Total pages in book: 183
Estimated words: 167196 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 836(@200wpm)___ 669(@250wpm)___ 557(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 167196 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 836(@200wpm)___ 669(@250wpm)___ 557(@300wpm)
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
(proto-Uralic)
Finnish
(Suomi)
Hungarian
(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 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).
Noun cases. Like all languages, Carpathian has many noun cases; the same noun will be “spelled” differently depending on its role in a sentence. The noun cases include nominative (when the noun is the subject of the sentence), accusative (when the noun is a direct object of the verb), dative (indirect object), genitive (or possessive), instrumental, final, suppressive, inessive, elative, terminative and delative.
We will use the possessive (or genitive) case as an example to illustrate how all noun cases in Carpathian involve adding standard suffixes to the noun stems. Thus, expressing possession in Carpathian—“my lifemate,” “your lifemate,” “his lifemate,” “her lifemate,” etc.—involves adding a particular suffix (such as “-am”) to the noun stem (“päläfertiil”) to produce the possessive (“päläfertiilam”—“my lifemate”). Which suffix to use depends on which person (“my,” “your,” “his,” etc.) and whether the noun ends in a consonant or a vowel. The following table shows the suffixes for singular nouns only (not plural), and also shows the similarity to the suffixes used in contemporary Hungarian. (Hungarian is actually a little more complex, in that it also requires “vowel rhyming”: which suffix to use also depends on the last vowel in the noun, hence the multiple choices in the table, where Carpathian has only a single choice.)
Carpathian
(proto-Uralic)
Contemporary
Hungarian
person
noun ends in vowel
noun ends in consonant
noun ends in vowel
noun ends in consonant
1st singular (my)
-m
-am
-m
-om, -em, -öm
2nd singular (your)
-d
-ad
-d
-od, -ed, -öd
3rd singular (his, her, its)
-ja
-a
-ja/-je
-a, -e
1st plural (our)
-nk
-ank
-nk
-unk, -ünk
2nd plural (your)
-tak
-atak
-tok, -tek, -tök
-otok, -etek, -ötök
3rd plural (their)
-jak
-ak
-juk, -jük
-uk, -ük
Note: As mentioned earlier, vowels often get inserted between the word and its suffix so as to prevent too many consonants from appearing in a row (which would produce unpronounceable words). For example, in the table on the previous page, all nouns that end in a consonant are followed by suffixes beginning with “a.”
Verb conjugation. Like its modern descendants (such as Finnish and Hungarian), Carpathian has many verb tenses, far too many to describe here. We will just focus on the conjugation of the present tense. Again, we will place contemporary Hungarian side by side with Carpathian because of the marked similarity between the two.
As with the possessive case for nouns, the conjugation of verbs is done by adding a suffix onto the verb stem: