Verdurian (''soa Sfahe'', "the Speech") is a

constructed language A constructed language (sometimes called a conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for a work of fiction ...

created by Mark Rosenfelder, first published in 1995 and hosted at his website,

Zompist.com Zompist.com is a website created by Mark Rosenfelder a.k.a. Zompist, a conlanger. It features essays on comics, politics, language, and science, as well as a detailed description of Rosenfelder's constructed world, Almea. The website is also the h ...

. Verdurian is a

fictional language Fictional languages are the subset of constructed languages (conlangs) that have been created as part of a fictional setting (e.g. for use in a book, movie, television show, or video game). Typically they are the creation of one individual, while ...

, which in Rosenfelder's constructed world is spoken in the nation of

Verduria Verdurian (''soa Sfahe'', "the Speech") is a constructed language created by Mark Rosenfelder, first published in 1995 and hosted at his website, Zompist.com. Verdurian is a fictional language, which in Rosenfelder's constructed world is spo ...

, on the planet Almea. Verdurian is the most-developed and best-known of the languages of Almea.

Phonology and grammar

Verdurian's phonology has eight vowels and twenty-one consonants. Among the most exotic of its sounds is the

voiced uvular fricative The voiced uvular fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , an inverted small uppercase letter , or in broad transcription if rh ...

(ʁ), which is transcribed as an R with a

háček A caron (), háček or haček (, or ; plural ''háčeks'' or ''háčky'') also known as a hachek, wedge, check, kvačica, strešica, mäkčeň, varnelė, inverted circumflex, inverted hat, flying bird, inverted chevron, is a diacritic mark (� ...

over it ( Ř, ř). Verdurian also has its own alphabet. Verdurian has SVO word order, fusional morphology, and accusative morphosyntactic alignment. This language has two genders (masculine and feminine), two

numbers A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers ca ...

(singular and plural) and four cases (

nominative In grammar, the nominative case ( abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or (in Latin and formal variants of ...

genitive In grammar, the genitive case ( abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can ...

accusative The accusative case ( abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘th ...

and

dative In grammar, the dative case ( abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "Maria Jacobo potum dedit", Latin for "Maria gave Jaco ...

). There are 4

tenses In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference. Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of verbs, particularly in their conjugation patterns. The main tenses found in many languages include the past, pres ...

(present, past, past anterior and future).

Alphabet and fonts

The Verdurian alphabet is used to write several languages of the Cadhinorian Plain on the world of Almea, most notably Verdurian, but also (with some supplemental characters) Caizu, Kebreni, Ismaîn, Sarroc, and Flaidish. It derives from the ancient Cadhinorian alphabet (equivalent to the Verdurian capital letters), and this in turn derives from the alphabet of Cuzei. The Verdurian alphabet may be used to write both ancient languages, Cadhinor and Cuêzi. Verdurian is currently included in the unofficial

ConScript Unicode Registry The ConScript Unicode Registry is a discontinued volunteer project to coordinate the assignment of code points in the Unicode Private Use Areas (PUA) for the encoding of artificial scripts including those for constructed languages. It was founded b ...

(CSUR), which assigns code points in the

Private Use Area In Unicode, a Private Use Area (PUA) is a range of code points that, by definition, will not be assigned characters by the Unicode Consortium. Three private use areas are defined: one in the Basic Multilingual Plane (), and one each in, and nearl ...

. Verdurian code points are mapped to the range U+E200 to U+E26F. The eight “Aux” variant fonts o
Kurinto
(Kurinto Text Aux, Book Aux, Sans Aux, etc.) support the Verdurian alphabet.

Real-life history

When Rosenfelder was a freshman in college, his dorm was next to that of a

Dungeons & Dragons ''Dungeons & Dragons'' (commonly abbreviated as ''D&D'' or ''DnD'') is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game (RPG) originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. The game was first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. (T ...

aficionado, one Chris Vargas. Vargas introduced Rosenfelder to the game, and Rosenfelder created the wilderness and also the languages for the game. All the players in Vargas and Rosenfelder's Dungeons & Dragons group were given Verdurian names. The language borrows words and grammar from various languages of Europe, but has been described as not resembling any one language. Many of the words were inspired directly by French or

Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...

