Cuss words are coming along nicely.
Short and sweet and heavy on the Kardasi. Not explicit, but you probably shouldn’t read it at work. I hope you like it!
Kardasi translation breakdown
For those who’d like to see exactly how the Kardasi in the previous story breaks down, it’s below the cut. feltelures, this is for you~! (Vocab file will be updated imminently!)
does anyone know if there are (canon or fan-made) cardassian swears?
As per self and feltelures's ongoing totes made-up but very fun Kardasi vocab:
Let’s swear in Cardassian!
Cardassian
Pronunciation
Rough English equivalent
atsi’sepgehtef: to consort with an inferior
e’Gir: defective
huss’vest: to desiccate – a pretty mild curse
kratnij: boundary violation
pled: to shit
s’hUnj: to twist – a pretty mild curse
sark: alien
slet: to fuck
tiz: to piss
us’cut: chaotic, unstructured, a mess
usU: messy (mild curse); oh, it’s all messy = oh, it’s all fucked up, but the sense is mild exasperation; you look a bit messy = you look a bit disarranged, and implications can vary from “you aren’t taking very good care of yourself” to “ooh, did you just get laid?”
vrerUj: unclean, filthy
I believe “sark” is actually sourced from galileoace’s Kardasi, our template.
(also someone mentioned “khest,” but I thought that was Klingon a la John M. Ford? Is it Kardasi too?)
@catully wondered how to conjugate. Good question!
(Trying to @ feltelures but it’s not working…?)
Like so, more or less:
subject-noun object-noun adjective verb’tense. (Although it can vary. And obviously you don’t have to have all of these parts in every sentence.)
So if you wanted to tell Gul Dukat that he’s consorting with social inferiors—which, like, true, although you might want to be careful about actually calling him on it—you’d say:
dUkat atsi’sepgehtef’I! (Dukat consorting-with-inferiors’in present!)
Or, like, in-past (‘a) or in-future (‘U).
You can also just cuss. Like, you might hiss “vrerUj” under your breath when the sewing machine skips stitches.
Play around; it’s all just conlang anyway. More details available if requested.
I also have been working out out what “Fuck you” would possibly be. Perhaps not the most Cardassian of things to say, but you never know. (tinsnip, what say you?)
ka slet’U! (you fuck’imperative [which overlaps with the future tense]; pronounced “kah slayt’oo” with a glottal stop [the hyphen in “uh-oh”] as the apostrophe)
There’s also “Fuck me,” which would be “nu slet’U” (“nuh slayt’oo”)
Pretty sure those are the right tenses, anyway—I spent a bit reading up on profane grammar, which was amazing.
~~pfffft~
I’m just imagining Garak narrowing his eyes at Dukat and then quietly spitting "ka slet'U,“ and it’s destroying me~~!
Much to be done with second tongue here, of course, as well as tone of voice. Chief O'Brien might run into trouble with Gilora Rejal when he means to say "well, fuck me,” (baffled), and she hears “well, fuck me,” (flirtatious undertones)… assuming he ever gets to learning Kardasi, I suppose.
An analogue to “fuck you” might be “in your ajan”, ie. cufka'ajan (shoof-kah'ahzhan). If someone’s insulting you and you turn to him, smile, and say “cufka'ajan,” you are going to start a fight. That is not polite-argument.
You can also say se'ajan (say'ahzhan), “of-ajan”, to comment on someone’s bright idea; ie. that must be where they pulled it out of.
does anyone know if there are (canon or fan-made) cardassian swears?
As per self and feltelures's ongoing totes made-up but very fun Kardasi vocab:
Let’s swear in Cardassian!
Cardassian
Pronunciation
Rough English equivalent
atsi’sepgehtef: to consort with an inferior
e’Gir: defective
huss’vest: to desiccate – a pretty mild curse
kratnij: boundary violation
pled: to shit
s’hUnj: to twist – a pretty mild curse
sark: alien
slet: to fuck
tiz: to piss
us’cut: chaotic, unstructured, a mess
usU: messy (mild curse); oh, it’s all messy = oh, it’s all fucked up, but the sense is mild exasperation; you look a bit messy = you look a bit disarranged, and implications can vary from “you aren’t taking very good care of yourself” to “ooh, did you just get laid?”
vrerUj: unclean, filthy
I believe “sark” is actually sourced from galileoace’s Kardasi, our template.
(also someone mentioned “khest,” but I thought that was Klingon a la John M. Ford? Is it Kardasi too?)
@catully wondered how to conjugate. Good question!
(Trying to @ feltelures but it’s not working…?)
Like so, more or less:
subject-noun object-noun adjective verb'tense. (Although it can vary. And obviously you don’t have to have all of these parts in every sentence.)
So if you wanted to tell Gul Dukat that he’s consorting with social inferiors–which, like, true, although you might want to be careful about actually calling him on it–you’d say:
dUkat atsi'sepgehtef'I! (Dukat consorting-with-inferiors'in present!)
