cosmictuesdays asked:

"my-air" "guarded-one" "my-protector", definitely something about "my-lands" which compares one's lover to the region they're in or the region in which one grew up, which would be more suited for poetry and letters than conversation. Human endearments generally go for sweet foods and baby animals; Cardassians would more likely go for sweet smells and claims of ownership.

Oh, “my-lands”~~~~~~ Love it. Yes.

genderxfluidxnerd-deactivated20 asked:

I'm wondering if there are any Cardassian terns of endearment?

I recall the suffix -lin can be attached to any word to render it an endearment, eg. s’h’iosr’ha = doctor, s’h’iosr’halin = my dear doctor.

jucem (zhuh-shaym) = friend

…and that is all I’m coming up with, wow, apparently Cardassians aren’t much for snuggles!

Vyc, your assistance is required! Shall we embark on the good ship Make Shit Up?

Thoughts that occur:

“my-heart”  “my-eyes”  “sweet-taste”  “protected-one”  “beautiful-one” ?

[cardassianlanguage]

Thanks–you’re very flattering! I’m not at all alone in this endeavour. The language I work with is based on galileoace’s Kardasi, and Vyc is a fully equal partner in the fleshing out of said language. I’m very glad you appreciate the synthesis!
salmakt = hello, and it’s a general kind of ‘hello’. Morning, evening, what have you: salmakt will cover it. Depending on posture and tone, it can be more or less formal.
hintik is another option. It translates more or less as 'to your health’. It can be a greeting, a farewell, or a toast, as is appropriate. (When Garak says it, it can even be a threat.)
ThIjuk = goodbye. As with salmakt, it will work for any time/place.
men beltas = good morning
ra'ajev'pey beltas = good afternoon
yan beltas = good evening
And there are two flavours of goodnight:
good night (1) (seeing someone at night) - itzik'pey beltas
good night (2) (goodbye at night) - macUs beltas (lit. pleasant sleep)
Vyc has some fantastic vocab work which she really ought to post, especially because most of this is hers. :D

[feltelures]

 Kardasi Phonology Version 1.9

So this is the second round of revamps that tinsnip and I have done with Kardasi phonology–which now includes IPA!

…From someone who knows practically nothing about IPA (me), so if I’ve made mistakes, please, please let me know.

Changes this time to the original phonology by Timothy Miller and Chris Pinette include:

- Switching the difference between “g” and “G” to soft G (dʒ) and hard G (g), as the original difference between the two Gs was pretty much imperceptible (at least with our accents!).
- Divorcing the pronunciation of “q” from Klingon “q.” This is the IPA I am by far the least sure of, so any suggestions are extremely welcome.
- I believe @atomic-mayonnaise noticed this first, but as I was going over the chart, I remembered that the original phonology included both voiced (ð) and unvoiced (θ) “th” as examples of “Th.” For those of you who haven’t spent large amounts of time clicking around the Wikipedia pages on IPA like yours truly someday I will learn this properly, put your hand on your throat and say “these” and “with.” Your throat should buzz on the “th” with the former and not with the latter, and it’s the latter that is now what we’re going with for “Th” in Kardasi.
- “Mech” was given as an example of how to pronounce Kardasi “x,” and it…wasn’t really accurate (provided they meant the short form of “mechanical,” anyway). The other two examples remain intact.
- The explanation for “’,” the glottal stop, has been rewritten.

So yes! Any questions or comments can be directed at either me or tinsnip. <3

archiveofourown.org

Learning to Speak (20163 words) by tinsnip [AO3]

Chapters: 7/7
Fandom: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Julian Bashir/Elim Garak
Characters: Julian Bashir, Elim Garak
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Cardassia, Established Relationship, Foreign Language, Language Barrier, Cultural Differences, world-building
Summary:

Julian Bashir has been on Cardassia for six months. He thinks he’s adapted pretty well. But when it’s time to learn the language, he realizes he’s nowhere near as clever as he thought.

Set post-canon, about a year and a half after the series ends. Light stuff, with occasional dips into darker territory.