. Others, such as "elir" for life, were

a priori ("from the earlier") and ("from the later") are Latin phrases used in philosophy to distinguish types of knowledge, justification, or argument by their reliance on empirical evidence or experience. knowledge is independent from current ex ...

coinages by Rosenfelder. There are also words based on political humor, e.g. 'fanaticism' is ''sunmünmún'' and 'terror' is ''arhafát''.

Fictional history

In Rosenfelder's Almean universe, Verdurian is spoken by about 55 million people in the kingdom of Verduria, as well as nations nearby in Almea's Cadhinorian plain. Verdurian is a member of the Eastern language phylum. This derives from a

proto-language In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unatte ...

called proto-Eastern, spoken by invaders of the Cadhinorian and Xurnese plains, about 4,000 years before the present time in Rosenfelder's universe. Some of the Eastern invaders were Cuzeian, while others were Cadhinorian. Cadhinorians picked up

civilization A civilization (or civilisation) is any complex society characterized by the development of a state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond natural spoken language (namely, a writing system). C ...

from Cuzeians (who left behind such works as the ''Count of Years'', showing the clear influence of

Tolkien John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (, ; 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works ''The Hobbit'' and ''The Lord of the Rings''. From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was the Rawlins ...

). The Cadhinorians spoke a classical language called Cadhinorian (its relationship to Verdurian is analogous to that of

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power ...

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: ** Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Ca ...

). After the fall of the Cadhinorian Empire, Cadhinorian developed into several daughter languages, among them Old Verdurian, which evolved later into Modern Verdurian. The fictional country of Verduria has an

embassy A diplomatic mission or foreign mission is a group of people from a state or organization present in another state to represent the sending state or organization officially in the receiving or host state. In practice, the phrase usually deno ...

Linköping Linköping () is a city in southern Sweden, with around 105,000 inhabitants as of 2021. It is the seat of Linköping Municipality and the capital of Östergötland County. Linköping is also the episcopal see of the Diocese of Linköping (Chu ...

, Sweden.

Verdurian's popularity

Out of all the languages of Almea, Verdurian is not only the best-developed but the most popular. Rosenfelder has translated texts from other languages into Verdurian and also published short stories and a newspaper in the language. He has also started a Verdurian course due to the requests of Verdurian aficionados, and the language was so popular as to inspire a Zompist.com spin-off

Internet forum An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least tempora ...

Verdurian in popular culture

Verdurian makes an appearance in the novel ''Gaits of Heaven'', one of Susan Conant's "Dog Lover's Mysteries". The character Johanna does

linguistic Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

research with a feminist bent on

grammatical gender In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns ...

"in

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

, Verdurian and various other languages in which verbs as well as nouns are masculine, feminine, or, in some instances, neuter".

Samples of the language

''Proše mižu: --Žaneno, tan satenam mážula er gorat, kiei finta attróue so syel er tan lažecom brac, pro dy řo ažlädam fne soa pera almea Ekaiei.'' – From the story of the

Tower of Babel The Tower of Babel ( he, , ''Mīgdal Bāḇel'') narrative in Genesis 11:1–9 is an origin myth meant to explain why the world's peoples speak different languages. According to the story, a united human race speaking a single language and mi ...

. Translation: Then they said: "Come, let us build a town and a tower, whose top will reach the heavens; and let us get ourselves glory, so that we are not scattered across all the earth." ''So cuon er so ailuro eu druki. Cuon ride še slušir misotém ailurei. So ailuro e arašó rizuec.'' Translation: The dog and the cat are friends. The dog laughs at the cat's jokes. The cat is quite amusing.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Verdurian Language Artistic languages Constructed languages introduced in the 1990s 1995 introductions Constructed languages