Fiendish: A Delve into Conlang

As a general rule of thumb, especially in fiction, artificial languages are unnecessary. The audience's limited exposure can rarely tell whether you put something together in a day with basic rules or spent a decade painstakingly constructing a new language down to incorporating historical borrowings and vowel shifts. This isn't to say you shouldn't put any thought into your constructed language, because zero effort conlang can be random and jarring. Something internally consistent and about a level deeper than what the audience will interact with is sufficient to make your fantasy language look superficially complete.

It is from that mindset that I am now doing conlang with the vulgar tongue of demons. This is a language spoken by fiendish inhabitants that possess many of the same morphological traits of humans as it pertains to communication; lips, tongue, a perception of time following the arrow of entropy, etc. Deal-making is also a major facet of their culture. Beyond this, I'm not planning on any deeper world-building of demonic culture, since I plan on this being applicable for multiple settings that use the above archetype.

Grammar

Fiendish sentence structure is Subject - Object - Verb. English follows SVO. An example of SVO is "Sam ate oranges," while SOV is "Sam oranges ate."

Grammatical Case

Fiendish conjugates its vocabulary pretty heavily. Objects aren't so much "gendered" as they are informing of the financial/hierarchical relationship. The object of a sentence is conjugated based on its relationship with the subject of the sentence, while the subject of the sentence is conjugated based on its relationship to the speaker. In the right context, this same conjunction is used in the ablative & allative cases (generally "wish to sell" & "wish to procure," respectively). As a good rule of thumb, apply the appropriate suffix to any noun. Appending -way or -ai to someone's name is an excellent way of indicating that the speaker is used to speaking in the tongue of demons.

-una  Neuter
-way  Lender, Seller, Owner, Allative
-ai  Debtor, Buyer, Owned, Ablative
-wan  Instrumental (tool)
-kuna-  plural

Subject Pronouns

First person subject pronouns (I, we) are generally not voiced, and are presumed when no other subject pronouns are used in the sentence.
Qan-  2nd person subject pronoun (you)
Pay-  3rd person subject pronoun (they)

Verb Tenses

Same principle as above. Take the verb and append it appropriately based on the tense. Fiendish cares about whether reporting of a past event is first or second-hand information (third+ hand is grouped here).
-ni  present
-chu  present (negative)
-sqani  past (reported)
-rqani  past (experienced)
-man  past (negative; would have)
-saq  future
-chik-  plural (allies)
-chi-  plural (minions)

Verbs

T'urpu-  to stab
Mikhu-  to consume (and add to yourself)
Lik’i-  to consume (without adding to yourself)
Impuwistu-  to invoice
Khuya-  to love
Qunqu-  to forget
Iñi-  to believe, accept as true

Nouns

sach'a (perennial), saca  large woody plant
-micun  food-bearing (temptation; eg apple)
-hamp  food-bearing (protective; eg oak)
q'illay  kanina coin
qullqi  price
asnu  gullible fool
michi  goblin

Sample Sentence

Qanai t'urpusaq  I will stab you (vengeful connotation)
Michikunauna asnuai mikhuchiksqani  Goblins ate, from what I know, the moron.

General Phrases

Haykai’k-[case]  Welcome!
Maypi [noun]?  Where is the [noun]?
Yanapayk-[case]!  Help! (-ai gives connotations of "my kingdom for a horse!", -una is more typical, -way is more prideful/assertive)
Wuynas diyas-[case]  Good morning!

Chu No. Adding grammatical case is only when being formal, especially in transactional context.

Taboo Deformation: Names Best Left Forgotten

Words hold power. We communicate with them, and as a race, we’re still amazed at them. We inherently think that speaking of something calls upon it and lets it influence us. I’m sure you’ve seen examples of it, such as He Who Must Not Be Named. Thusly, we have euphemisms for words, thinking that if we call it something else it won’t have the same effect. We do it right now with euphemisms for swear words, code words in military communication, politically correct speech, or even double speak.

Where the fun starts is its historical effect on language. Eventually the original word that was avoided falls completely out of use and the euphemism becomes the new word, in a process officially called taboo deformation. One of the most notable examples is the word ‘bear’, which linguistically means ‘brown one’. In fact, the original word for bear is completely lost in our language, and even in the language English came from (combination of Old German and French). We can only infer what it might’ve been by looking at ancient Greek and extrapolating from there. The original word for bear in Proto-Indo European (hypothetical language from which modern languages evolved from) is a synonym for destroyer. From the perspective of a Bronze Age man, a bear is certainly a force of destruction. So calling upon the bear by using its real name was taboo, and remained so for so long, its original name was lost completely.

It’s already been established in fiction where it’s taboo to refer to someone by name, such as Harry Potter’s Voldemort, the true name of the Beast from the Bible, or the big villain of the Guilty Gear video game series (‘that man’). In ancient Egyptian mythology, removing a person’s name from all records was believed to destroy their Ka (roughly speaking, their soul).

Instead, where knowing a name gives the speaker power over the subject, the subject is soo powerful/dangerous that the advantage is reversed. The subject gaining power over the speaker.



Here's a depiction of bears for use in your D&D games, without really changing any rules, so much as giving a story to the larger ones.

Dire Bear
As written in the standard rules for D&D 3.0+, this is the beast that man tried to forget. In times thankfully forgotten, the beast that would later be called bear roamed the lands. It slept like our bears, but its slumber was more akin to dragon sleep than human rest, its cavern a place of prophesied dread for the inevitable stirrings. It walked through the forest like our bears, but the ground shook in terror at its footsteps. Its claws can rend steel, its rage can bring a frost giant to a standstill.
They had been forgotten for so long. But then someone found their name. Some fool found their name and spoke it. Not even most bears remember their nature, but some retain an inkling of something missing. When they hear their name, they remember strength, power, and rage as footpads of creatures forgotten walk the land again.