Dark Memory – Dark Carpathians Read Online Christine Feehan

Categories Genre: Dark, Fantasy/Sci-fi, Magic, Paranormal, Vampires Tags Authors:
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Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 141492 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 707(@200wpm)___ 566(@250wpm)___ 472(@300wpm)
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APPENDIX 2

THE CARPATHIAN LANGUAGE

Like all human languages, the language of the Carpathians contains the richness and nuance that can only come from a long history of use. At best we can only touch on some of the main features of the language in this brief appendix:

The history of the Carpathian language

Carpathian grammar and other characteristics of the language

Examples of the Carpathian language (including the Ritual Words and the Warriors’ Chant)

A much-abridged Carpathian dictionary

1. THE HISTORY OF THE CARPATHIAN LANGUAGE

The Carpathian language of today is essentially identical to the Carpathian language of thousands of years ago. A “dead” language like the Latin of two thousand years ago has evolved into a significantly different modern language (Italian) because of countless generations of speakers and great historical fluctuations. In contrast, many of the speakers of Carpathian from thousands of years ago are still alive. Their presence—coupled with the deliberate isolation of the Carpathians from the other major forces of change in the world—has acted (and continues to act) as a stabilizing force that has preserved the integrity of the language over the centuries. Carpathian culture has also acted as a stabilizing force. For instance, the Ritual Words, the various healing chants (see Appendix 1) and other cultural artifacts have been passed down through the centuries with great fidelity.

One small exception should be noted: the splintering of the Carpathians into separate geographic regions has led to some minor dialectization. However, the telepathic link among all Carpathians (as well as each Carpathian’s regular return to his or her homeland) has ensured that the differences among dialects are relatively superficial (small numbers of new words, minor differences in pronunciation, etc.), since the deeper internal language of mind-forms has remained the same because of continuous use across space and time.

The Carpathian language was (and still is) the proto-language for the Uralic (or Finno-Ugric) family of languages. Today, the Uralic languages are spoken in northern, eastern and central Europe and in Siberia. More than twenty-three million people in the world speak languages that can trace their ancestry to Carpathian. Magyar or Hungarian (about fourteen million speakers), Finnish (about five million speakers) and Estonian (about one million speakers) are the three major contemporary descendants of this proto-language. The only factor that unites the more than twenty languages in the Uralic family is that their ancestry can be traced back to a common proto-language—Carpathian—that split (starting some six thousand years ago) into the various languages in the Uralic family. In the same way, European languages such as English and French belong to the better-known Indo-European family and also evolved from a common proto-language ancestor (a different one from Carpathian).

The following table provides a sense of some of the similarities in the language family.

Note: The Finnic/Carpathian “k” shows up often as the Hungarian “h.” Similarly, the Finnic/Carpathian “p” often corresponds to the Hungarian “f.”

Carpathian

Finnish

Hungarian

(proto-Uralic)

(Suomi)

(Magyar)

elä—live

elä—live

él—live

elid—life

elinikä—life

élet—life

pesä—nest

pesä—nest

fészek—nest

kola—die

kuole—die

hal—die

pälä—half, side

pieltä—tilt, tip to the side

fél, fele—fellow human, friend (half; one side of two)

feleség—wife

and—give

anta, antaa—give

ad—give

koje—husband, man

koira—dog, the male (of animals)

here—drone, testicle

wäke—power

väki—folks, people, men; force

val/-vel—with (instrumental suffix)

väkevä—powerful, strong

vele—with him/her/it

wete—water

vesi—water

viz—water

2. CARPATHIAN GRAMMAR AND OTHER CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LANGUAGE

Idioms. As both an ancient language and a language of an earth people, Carpathian is more inclined toward the use of idioms constructed from concrete, “earthy” terms rather than abstractions. For instance, our modern abstraction “to cherish” is expressed more concretely in Carpathian as “to hold in one’s heart”; the “netherworld” is, in Carpathian, “the land of night, fog and ghosts”; etc.

Word order. The order of words in a sentence is determined not by syntactic roles (like subject, verb and object) but rather by pragmatic, discourse-driven factors. Examples: “Tied vagyok.” (“Yours am I.”); “Sívamet andam.” (“My heart I give you.”)

Agglutination. The Carpathian language is agglutinative; that is, longer words are constructed from smaller components. An agglutinating language uses suffixes or prefixes whose meanings are generally unique and that are concatenated one after another without overlap. In Carpathian, words typically consist of a stem that is followed by one or more suffixes. For example, sívambam derives from the stem “sív” (“heart”), followed by “am” (“my,” making it “my heart”), followed by “bam” (“in,” making it “in my heart”). As you might imagine, agglutination in Carpathian can sometimes produce very long words, or words that are very difficult to pronounce. Vowels often get inserted between suffixes to prevent too many consonants from appearing in a row (which can make a word unpronounceable).


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