Suvile
From IdzonWiki
| Suvile (Suvile) | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Suźon |
| Region: | Brenor, Kiblor |
| Total speakers: | 240 million |
| Genetic classification: | Sotoyna
|
| Official Status | |
| Official Language of: | Suźon |
| National Language of: | Suźon |
| Regulated by: | |
| List of languages | |
Contents |
[edit] Introduction
Suvile is the lingua franca of Suźon, and an official language of most of the 19 member states, including Brenor. It is also used as a trade language across most of the Eastern Continent. In total, there are approximately 400 million speakers of Suvile in the whole world of Idzon, 240 million of which are native speakers.
Suvile is often considered one of the simpler languages of Idzon, for those who study it as a second language. Compared to Tutèlya, for example, Suvile has a much more restricted set of sounds. Inflection is more regular than in Andan, and so on. Yet this simplicity hides one of the most expansive vocabularies in the whole world. Grammar and syntax, though almost rigid in their regularity, can be difficult to understand in some cases.
[edit] History
Suvile is the most well-known member of the Sotoyna language family. It is by far the most widely-spoken member, though it is not the oldest. Modern Suvile can be recognized as such in writings from c. 100 AK on the Suźon calendar, or about 600 years ago. But a history of the language of Suvile extends thousands of years, and is a history of the whole of Suźon, which must be told here in much abbreviated form.
[edit] The Earliest Times
The earliest evidence for migration into Brenor is dated to approximately 8000 years before the present (8000 BP). Most of this evidence is limited to drawings and tools, with no form of writing evident. Since most of these remains are found in the southern regions of Brenor and its neighbor Vene, the logical conclusion is that the first inhabitants of what is now Suźon came from present-day Andan, over the Avamindet mountains, into the southern plains. These people spoke the ancestral tongue of most of the Suźoni languages, Sotoyna. They spread to the north, bringing their speech with them. Sometime around 6000 BP, they reached the inland sea, settling the first cities north of the Avamindet.
[edit] The First Empire
About 5500 years ago, the Sotoyna speakers of southern Brenor, having settled that country, decided to extend their reach in their new homelands. More had immigrated into Suźon since the first wave, most of them in the west, near present-day Urvele, Þilwe and Koś. These westerners, known as the Umandi, had formed an empire, calling theirs all the land west of the Umu River. The Brenori had settled all the way to the east bank of the Umu, and looking for more. They took the declaration as an act of war, crossing the river in the first battles of the so-called Imperial War.
The Brenori and the Umandi both had the tools necessary to win a war of that scale, but the Umandi lacked the manpower, and ultimately lost. Those who fought and fled went to even more northerly lands, present-day Nende, which won many battles in its own lengthy history. The Umandi who did not run were eventually subsumed into the first Brenori Empire, which ruled southern Suźon for over 1000 years.
The first empire at first spoke (the now much changed) Sotoyna, though the western lands took many words from the Umandi tongue. By the end of the empire's days, the dialects had become different enough to be mutually unintelligible, and are called separate languages: Uvise (Eastern), and Tside (Western). Suvile descends from the Uvise branch, while languages such as Kośe come from the Tside dialect.
[edit] The Second Empire
Four thousand years ago, as the people of the First Empire, split by the Umu River, diverged more and more in speech, belief, and society in general, a number of new entries into Suźon changed the political situation drastically. Between the plagues, the civil wars, and the invading armies of Tutèl, the empire was crumbling.
[edit] The Plague
As people continued to pour in over the Avamindet, the population of the empire grew and grew. Cities became larger, some having as many as 250,000 citizens. Though the urbanization of the First Empire cannot compare to the cities of today (such as Tèyla and its 4.5 million inhabitants), the ancient metropolises were large and crowded by the standards of their times. Disease was already rampant, and when the first plague started about 3500 BP, it was dismissed as just another lower-class illness. That attitude changed once those in power noticed that the plague killed half of those infected, and more than half the empire was infected.
Many of the peasantry died in the plague, and those that remained were wary of the towns that bred it. Smaller cities became ghost towns, larger ones simply became market squares. Though the nobility was largely unaffected by the plague, in a strange turn of events, they found that they simply could not run an empire without their inferiors. Since the peasents were dead or fled, the emperor and his advisors decided to find new ones, thus beginning the age of slavery in Suźon, which lasted over three millenia.
[edit] The Silver Age
The wars of conquest and enslavement swept over the eastern nations in present-day Isal, Kelin, and Luxon. Had they gone farther, they would have reached Vis, already the largest port in the north. But they stopped short, having enough land and labor to support the once-again growing empire. After the wars, about 3300 BP, the empire was becoming stronger, trying to regain its "Golden Age" of a thousand years past.
Around 3000 BP, with the now Second Empire stretching from what is now Orbália to the mouth of the Śezil River, it would seem that the Brenori had not only returned to their Golden Age, but surpassed it. But not everything is so simple as size. The emperor, ruling from his seat on the southern shores of the inland sea, had given command of each region to a governor picked from the noble families. The governors at first acted simply to maintain law and order in their appointed lands. For a century or more, there was peace. Then there was war: civil war.
[edit] The Civil Wars
It started when two governors who, through the intracacies of the nobility, were somewhat close relations, disagreed on who controlled the lands about the inland sea, where the Nend and Eril rivers emptied. The situation began diplomatically, but quickly escalated into pitched battles and sieges of city walls. Both of the newly-styled princes called on the other governors, asking for fighting men.
