Articles - Soithas Marraidh

18/07/202127/08/2021

Third degree

The third part of Dragar spells! And, accordingly, their third degree.

It's been so long since the last post because we've been racking our brains trying to figure out how to describe the third degree without too much complexity. Spoiler: nothing came up, so get ready for philosophy. And in one post, we obviously can not manage; there will be only the most-most basic information to think about.

To begin with, imagine a huge semantic space where you can find any meanings you want. Each word corresponds to a certain area in it (I won’t call it a field, because I have to go into a hardcore linguach, but I don’t want that at all). And the dragars say that certain actions can be performed on these areas:

rxucaf, narrowing: parent > mother, parent > father;
vohef, extension: sword > weapon;
zêşâf, transformation: anything that doesn't belong to the two above. For example, negation: good > bad; or a more complex example: fiery + water = “fiery water” (strong alcohol).

IN first degree we obviously use only narrowing: clarifying words, of course, can neither transform nor expand. In second same ... also only narrowing! Although it's not so obvious. It is not in vain that the emphasis is placed on the single-component sentence; what we do, in fact, is take the semantic area that is given by the verb (imagine, for example, how huge it is for the verb “to do”!) And gradually narrow it down, stuffing the subject, objects, circumstances into it ... A little rough, but I hope , It's clear.

The third degree allows maximum freedom of action. So many different new elements appear in it that we could describe them together with Zear until tomorrow morning. So for now, let's focus on the three most simple and characteristic.

1. Denial. The usual particle "not", which looks like dragars ir. Performs, obviously, a transformation operation and turns the area into everything outside it: jun "shield" > þun ir "not a shield." Similarly, you can put it after something larger: þun ğa ce ir "not a sand shield." It is important to understand that this is not a “(non-sand) shield”, but a “non-(sand) shield”, i.e. anything that is not a sand shield. "(non-sandy) shield" will be þun ir ğa ce ir: "not ((not shield) sandy)" = "(not not shield) (not sandy)" = "not sandy shield". Unnatural in terms of natural language, but what can you do.

2. Association. Corresponds to the Retsin union "and", which among the dragars looks like Oy. Yes, you can immediately remember the logical AND, which on sets corresponds rather to an intersection ... But we have here not logic, but magic! Therefore, excuse me. And so this union can be used in exactly the same way as the Retsin “and”; when connecting two sentences, they need to be slightly modified, but this is already in the next post. şul îy farð "wind and fire" and all that.

3. Intersection. Preposition used su, which roughly corresponds to the Retsin "s". If şul îy farð from the previous example is an area that unites everything that relates to fire and wind, then sul sü fari is an area that includes only what is related to fire and wind at the same time. For example, some hot desert winds, relatively speaking. It can also link two sentences, and also requires their modification.

The other two most popular things are the so-called. "spontaneous narrowing" and antonymization. The first one sounds really weird, and the second one looks kinda obvious at first... but that's just before you try to find an antonym for the word "arrow". The Dragar magical language knows how to get out of such situations, but before explaining them, we first need to talk a little about their philosophy. And this is a topic for a separate post. So - see you soon!

PS Such complexity of the linguistic complexes used in magic is due to the fact that the dragars never had a natural language. Due to their innate ability to telepathy, they never needed it; and both spoken and magical language were artificially created to better convey meanings, records, and some other things.

28/05/202127/08/2021

Second degree

Dragar spells, as promised.

In the previous post, we considered the first degree, and now we turn to the second. It, unlike the previous one, is not divided into any categories, but is quite complex in itself.

The first thing to note is that at this degree, the words used in the spell already obey certain grammatical rules. In general, roughly speaking, the second degree is a very formalized artificial language.

There is only one part of speech - the noun, which is also a verb. I mean, the word þun can mean both "shield" and "protect", this applies to everything else. If you really want and need to make an adjective, a particle is placed before the word ga: ce "sand" becomes ga ce "sandy".

There are no prepositions, instead there are postpositions: fors "fire" → fors goz "(on) against the fire." Adjectives always appear after the noun they describe: þunğa ce "sand shield" (sorry for the idiotic examples). The predicate is always at the end of the sentence.

Such a structure is not very typical for natural languages, but it has a certain meaning: everything is done in order to first introduce some term into the spell, and only then refine it and modify it in some other way. The only exception is this adjective particle ga (And then, this is not quite an exception, but that's a completely different story).

And one more important fact. A pure second degree is a simple sentence (one-part, two-part - it doesn't matter). If the sentence is complex, then this is already degrees higher, and some additional things appear there.