Or, like, in-past (‘a) or in-future ('U).
You can also just cuss. Like, you might hiss “vrerUj” under your breath when the sewing machine skips stitches.
Play around; it’s all just conlang anyway. More details available if requested.
Concepts and translation
"How do you say ‘noble’ in Smoppian?"
Professor Jurgen Prinz von Arschegesicht-Hosenscheisser sighed, and delicately adjusted his horn-rim spectacles. “You don’t,” he explained.
"Sorry?" The student blinked. "But—"
"Unless, ja, you mean in the sense of, er, aristocratisch,” added Arschegesicht-Hosenscheisser thoughtfully. “In that case, you say ‘jogspuldrup’, which, er, basically is synonym for ‘supreme asshole’ but with specialized secondary meaning, ja?”
The student hesitated for a moment, unsure of how she should respond, before deciding that a polite laugh was appropriate. It was not, which Arschegesicht-Hosenscheisser indicated by narrowing his eyes imperceptibly. “Yes, sir, no, I mean as an adjective. ‘He was a noble man,’ that sort of thing.”
"Then I refer you to my previous statement, ja?" said Arschegesicht-Hosenscheisser. "You wouldn’t say that. This is East Smoppisch, ja. There is, er, no word with an equivalent meaning." He sighed. "In East Smop, you compliment a man by not knifing his father when you are robbing his home, ja? The Parliament only banned rocket launchers from the chambers a few years ago. What use would the Östsmoppers have for a word like “noble”, yes? That is, er, not how they categorize the world.”
The student shook her head. “But surely they must have some way of saying it — ‘nice,’ at least?”
Arschegesicht-Hosenscheisser gave a slightly superior smile, as he often did. “Ja, they do — ‘zbilmop.’ It means ‘one who parts easily with their kidneys,’ yes? Or ‘one who is easily short-changed,’ that too. It is not a word you would use to describe somebody you, er, liked, ja?”
The student folded her arms. “Well, what is a word you’d use to describe somebody you liked, then?”
“Xlepskaya," Arschegesicht-Hosenscheisser suggested, after a moment’s pause. "It means, like, one who is stabbed and comes back the next day mit ein rocket launcher, yes?"
"That seems awfully… harsh," said the student.
"Ja," said Arschegesicht-Hosenscheisser patiently. "The East Smoppians are awfully, as you say, harsh.”
It’s very easy to get so wrapped up in the game of conlanging that you can forget there’s more to a language than its structures and patterns. But there is; languages are practically inextricable from culture. Languages exist as a tool for communication within a particular cultural paradigm, a particular set of procedures for parsing the world around you. Some words — most of the “simple” ones, I’m willing to bet — only make sense within a particular cultural context, and there’s no way to translate them from one language to another.
Let’s take a look at our usual go-to example, the exotic and terrifyingly sociopathic land of East Smop. Theirs is a culture of ceaseless corruption and strife, where Parliamentary parties are defined not by shared ideological ties but by desire for human shields to avoid being stabbed by other MPs, where if a child hasn’t knifed a man by her fourth birthday, she’s considered a wuss, where the symbol of national unity is the guillotine (or rather, a nastier, lazier variant called, onomatopoeically, the spxolk with a lumber saw instead of a dropped blade). The Smoppians are, by and large, not nice people. They don’t particularly approve of nice people. And so any word East Smoppian would have denoting the concept of “nice” is not going to have the same connotations that an English-speaker might associate with the concept.
And keep in mind, this is still relevant even if you’re not writing in a conlang. There are a lot of words that are extremely problematic if you’re trying to represent the structures of another culture with English (something that can only really be approximated, but it’s still worth trying). If you come from a warrior culture that exalts bravery and martial derring-do, maybe it makes sense to have a word that you’d translate as “glory,” but a colony of pacifist space elves is probably not going to be using language like that. Basically, it’s really important to keep track of the built-in cultural assumptions behind the words you use.
themanfromnantucket asked:
With all this fuss (good fuss, though) about Leonard Nemoy being the universal Trekkie grandfather, I figured it would be appropriate to ask you how to say the familial term in Cardassian.
Oooh, fun! So I consulted with Vyc, and the conversation went as follows:
tinsnip:
Well, I think it probably depends on whose!
If you’re dealing with a family with a mother and father, then we’d have mother’s mother and father’s mother, father’s mother and father’s father. Odds are they all live with you anyway, if they’re still alive, so you can’t just say “Grandpa,” it’s going to confuse everybody.
adik is mother and yadik is father.
a’adik is mother’s mother; ya’adik is mother’s father.
a’yadik is father’s mother; ya’yadik is father’s father.
