If you’ve read any of the Stone and String stories or later Wishing Blade books, you know I very much enjoy creating fictional languages. The Cantingen language for word magic is fairly fleshed out with grammatical rules and a good-sized list of words, though it still has a ways to go before being fully functional.
That being said, it isn’t the only language present in the world of The Wishing Blade.
We also hear reference of the the Cirenan language, Ancient Cirenan (mentioned in Magic’s Stealing), the Maijevan language, and the immortals’ languages.
The fun part is that Cirenan is supposed to be kind of like English… a mixture of several different languages. The problem?
I needed to figure out at least a portion of Ancient Cirenan for use in one of the later Stone and String stories.
Since Ancient Cirenan is supposed to be a mix of Cantingen, the immortals’ language, and an as-of-yet-undetermined language (Anethian?), I realized I needed to start delving into creating the other languages of influence… at least the basics.
So, I made notes on the immortals’ languages. So far I’ve got a basic idea of sentence structure, interrogatives, how verbs work, and the phonetics.
There would be too much to cover in one post (though if you want to see my notes on creating the sounds of the language, click here to check out my blog post from 2018), so I wanted to focus on one specific aspect… what the immortals call themselves.
The thing is, the Immortal Realm is fluid… a misty, fog-filled place with different regions inside it that don’t have any concrete position on a map. You could leave the edge of one region, travel through the mist, and arrive at a different region each time, despite traveling the same “direction.”
As a result, there are several different tribes and clans of immortals… beings which often resemble humanoid wolves, giant bears, equines, and other animals, although you also get the occasional griffin, dragon, minotaur… etc. Each group has their own dialect and variant of religion and culture, which results in occasional clashes.
I chose to focus on the primary language of the wolves, the one which has the most influence on Cirena. (Though, admittedly, I’ll sometimes use the same version of the language for the bears, and go with the idea of borrowed phrases or similar development of words).
One of the first things I wanted to figure out is what the immortals call themselves. While a lot of this is still in flux and may change, here’s what I’m currently looking at:
Since the immortals believe themselves to have come from the mist/fog of their realm (the word for “Mist” being “nirrin,” I decided that they would call themselves Mist Children. They live long lives (they don’t typically die unless they are outright killed or if disease takes them), and they have immortal ribbon magic, which is considerably stronger than regular ribbon magic.
The word for child is “cira’ma.” Plural, it becomes “gercira’ma.”
When creating names or special places that have a possessive tendency or description, the two words simply go together, primary noun first, and then the descriptor.
Thus, “Children of Mist” / “Mist Children” becomes:
gercira’ma’nirrin
(I’ll note that the apostrophes simply mean that the vowel sound before it does not merge with the next consonant. Thus, this words sounds something like “gair-cir-ah-ma-near-in.”)
I’ve got a lot more planned for this language, including what they call “created” beings who are still “immortal” but aren’t Children of Mist… but I’ll save that for another day.
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Explore the my different conlangs…
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Happy reading and writing!
Stephanie Flint - Author and Artist 