A/N: I was thinking it might be a good idea to write a “cover essay” if you will about Koryae and where I intend to go with it. So chap 1 will be this “essay” and chap 2 will be the “Koryae Source” material I’ve already posted.

Koryae,

A Language

Under

Construction

Koryae is a fictional language that I have been developing for my stories concerning the Kor’Dae (i.e. “The Saga of the Kyínturna”). I felt it necessary to write this explanation seeing as no one has taken interest in the “Koryae Source” and now that I think on it, I can see why. When one clicks on the link to the “story” one will find an author’s note by me and then…a list of letters, diphthongs, blends and unfortunately, un-alphabetized vocabulary followed by grammar. And then—I’m sure—most people click the back button in confusion. So I have decided to write this “cover” essay explaining about Koryae and how it came to be as well as explaining the grammar to the best of my ability.

I started the beginnings of the language in ninth-grade while sitting in biology class. Now because my handwriting is difficult to read, I always type everything. However, on this occasion, I took my pen and paper and wrote out my ideas, the original plan for the Mythology and some small notes on the Kor’Dae. This is significant I think, because I had the idea-urge and had to write it down and the only materials available to me were a pen and paper—which I was supposed to be taking biology notes on!

Some time after the class was over and I was home, I typed the hand-written material—to the best of my ability in reading it—into the computer. This material became the main beginning source for my “world”. Though it started out with the Mythology, AI who is the “supereme-God” who created the Kor, (Gods) but in order to have a mythology, one must have names. And that is how the language began as a few simple names and words written in hard to read handwriting.

I then went on to creating the “LANGUAGE NOTES” document which was where I began the initial vocabulary, letters, and grammar. My suggestion to people, and maybe this is because I am a very auditory person, is to, if one is trying to make a language, start with what letters, or representation of sound/phonology that one would wish to have in their language, then comes the vocabulary and finally the grammar.

I will say that the biggest influence for Koryae has come from Elvish (created by J. R. R. Tolkien). This is, however only in phonological bases, since I am still struggling with Quenya, and I couldn’t manage to even start trying to learn it until I took Latin in my last two years of high-school. The unique concept for Koryae, I thought this up on my own, is the concept of etene which is “time/tense” this indicates what tense the verb should be in. But etene can’t stand alone unless it is being used as a noun for “time”. One must add the “tense-indicator” (i.e etene’nyet nule) “Walked”. The nyet symbolizes past-tense. As for word order, this is used to specify the function of the nouns and other parts of speech. This order goes as follows with a sentence example, though one must keep in mind that I haven’t decided upon all the grammatical material.

Sentence:

Verb second verb in infin. Object Subject.

Tense’past came (to destroy) Dur’Kor’Dae Kyínturna

etene’nyet ánda traedûesse Dur’Kor’Dae Kyínturna

This is the main structure of a Koryae sentence. One of my main obstacles to over come, is the idea of whether I want to conjugate my verbs—though not as: “I walked” Latin amavi—because there are almost no pronouns in the language, or make nouns plural. However I do not know if I wish to keep –esse as my infinitive ending, and speaking of infinitive endings… This area is probably the one place—so far—which has been influenced by my two years of Latin. Other than that, and the concept of certain endings agreeing with each other, I don’t think that there is much Latin influence here. Though I will say that having had the two years of Latin has helped me understand how languages work, in fact, until I took Latin, I didn’t understand the technical grammar worksheets we had to do for the English language in English class. Yeah! And here I am creating my own! Anyway, I hope to take linguistics in college which should help me immensely with Koryae’s construction.

So in effect, I have been working on Koryae so that my “people” in my stories have a language to speak, and names to use as well as spells for magic… That is what Koryae is when one comes down to it. And I’m going to have to alphabetize that darn vocabulary! groans I hope this “overview” has cleared some stuff up.