Those are the formal names. You can also abbreviate. ad’ is mommy, yad’ is daddy, a’ad’ is mommy’s mommy, ya’ad’ is mommy’s daddy, a’yad’ is daddy’s mommy, ya’yad’ is daddy’s daddy.
There are also pet names, of course, like ts-ts (because that’s one of the first noises most little reptile babies can make, so of course the grandparents co-opt it), or hUr (a sort of humming, purring coo; a soothing sort of noise). A little puff of air might be a thing too: ffuh.
Vyc:
I absolutely love that it matters in Kardasi whose grandfather you’re talking about. With both family and territory being huge things for Cardassians, that makes perfect sense.
The only place I see a problem is when trying to apply the rules to families with two parents of the same gender. How do you specify whose grandfather you’re talking about when technically both would be termed ya’adik? While we could go the route of one being ya’adik and the other ya’ad’, I feel as though Cardassians would have words to discriminate between the two regardless. What would those words be? What would they be based on? Status of one parent versus another? But what happens if they’re both, say, hibalek class? I don’t know! :D;
tinsnip:
Yes! I thought of this too, re: same-sexed parents, and I figure that this is where you’ll have “grandfather” and “gramps,” kind of thing? Or “nana” and “pop pop?”
Re: status: oooo, that’s complicated. Okay. Well, that might determine who’s “grandfather” and who’s “pop-pop”. High status wins and gets more respect. If you’re both the same class, older wins. If you’re both the same age, perhaps names do start coming into play, and we get ya’ad’ Rugal and ya’ad’ Chemut. But that’d be uncommon, weird enough that other people would be like, wow, what are the odds? And you’d be like, dude, I know.
And there was unanimity, and much smiling~!
So, Leonard Nimoy is everybody’s grandfather! But since we can’t give him a maternal or paternal aspect, let’s just call him ts-ts and be done with it!
Hello, everyone! tinsnip has encouraged me to share a project I’ve been working on this month, so, well, here it is: a version of written Cardassian that corresponds to the linguistic rules of the Cardassian language built by tinsnip (and by me, a bit), using the Cardassian font as a base.
Not to make this too long, but as a bit of background, there have been three versions of the Cardassian language that people have put together that I’m aware of: tinsnip’s (which uses Timothy Miller’s version as a base), Greig Isles’, and Esther Schrager’s Simplified Varagasi (more on that in a later post). However, there’s been only one attempt that I know of to put together a written language to match the spoken one—Greig Isles’. (There’s a Cardassian font, but it basically is a letter-to-letter matchup with Latin script […mostly] and has nothing to do with the Cardassian language.) Unfortunately, while it looks as though he put a huge amount of work into building the written Cardassian language, its rules make it essentially useless for the version tinsnip has created.
So, this is where I stepped in—with full permission, of course. I wanted to take the preexisting characters of the Cardassian font and make them correspond to the linguistic rules of tinsnip’s Cardassian language so that any word could be written as well as spoken.
I had a few goals that I tried to keep in mind as I worked:
1) I wanted to maintain Greig Isles’ Cardassian numbering system. This meant that any parts of the Cardassian font where characters had been flipped and mirrored to make the numbers had to be changed.
2) I wanted there to be logic behind the characters I chose to represent each sound, and behind the relationship between the written Cardassian language and its romanization. So while I often left alone anything that didn’t overlap with a number, if I did have to change it, I tried to make similar sounds visually similar as well. (For example, since uppercase X is basically 0 mirrored and flipped and there’s no character assigned to lowercase x in the font, I made it visually similar to k…as far as I could, anyway.)
3) I wanted the language to be accessible (from the point of view of an English-speaker, which is where all my expertise lies). While of course Cardassian is an alien language and thus is likely to be very different from anything spoken on Earth, I wanted the language to be usable by fans without too much trouble. Speaking personally, I’m already trying to learn hundreds of kanji. I don’t need to devote hours to learning how to write in space lizard language. :|
For a few more notes and a usage guide, check below the Read More. I would highly recommend having the pronunciation guide from tinsnip’s language file open as you read along—unless, of course, you’re already familiar with Cardassian pronunciation rules.
Tumblies, this is allll Vyc. Please direct all delight to her, as she is perfection embodied in flesh.
Like… I would never have even tried to do this without her. And she just kind of tilted her head, went oooohkay, and built a written language.
I cannot praise her highly enough. And I can’t wait to write in Kardasi~!
cosmictuesdays replied to your chat: “husband: hey, you, how’s it going?
me: huh? what? oh… oh, it’s…”:
Regarding Cardassian grammar, I settled on calling those perpetual children “night-parents” - night-mothers, night-fathers - because it seemed to fit for reasons I can’t quite articulate.
Oh, I love it! How perfect!
because fictional languages are fun
learn dothraki (dothraki to english dictionary)
learn tolkien elvish writing speaking (there’s a lot of history and extras but still very helpful)
chequerootlurks