Finally, with regard to inversion. It is possible if the caster understands very well what he wants to do, and specifically focuses on some word. An example of this would be… yes, the Akedega spell from the book.

First, let's show how it would look without inversion:

þun şuf ğa ce goz
"shield storm adj sand vs” - that is, “shield against a sandstorm.”

Akedeg has it like this:

þunğa ce şuf goz
because he emphasizes "sandy". Note that in this situation it can be read as "sand shield against the storm", which, of course, is not at all the same and has a completely different meaning.

Well, two more examples from the literature:

tan ür forş yer pâð alx
"wood from fire with coal do", that is, "I make coal from wood into fire." The caster, if I remember correctly, urgently needed a piece of coal to write something.

nêh ğa jo cew göz
"sleep ADJ eternity disease against- "eternal sleep against illness." A spell used to kill the hopelessly ill.

Let's end on that positive note. Once again, don't worry!

28/04/202127/08/2021

Kharassukhum writing

What does the most common stereotype regarding doors look like? They are such stocky, stern guys, gloomy and stingy with words... and, accordingly, their writing should be the same, right?

It didn't work out quite well in the end. But let's talk about everything in order.

It all started, as often happens, with pictograms. Their earliest stage is found in rock paintings that date back to... there are terrible numbers there, but all this is obvious before 10,000 AD.

Each of these pictograms is a letter that corresponds to the first sound of the word that the pictogram represents. For example, here are three examples in the figure below:

It probably wasn’t particularly convenient to write this way, but somehow it was necessary. And yes, only consonants were written, without vowels, and from right to left. The full list of symbols is below:

Then some time passed, and the local doors began to write not on the walls of the caves, but on clay and wax tablets. Therefore, the symbols have been somewhat simplified and become a little more angular:

At this stage, vowels are also not written down. Well, who needs them, right?

Now we skip a few stages, because it’s not too interesting, and move on to the one we have now. And which was already... Well, in 200 AD for sure.

By this stage, some of the sounds had merged, but even for letters that had gone out of circulation, modern versions of letters exist: some ancient texts continued to be written with them. And finally vowels appeared! But in, uh, a little strange way.

With the help of the sign ̯ and its mirror analogue ˘ (depending on where it is attached to the previous letter), both a, And e, And o. And with the help of ̹ and ͗ - simultaneously i and u. Why is that? It's hard to say, actually; there is evidence that in the first millennium BC two dialects were in use in Kharassukhum, and e in one corresponded exactly a in another (and vice versa). Perhaps it has something to do with it; Perhaps they just decided not to bother. And another symbol appeared a little later: a dot next to the icon with a vowel began to indicate its nasalization (pronunciation through the nose).

In short, this evolved writing ends up looking less like something stern and staid than something Tyvian. What to do, however.

And finally, a phrase. Not exactly modern, originally from the 5th century AD, but nonetheless. Romanitsa looks like this: qeyadqāñrum arrex ğ-weẓgeñlāy xūrukāṣ, “They say that a long time ago there lived a people in the middle of the world.” And in Kharassukhumi writing - below:

It turned out to be a bit much, but hopefully not too tiring. Thank you for reading!

16/04/202127/08/2021

First degree

We apologize for the long absence, we came to you with ... dragar magic!

To be honest, in their system, the devil himself will break his leg. Therefore, for now, let's start with the most basic (namely, what we ourselves have been able to understand so far), and then we will continue if we figure it out.

Dragar spells are divided into three main spells according to complexity (four according to some classifications) ferxey (approximate translation - "stages; degrees") and some crazy number of derivatives. For now, we will only consider the first one, because
a) tired;
b) the second one is simply huge in itself, so it definitely needs to be considered separately.

Oh, and most of the spells now we will consider the example of the Akedega spells from the "Islands", so do not be too surprised.

So. First ferxeg, a degree, is divided into three and a half digits.

The simplest spell, consisting of exactly one word. For example, we already love jun - "shield". Clearly, there are a lot of applications for it: how many objects are there that can be protected from, and how many objects are there that need to be protected? That is why such spells are rarely used: if you say “fire” in Dragar, then you can set fire to a fire, or you can burn down a neighbor's barn. And to avoid a catastrophe, you need a very good concentration.
Two words. The first is the main one, the second describes or refines the first. For example, a spell þun hor - "shield circle" - Akedeg created a domed barrier around the sailors. But then again, the barrier could be from rain, or it could be from hostile magic, right? Therefore, concentration and the inner intention of the caster again play a role here.
Three words.
1. The first is the main thing, the second two clarify or describe the first. Akedeg again: þun ce hor The "Sand/Dust Circle Shield" created a circular barrier around the sailors, protecting them from the sand. I think further comments are unnecessary. And although not, I will add: the same spell can create a round barrier _of_ sand. I won't talk about concentration for the third time.
2. The first is the main thing, the second specifies the first, the third specifies the second. Let's leave Akyodega alone, and instead demonstrate this: þun forş ğak "shield fire heat." This is not a “fire shield from heat”, as it would be in paragraph 3.1., but a “shield from hot fire”. These two subcategories are usually separated because the impulses used in them differ too much.

