TL;DR What language(s) would you like to see Tevarin based on? I personally think Ogham is a good candidate for their script
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This is all for fun and chats, fan worldbuilding, and fluff.
With the recent release of the San'tok.yāi and Syulen ships, and the anti-xeno graffiti at IAE, I got to thinking about the Tevarin ‘cultural resurgence’ thing that’s apparently happening in-lore, and whether they’d eventually get the conlang treatment like the rest of the currently known aliens.
And I suggest, for the writing at least, that ‘Ogham’ be considered as a start.
My proposal falls apart pretty quickly; for one it’s already been established that Tevarin culture is vaguely Japanese, Bushido-based. Secondly, all the currently known Tevarin words, mostly Proper Nouns, wouldn’t fit the typical celtic language sound that ogham is used to write. Lastly and most importantly: If Tevarin is getting a language, it’s almost certainly already in development. And if it isn’t, then it’s more likely that it’s not planned at all. I’m ignoring all that though, so let’s crack on.
OGHAM
Ogham is a writing system developed to write ancient celtic languages, mostly carved into stone as placemarkers. It’s an alphabet, with each glyph representing a single letter. The things that make Ogham stand out in comparison to most writing systems on Earth, or in the Verse, is that each letter is linked with a Stem or solid line, and that it’s written from the bottom up.
Ogham example, source https://bencrowder.net/blog/2015/ogham-alphabet-worksheets/
BUT WHY THOUGH?
There’s a couple reasons. First and foremost is just that I personally like Ogham and I have the ulterior motive of trying to push it as much as possible to the public. But more importantly, I think it provides a good extra dose of variety to the current lineup. uo'aXy'an is based on East Asian writing systems, Korean with a Chinese styling, written vertically in syllable blocks. Banu Ochoa is a syllabary mostly written horizontally, with sort of a Hindi/Tibetan inspiration if I’m not completely mistaken with its consonant-base-vowel-diacritic construction. “Abugida” is the term I think. I’m not gonna comment on Vanduul since all I know about it is that it was made by scratching shapes with marker-claws. If Tevarin is Japanese-based that’d make for a second (or third, possibly) asian-inspired Alien Language. I think we have an opportunity to shake things up here. Ogham is about as far away from Asian systems as you can get, but isn’t as ubiquitous as other Euro systems like Runic, which I’d imagine would be the next go-to writing system to provide an ‘otherworldly’ feel. A good argument could also be made for Pictographic systems, Inca or Hieroglyphics for instance. Ogham has some unique features to help it stand out. Obviously, being written from the bottom up is very unusual, but that it also requires all letters to be written along an unbroken stemline makes the whole thing very ‘alien’, to me at least.
When the Prowler development was being shown, it was mentioned that the inside is designed to look like tree branches, as Tevarin felt relaxed in trees. In popular culture, the history is dubious, Ogham letters are associated with Trees, and when written out, especially paragraphs of sentences, Ogham can sort of have an effect not unlike a forest, or the natural markings on birch trunks. Written along unbroken stems, each letter is a series of simple straight lines branching out from the centre. Reinforced by the bottom-up writing, like it’s growing. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the Tevarin incorporated tree imagery into their writing too. Like Runes, the simple straight lines of Ogham are meant to be carved into the edges of rocks, sticks, and trees (scratched with bird talons perhaps, eh?) though a ‘Monastic’ version was starting to be developed around 500-900 CE
OK, HOW?
I propose that Tevarin keeps the base elements: written bottom-up normally, along a stem, and made up of a series of branching lines. Real-life ogham is rather limited, it’s missing some features that actually make it unusable for surviving modern day Gaelic and Brythonic languages. A conlang/con-script called ‘Úrogham’ was created as well, meant to be an alternate history Monastic Ogham if it had survived to the modern era, that was made to work with Modern Irish specifically. It incorporates diacritic marks and a more cursive look that’s easier to both read (once you get used to it) and write than standard Ogham. If Ogham is to be used I definitely wouldn’t overlook the changes Úrogham makes to expand it
Úrogham sample, source https://omniglot.com/conscripts/urogham.htm
As an aside, though I know the feel of Tevarin is already established in the names we’ve got for people and places, I’d still like to make a case for using some features of Irish for the actual grammar. Namely “Consonant Mutation”, lenition and eclipsis, where following certain rules the ending letters of one word can modify the starting consonants of the next, mutating the sound. Usually depicted by adding extra letters to the next word at the start. Wikipedia has an article explaining it
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CONCLUSION
I just think it’s neat. And I want an excuse to talk about ogham and Tevarin and languages in general. Best result is this starts a discussion, what would you like to see out of a Tevarin language? Would you even want one?