When the imperial army marched into the city of El, where the fighting was fiercest, the two princes stopped their efforts at killing each other and turned to face what both saw as a common enemy. The imperials were routed, and many hunted down. The princes declared themselves independent from the Second Empire, yet each called the other a traitor.
With the majority of the empire's defense force destroyed, other governors saw the chance to become a king. Each city became a state, each an island. For 600 years, Suźon was home to a hundred kings.
[edit] The Invasions
Now, around 2200 BP, with a king in seemingly every town, the lands of the north were in disarray. The far north had been settled by seafarers from the original homeland of the Brenori, far to the south in Andan. The lands to the west of the Ganzon mountains had also been settled. The men of the western plains were as rugged as the lands in which they lived. And they had a thirst for blood even moreso than the princes of the civil wars.
At first, around 2000 BP, there were merely raids. Men would come, in ships, or through mountain passes on horseback, and sack a city or burn a field; then all would be quiet for a month or a season. Raiding and pillaging lasted for almost 300 years. None of the local kings could stop it, and none would call upon his neighbor for fear of seeming weak and unable to defend himself, which could be suicidal.
Sometime near 1700 BP, the raids stopped. For ten years there were no burning cities. The kings whose lands had been targeted were relieved. But then the western men came again, this time in force. Armies swept through the western Suźoni kingdoms, destroying all in their path. The kings' men were not enough to defend them, even when twelve of them united, calling upon the gods themselves to save their people from the invaders, whom they called infidels and heretics.
As lands further and further east were falling under the control of the Ganzoni invaders, the Brenori, whose kingdoms were relatively untouched by the wars, and who, it must be noted, spoke a language that was a heavily corrupted form of Uvise, called for an end to the infighting. The enemy, they said, was not within, but came from without. Sending their pleas to all the remaining kings, the Brenori tried desperately to retain something of civilization.
[edit] The Kingdom
The Brenori, around 1600 BP, trying to hold together under the onslaught of the Ganzoni, took charge. Calling itself the Suźon Kingdom to emphasize its identity as separate from the Ganzoni, the Brenori alliance gathered men from all the remaining local kingdoms. In a strange twist of fate, the battle that turned the tide in favor of the Brenori came at the banks of the Umu, where centuries before the great Brenori Empire had won its first conquest.
After defeating the Ganzoni at Umu, the fledgling Suźoni Kingdom went on the offensive, winning back the lands that had been taken by the invaders. Those easterners that had not fled the invasion had been taken as slaves, and they were as eager to help their long estranged cousins as the allied kingdoms were to free them. The Ganzoni were not totally defeated, and maintained a stronghold in their mountain passes, where the city of Tèlya stands today.
(TODO: finish this)
[edit] The Name
Suvile is the most common name for the language among its speakers. This is actually a shortened form of the word sotuvile, deriving from the word sot ("language"), and the possessive suffix -uvile ("of us all"). Therefore the literal meaning of the name Suvile is "language of everyone". Speakers of Suvile, like so many ancient peoples of Earth, once considered themselves the only true speaking people. Other names for the Suvile language include: Brenore ("of Brenor"), Suźoni ("of Suźon"), and Lax Kiblore ("language of the capital").
[edit] Phonology
Suvile has (in the standard dialect) 39 phonemes. Of these 39, 26 are consonants, 6 are singular vowels, and 7 are diphthongs, or sequences of two vowels pronounced together.
[edit] Consonants
| Bilabial | Labio- dental | Dental | Alveolar | Post- alveolar (Palato- alveolar) | Palatal | Velar | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosive | p | b | t | d | k | ɡ | ||||||||
| Nasal | m | n | (ŋ) | |||||||||||
| Fricative | v | θ | ð | s | z | ʃ | ʒ | x | ||||||
| Affricate | tθ | dθ | ts | dz | tʃ | dʒ | ||||||||
| Tap or flap | ɾ | |||||||||||||
| Approximant | w | (ɹ) | j | |||||||||||
| Lateral approximant | l | |||||||||||||
(Note: Phonemes listed in parentheses are allophonic.)
[edit] Vowels
| Monophthongs | Front | Central | Back |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i | u | |
| Close-mid | (e) | o | |
| Open-mid | ɛ | (ɔ) | |
| Open | æ | a | ɑ |
| Diphthongs | Closer component is front | Closer component is back |
|---|---|---|
| Opener component is close | uɪ | iʊ |
| Opener component is mid | eɪ | oʊ |
| Opener component is open | aɪ | aʊ |
[edit] Grammar
I am currently writing a sketch of Suvile grammar as a series of articles, each detailing one facet of the language.
[edit] See Also
- The Suvile dictionary
- The Swadesh List, which contains over 200 English words with their translations into various Idzoni languages.
[edit] External History
Suvile was the first language I made for Idzon. When I started, I didn't plan on creating a whole world, but I did. Suvile is the lingua franca of the Suźon, largest country of the Eastern Continent.
- Suvile Introduction describes the phonology (sounds) and orthography (writing) of Suvile.
- The Swadesh List is a set of 207 basic words. It was intended to determine the closeness of languages, but it comes in handy for conlangs, too. Wiktionary has a list of Swadesh words in various natlangs.
- The Babel Text is the standard for language comparison.
- Endings has tables listing all the case, number, and person endings.
These pages will remain active until I move their information onto the wiki.
