WORD THOUGHTS

[oceanose]

 Since Firefly has been so heavy on my mind these past few weeks—what, with the novel being out, and everything—I've been thinking a lot more on the use of language and how I'd like to incorporate language into my own verse. Language in Firefly isn't much more than a mix of two existing languages, English and Chinese, but the combination of the misceaallenous phrases and use of colloquialisms and 'accent' makes the language experience of Firefly super fun! 

My main concern with my story is having too many languages. I'm up to about eight unique languages used by different groups across the six planets that Spheres is set in. The problem here being that these languages are entirely made up, but they're each based on existing languages. For example, I wanted the primary language, Muwe,  to be pretty simple, so I used Hawaiian as its base. The Hawaiian alphabet has only twelve letters, and I thought that something smaller would be helpful for me to write and for readers to, well, read. Another language, Bain, is based on French. As romantic as it sounds, it's a pain to pronounce some of the words even in my head without having to look at the pronunciation guides. Here are a few of my favorite Muwe words and phrases!

MUWE	ENGLISH	NOTES
Manu	'Love'	When creating new languages, admittedly, this is the first word I test out to see if I like the way the language sounds. If the word for love ends up sounding crass or unappealing, the language doesn't work. Those are the the facts.
Pumanu	'Lover'	I love that the way to turn a noun into a profession is to add 'pu' to the front of it. It's easy to remember and to recognize. (Sort of like how a person who teaches is a teacher, a person who mumanu (verb form of 'love') is a pumanu).
Puwuya	'Killer'	Which makes wuya 'kill'. See how easy that is?
Ochi	'Alcohol'	Nothing too special about this one aside from the fact that I like the way it sounds. It's, like, cute? (Would alcoholic then be puochi, or pumuochi?)
Moki	'Fuck', or 'Screw'	(We had to add some bad words to the list, come on.) Moki sounds like 'mochi', the Japanese rice cake desert. Mochi is cute, and tiny, and probably really tasty. Moki is an aggressive, vulgar word. It's cute even though it really isn't supposed to be. I'm sure I'll have fun with this one.

 

 

The novel, it's all going to be written in English with some phrases from some of these other languages peppered throughout, mostly in dialogue when people from different backgrounds interact with one another. Even looking at it all now, I realize that eight languages entirely separate languages is going to be a chore to keep up with and very complex & confusing to keep track of, which is why I really want to focus on one or two languages.