by Ian Fallis

Inamali is the language of magic – the language of the Inamali people and their writings, including their spell books. It is the language Karia must master if she is to understand how to destroy magic.

And I thought you may enjoy the books a lot more if you understand a few things about the Inamali language.

Spoiler alert: If you have not read The House in the Old Wood, you will not want to read the rest of this post.

Real languages have variations and irregularities.

You don’t have to look past English to see that. Look at how many different ways we spell words. The one I love? Phonetic – spelled with a ph. Really?

So to make Inamali more realistic, I inserted a few things don’t seem to make much sense, two of which the astute reader will have noticed in The House in the Old Wood.

One has to do with the way the syllable na is pronounced. Karia notes that sometimes it can be pronounced as “nar.” Why? There’s not a solid reason, but I based the variation on something my daughter Meghan encountered in China. She learned some Mandarin in Beijing, and as soon as she tried to use in Inner Mongolia (which is also part of China and where Mandarin is also the most common language), people would say, “Oh, you’re from Beijing.” They knew that because some words pronounced with “ah” sounds elsewhere were pronounced as “ar” in Beijing.

So in Inamali, in some words at least, na is prounounced nar.

Wait a minute, however, you say. You remember that I said Inamali syllables are all open – that is, they all end in vowels. So how can nar be a legitimate syllable in Inamali if there are no closed syllables in the language – no syllables that end in consonants?

That’s easy. R isn’t a consonant.

Huh?

Phonetically speaking, a vowel is a sound formed when the breath is modified to make a sound, and a consonant is the sound formed when the breath is partially or completely blocked to make a sound.

But where do you draw the line between modifying the breath and partially obstructing it?

It’s somewhere around W, Y and R. This is why these are sometimes referred to as semi-vowels. (That would be the American English R, by the way. Not the flapped or trilled R of other languages, nor the softer R of British English.)

So nar is not a closed syllable; it does not end with a consonant, but with a semi-vowel.

Now that all that is clear as mud, let’s look at the other thing Karia notices in The House in the Old Wood: the word tsilinki. Karia notes that this is the only place she’s come across where li is pronounced “lin.” Actually, she’s wrong. There are no closed syllables in Inamali – no syllables that end in consonants. Li is pronounced “li” in that word; the variation comes in ki. In this word, it’s pronounced “ngki.”

Oh, that clears everything up, right?

Try saying it with me. Most people, when they see, “linki,” would not pronounce it “lin-ki,” but “ling-ki.” But in a language with only open syllables, it would be written – and thought of – as “li-ngki.”

But why?

Who knows? That’s what remainders in linguistics are all about: stuff that doesn’t seem to make sense.

By the way, “ng” is one of those fascinating consonants – and phonetically, it is one consonant – that we use all the time in English but struggle with when we see it in other languages. We just never use it at the beginning of a word, like other languages sometimes do. (Others are flapped Rs and glottal stops, both of which are actually quite common in English.)

Next time, we’ll look at something supremely confusing …

Tags: Inamali

Inamali is the language of magic – the language of the Inamali people and their writings, including their spell books. It is the language Karia must master if she is to understand how to destroy magic.

And I thought you may enjoy the books a lot more if you understand a few things about the Inamali language.

Spoiler alert: If you have not read The House in the Old Wood, you will not want to read the rest of this post.

OK, English speaker, whose language is written with an alphabet. What’s the relationship between the following syllables: a, ka, ma, sa, va?

They all have the same vowel, right?

Well done.

But what’s the relationship between the following symbols?

Those are a, ka, ma, sa and va in Inamali. And someone who spoke Inamali would see no more relationship between them than you see in the symbols.

An Inamali speaker is not thinking in terms of the sounds individual letters make, because their language has no individual letters. They’re not thinking, “Oh, those all end in ‘a,’” because a is a distinct and different syllable from ka.

But knowing that, if you were to peruse an Inamali syllabary, you would see something strange. Some of the symbols for syllables with the same vowel are similar.

For instance, here are a, la, ra and sha:

Why the similarities?

Inamali arose among people who spoke and wrote the language commonly known as Teneka – the language of all people, based on the language of Nymph, written with an alphabet. Inamali is based on the language of Sylph.

It bears similarities to Analiki, which was the previous language of magic, and also arose among people who spoke and read Teneka and also is based on the language of Sylph.

So the influence of an alphabet shows up in both Analiki and Inamali.

Next we’ll look at the stuff that really doesn’t make sense.

Tags: Inamali

Inamali is the language of magic – the language of the Inamali people and their writings, including their spell books. It is the language Karia must master if she is to understand how to destroy magic.

And I thought you may enjoy the books a lot more if you understand a few things about the Inamali language.

Spoiler alert: If you have not read The House in the Old Wood, you will not want to read the rest of this post.

With so few ways to make syllables, leading to a total of 37 possible syllables, many Inamali words look and sound alike. Is this confusing?

Possibly, but think about this: Have you ever heard someone use to, two or too in a conversation? Of course you have. Now, how many times were you confused over whether it was a preposition, a number or a synonym for also? Even once?

Why were you not confused? Context.

So let’s look at a sentence using our Inamali example: the word sili, which can mean playful, redfish, cumulonimbus or walk slowly. If I were to write, Tsikalitar’uluva Karia sili, or actually,

you would know, if you spoke and read Inamali, that the first word is a verb, the second is the subject and the third is the object. So just from basic grammar you would know that in this case, sili must be a noun, so it could not mean playful or walk slowly. It has to mean redfish or cumulonimbus.

Now, if you strip away all the modifiers from the verb, you would see tsiva – to fish. We’ll talk about how that works when we talk about “heavily modified verbs” later on. For now, let’s keep our focus on sili. We have “Karia fished sili.” Let’s see now, what makes sense here? Did she go fishing for redfish or clouds? Hmmm. Let me think …

Someone who spoke Inamali would not be puzzled at all by that.

That’s not to say confusion isn’t possible. It happens. But we can usually work out what someone is saying. For instance, if I showed you a photo of a field full of purple flowers, and you heard me say, “Look at all the flocks,” you would probably look for bunches of birds in the photo. But seeing none, you would likely soon figure out I had actually said, “Look at all the phlox.”

This same type of “difficulty” exists in written Chinese, where the same character can mean different things, depending on the context. And it doesn’t seem to be keeping the Chinese from doing just about anything.

Next time we’ll take a look how a syllabary influences the way an Inamali speaker thinks about words and sounds.

Tags: Inamali