[feltelures]

jem’Uv jem
jem’Uv jem
ikUvik jem’Uvik jem emp

Sweet sweetmelon
sweet sweetmelon
IkUvik’s three sweet sweetmelons

A Cardassian children’s song/chant, written in Kardasi. What melody goes with this? I, er, don’t currently know. Trying to figure out Cardassian music is a bit of a headache….

i-fought-space asked:

Random question - but did you guys talk much about how the stress on certain syllables works in Kardasi? I'm getting to that stage of stuff soon and I was wondering if you had any ideas.

feltelures answered:

Yes, we did, actually! Fairly early on, although we don’t have anything about it in the document at the moment. If I’m remembering correctly, Kardasi is an unstressed language, so there are no rules for stress patterns. Which is lovely for learning the language, but as someone with the wonderfully stress-full English as their first language, it’s hell to actually speak properly.

tinsnip?

atomic-mayonnaise:

tinsnip:

Vyc’s right. Intone as you please. There are no rules for stressing. In fact, a Federati accent would probably involve hitting syllables a bit harder than one should, instead of letting them drop from one’s lips like a steady, rapid flow of water. (That’s a Kardasi’or accent, anyway. Damar stretches his vowels and swallows his ‘. His Southern Archipelago accent is a bit more like poured jem’Uv syrup.)

(Reblogging so I can get back to it later and I’m too lazy to bookmark, but beyond that…!)

I might do a ‘second language acquisition of Kardasi’ bit and talk a little about where native speakers of something English-derived like Federation Standard might come across learning difficulties when trying to get the hang of Kardasi. (Is ‘Federati’ the name for Federation Standard in Kardasi?)

This would not only be good for ficcing purposes because I can predict with reasonable certainty where a given character (*COUGH* BASHIR) might encounter issues learning the language, but also where fans just trying to say stuff might encounter problems, too.

Re: the stress patterning thing - all languages have a sense of rhythmic division about them, although it may not be necessarily timed by stress like English is. Your description actually helps a lot. I’ll look up some stuff and come up with something flowy and super easy to learn. :D

As for Damar ditching things like glottal stops, OMG USEFUL DATA GIVE ME MOOOORE. If anyone’s come up with any quirks given characters have in their language usage, throw them my way - useful!

I may start calling fans ‘informants’ or ‘interlocutors’ and now I feel silly!

Oh, shit, that’s a slip! It should actually be the Federaji!

‘Foreign’ cultures get a -ji or an -i tacked on, eg. Federaji, Romulaji, Humaji or Humani (depending on how respectful of Human preference one is).

You may have also encountered the term 'bas’. It’s one’s way of speaking, which to Cardassians is as affected as one’s sense of fashion. Garak, for example, has a very particular bas. He tastes each word before he speaks it. It’s rare for that to slip. Damar, on the other hand, has a very lax bas. Words are just words to Damar, which suggests (to a Cardassian) a hammer-type personality that treats every situation like a nail. No finesse. (Of course, a lax bas also suggests plain-speaking and avoidance of the decadent mendacity characteristic of the inhabitants of the Capital… or as a non-resident of the Capital might put it, “big-city folk shed an awful lot of ctel.”)

paso-liati asked:

I love your blog and I love that you and some others are working on Kardasi. It's a huge influence on my re-obsession w/ DS9. A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon the existence of conlang while looking up cryptography. I'm wondering if you can help me find something though.... you posted a cross-stitch in Kardasi orthography... I've searched high and low and I can find nothing about how to write Kardasi IN Kardasi ... Is that info published anywhere? Thanks!

I think what you’re asking is whether there’s a chart of how written Kardasi matches up to the sounds we use, yes?

There is! It was made up by the lovely Vyc aka feltelures, who is clever as well as devoted.

Vyc–your assistance, please?

(And thanks for the nice comments–it keeps us going!)

A chat with cosmictuesdays that has meandered through Cardassian steam baths, ways of speaking Kardasi, and lullabies sung to headcanoned kids.

theoleshamearchive-blog asked:

Hi! I'm a silly nerd person studying Linguistics and I am so so interested in Kardasi. Do you have anything written up about word order or rules conjugating verbs?

Oh, yes, there just might be a little something.

feltelures (to whom I cannot link, idk?) and I work on it together. (You’ll notice our working notes in green and blue, respectively; please ignore.) The basic grammatical structure belongs to galileoace, who is credited in the file.

Have fun! nuholok kaderbet’U!