar (genitive). The following table illustrates the four different declinations using terms that are more common in Crest of the Stars , these are abh (Abh), lamh (pearl, gemstone), duc (yellow gemstone) and saidiac (pilot).

Declinations in the Baronh

	Declination 1	Declination 2	Declination 3	Declination 4
Nominative	depend	lamh	duc	saidiac
accusative	but	lame	dul	saidél
Genitive	bar	lamr	major	saidér
dative	bari	lami	duri	saidéri
Directive	baré	lame	dugh	saidégh
ablative	abhar	lamhar	dusar	saidisar
Instrumental	bale	lamle	dule	saidélé

Adjectives don't change and usually follow the noun. They consist of a stem + a , like bhoca (large) or laca (high). By to the stem of verbs a appends, they can be used also as an adjective. Adverbs are also immutable and are mostly derived from adjectives such as bhoci and laci .

Writing and pronunciation

Ath alphabet and Latin transcription

In order to be able to write Baronh, Hiroyuki Morioka and Takami Akai created an alphabet called Ath ( letter ), which is based to a certain extent on the Kana , the Japanese syllabary scripts Hiragana and Katakana . The phenomenon that occurs here in a fictitious context, that a political upheaval leads to the introduction of a new writing system, is not uncommon in reality, but has occurred frequently in recent times, as can be seen, for example, in the section Meaning of the Latin script in the Wikipedia article about the Arabic script .

Each letter in the ath has its own tone, except for a few consonant combinations such as bh , which stand for others.

The characters are available in the character set of the TRON project .

Vowels

	front		central	back
	unrounded	rounded	unrounded	rounded
closed	, i [ i ]	, y [ y ]		, u [ u ]
half closed	, é [ e ]	, eu [ ø ]		, o [ o ]
medium			, e [ ə ]
half open	, ai [ ɛ ]	, oe [ œ ]		, au [ ɔ ]
open			, a [ a ]

There is no distinction between short and long vowels. The vowel length has no meaning-distinguishing function and is only a question of the speaker's accent.

When an e appears as part of an affix , it often becomes silent, e.g. B. byrec (/ byr /, fleet ) and cluge (/ clug /, relax ).

Half vowels

• , ï: voiced palatal approximant [ j ]
• , ü: labialized voiced velar approximant [ w ]
• , ÿ: labialized voiced palatal approximant [ ɥ ]

ÿ is a semi-vowel that occurs when a y is followed by a vowel.

Consonants

Some consonants become mute at the end of a word or in a series of consonants. The letter that originally stood for [ h ] now marks the preceding consonant as a fricative , e.g. B. is bh for [ v ] and mh for [ ɸ ].

		bilabial	labiodental	dental	alveolar	postalveolar	palatal	velar	uvular	glottal
Plosives	unvoiced	, p [ p ]			, t [ t ]			, c [ k ]
	voiced	, b [ b ]			, d [ d ]			, g [ g ]
Fricative	unvoiced	, f ,, mh,, ph [ ɸ ]		, th [ θ ]	, s [ s ]	, ch [ ʃ ]				, h [ h ]
	voiced		, bh [ v ]	, ie [ ð ]	, z [ z ]	, gh [ ʒ ]
nasal		, m [ m ]			, n [ n ]		, nh [ ɲ ]
Vibrant					, r [ r ]				, rh [ ʀ ]
lateral approximant					, l [ l ]

Diphthongs and triphthongs

Baronh knows both diphthongs and triphthongs , even if it is not clear when they occur. However, / aj, ej, aj, uj, aw, ew / are falling and / ja, jɛ, je, jo, ju, wa, we, wi, ɥa, ɥe / increasing diphthongs. A triphthong occurs e.g. B. in the word süaïc (/ swaj /, residence of a nobleman ). Even when a diphthong occurs, it is not always clear how it is pronounced. A g becomes e.g. B. pronounced in the following words as [ j ]: agth (/ ajθ /, state, country ) and rogrh (/ rojʀ /, sand wasp ). Ablïarsec (/ abljar /), the name of the ruling Abh clan, is written in Japanese instead of the expected ア ブ リ ャ ル ( aburyaru ) as ア ブ リ ア ル ( aburiaru ), which suggests a pronunciation as [ abli̯ar ] rather than [ abljar ].

Practical advantage of your own writing system

There are not only political, but also very concrete reasons for not using the Japanese writing system for Baronh. Baronh written with the Japanese writing system is even more demanding on the reader than Japanese, whose written form is considered to be one of the most difficult languages ​​in the world.

Japanese uses two different syllabary scripts and ideograms originally from China. These ideograms can be used in Japanese not only as ideograms, but also as phonograms according to their reading. And often these kanji also have more than one reading.

However, there are also things that are easy in Japanese. Text written in syllabary is always read the same way. No matter which Kanji precede or follow. And this is exactly where Baronh's problems arise. This is no longer true there.

As has already been said, Baronh means Abh language . The name of the Abh people is written in Baronh and Japanese ア ー ヴ ( āvu ). The expression Abh-Sprache then arises in both languages ​​by putting the ideogram for language after the name of the people. The result is the word ア ー ヴ 語. The main difference is in the reading. While in Japanese one does not have to worry about the following kanji 語 ( go ) when reading the syllabary and then simply appends it (the word reads āvugo in Japanese ), in the case of Baronh one must first recognize the word as a term Abh language , before one can assign its sound value Baronh to it.

Web links

Commons : Baronh  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

• The world of Baronh, consultation. Part of a multilingual site primarily in Japanese
• Ath alphabet at Omniglot (English)
• Seikai no Monshou (Crest of the Stars) ( Memento from March 19, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
• Glossary for baronh written in katakana (Japanese)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ tron.org ( Memento of the original from November 25, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.