LUMICRON CAPTURE | HOUSE ETI
MON KYYR GR’BAKTH HAS BEEN CALLED.
Translation: A Settling of Debts.

Languages shapes culture, even in fictitious worlds. Let’s dive in! Contract’s been paid, and the blade’s unsheathed. Let’s stay on target.

Conlang. A constructed language—something deliberately invented in Lord of the Rings, in Game of Thrones, or my own, Brodacci.

Yeah, I created a language for my world and series, and damn, it was hard. We’re about to get to the books where people speak it fluently. It takes place on the other side of Ermaeyth, away from Ralloc, Ernrul, and deep in the Kran Empire and Merlul, a city in Cronele—where the Atramentous Order and their assassins reside.

I’m not Tolkien. He built a language, then a story. I did the opposite. I’m a storyteller—my blade is character and plot. The language had to serve that, not eclipse it.

In Brodacci, sound dictates rather than the meaning, and we care about the sound of the word in translation.

Rules were step one! English is complicated, and most other ones speak backward compared to us. I wasn’t trying to Yoda my language. With English structure as gospel, it was time to craft the language.

Prime Rule: One-to-one sound mapping takes priority over meaning.

More to the point, there couldn’t be duplicate sounds, even though there might be two very different words that sound the same, the context of the sentence had to define the word. In English, we have homonyms, weather and whether, there and their, inn and in, you get the point. We know the difference based on context.

Sub-prime Rule: Simplicity must rule.

Back to not Yodafying my language, I generally stick to a one-for-one rule in words. If a cop says, “Hands on the wall,” over in Merlul, what he’d actually say is, “Nado ter en waol.”

Hands = Nado
On = ter
The = en
Wall = waol.

Japanese uses chunk-based sounds, too—and that shaped Brodacci’s backbone. For the free subscribers, I made note of the word justice.

Jus-tice
In Brodacci, that breaks down to two phonetic chunks.
Jo-sera.
I’ve been wronged, and I seek josera in the courts.

Josera sounds like a complete word, a strange word, an alien one, but it does sound like a word. A big sticking point was to make sure it didn’t sound like a garbled nonsense like: hishagabaderaban.

Change of Pace:
But here’s where I where I veered off the hard English rule and took note of the romance languages, knowing they had masculine and feminine language. That added flavor to Brodacci. These words were more for titles, like dramli and dramla, which equates to lord and lady. The ending of a word hinted at which sex it was meant for.

As a short aside, but also in the realm of changing a letter for masculine or feminine, these words are similar but bring different meanings are the following:

Wana = woman
Wanase = women
Wano = man
Wanose = men
As you can tell from these examples, the ‘se’ at the end makes it plural.

I went a step further, and sometimes words that meant the same thing were actually different words in the language. For example, the word ass in the English language—unless referring to the archaic word used for a donkey—it means butt or backside.

Here, I changed the words between a woman’s and a man’s ass: Suesu and bruk. If it’s an insult, it’s bruk.

As in: “You fucking bruk.”

Another good point: what’s the difference between fucking and sex? In Brodacci? Kechi and vur.

Kechi is for the sexual act, while vur is a curse. The word ‘wagi’ is the stand in for me/I, so, kechi wagi is a literal fuck me, and vur agda would be fuck you.

That’s enough fucks for now, so let’s move on.

Canon words and definitions:
Asa—little or first
Legin—flower
Asalegin—little flower (can be layered with double meaning: prized/claimed).
Ketprae—gift or offering
Asa ketprae—first gift (something part of a cultural rite).

Now, here’s where I played around with words to get different meanings, literally changing one letter for a whole new meaning, and we’ll tie it back to the words I just used.

We have asa (ah-sah), legin (leh-gin), asalegin (ah-sah leh-gin), and let’s throw in asale (ah-sah-lay). Asale means prize. Add a single letter, asalea, and that changes to female genitalia. There’s layers and meanings behind the words.

But let’s take a very important word out of their language: enukorvi. This means assassin, and it’s two words drawn together: enu (E-new) and korvi (Core-vee). Enu means shadow or darkness, and korvi means death or murder. So, when someone calls you enukorvi, they mean assassin, but they also mean the shadow of death. Pretty epic, right?

But Brodacci isn’t just a language. It’s the tongue of blood and savages, slaves and masters, sex and death, and those who’ve turned their back on magic. In the Kran Empire, and in Merlul’s shadowy underbelly, language is their binding power—more of that in the Ko-don/Founder post, or you can wait until the books release.

Now for the pop quiz! Put your answers in the comment section. Translate: “You ass!” in Brodacci. All the clues are in this post. Can you figure it out?

Well, the gods have spoken, and it’s not up to us to interpret, but to understand. That’s all I got for this round—short, sharp, and sweet. I shall return…

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