Motives, right? Another not fully understood term. From what we've been able to figure out, it's some specific kind of thought structure used in a spell, but... what is a thought structure?

In general, let's stop there for now. If we find simple and understandable explanations, we will immediately provide them. In the meantime, just believe that such things exist, and they work =D

03/02/202122/02/2021

Nudyatina about poetry

In anticipation of some interesting contraption, which you will learn about a little later, let's just look at the ancient poetic traditions of the different peoples of Orova. Those of them that modern science is aware of, of course. Well, we will not go far to the east - at least for now.

1. Hellenic. There is no need to tell anything here, I think the word "hexameter" speaks for itself to everyone. It was the ancient Hellenes who invented the feet known to us today: iambic, trochee, dactyl and others. But everything, in fact, is not so simple.

Our modern versification is syllabo-tonic, that is, it looks at the number of syllables and stress positions of the verse. Ancient Hellenic was metrical, and in it the rhythmic groups of long and short syllables, repeated in verse, mattered.

Thus, if the dactyl in Retsin is a three-syllable foot with an accent on the first position:

> dug | dactyl | the pit is deep,

then in Old Hellenic it is a foot with the first long syllable (that is, having a long vowel or ending in a consonant), and the second two are short:

2. Skadinsky. In addition to the borrowed Hellenic metric, there was an older form of versification, now called Saturnian verse. The beauty of it is that no one still can understand exactly how it works: some consider it quantitative (when the positions of long and short syllables matter), some consider it tonic (when the position of stress is important). Analysis of similar verses in related languages does not help much either. You can read more details at least on the same wiki, and the example looks like this:

Postquam avem aspexit in templō Anchisa
sacr(ā) in mēnsā Penātium ordine pōnuntur
immolābat auream victimam pulchram

Quantitatively:
– ∪ ∪ ∪ || – – ∪ || – – – – – x
∪ – – – || ∪ – (∪) – || – ∪ – – – x
– ∪ – – || – ∪ – || – ∪ – – x
Tonically (ancient Skadinsky):
´ ∪ ´ ∪ || ´ ∪ ∪ || ∪ ´ ∪ ´ ∪ ∪
´ ∪ ´ ∪ || ´ ∪ (∪) ∪ || ´ ∪ ∪ ´ ∪ ∪
´ ∪ ` ∪ || ´ ∪ ∪ || ´ ∪ ∪ ´ ∪
Tonically (classic Skadinsky):
´ ∪ ´ ∪ || ∪ ´ ∪ || ∪ ´ ∪ ∪ ´ ∪
´ ∪ ´ ∪ || ∪ ´ (∪) ∪ || ´ ∪ ∪ ∪ ´ ∪
` ∪ ´ ∪ || ´ ∪ ∪ || ´ ∪ ∪ ´ ∪

3. German, Rechan and Bet

I combine them into one, because they all have two things in common:
- sound repetitions (alliterations, rhymes) both inside the line and outside;
is the number of syllables in a verse.

As an example, I can give a couple of lines from a well-known text. The lines in it, as you can see, are held together not by rhymes, but by certain repetitions of sounds, which are italicized and bold.

onchat or xia that song
by wereonmŏ nowen<e>
A Not by design Bojanyu
Bojanŏ bO Vѣsch<i>th
even to whom you want || songs TinRgo
then pstop coughing We-I will merge according to the tree
sirthĕ inòlclod of earth
shizym oplom subŏ clouds

And here is modern Botian poetry, but using their local ancient meters and other things.

Ar y llawr mae cawr y cwm — ar ei draws
Mae dryswch ei godwm
Yn celu yn y cwlwm
Egin-goed Dany troed trwm.

This is the end for now, but for now, stay tuned for updates!

26/01/202122/02/2021

A little more about therianthropy

Continuing the werewolf theme.

We did a little research (= we poked different buttons in the search engine for half an hour) and we would like to share the results with you. In particular, to answer the question: what happened to werewolves in our times?

Not much information is available on this subject, mainly because many people now perceive werewolfism as something of an unpleasant and rather shameful disease. Nobody walks the streets and talks about their sexually transmitted diseases, right? However, there are exceptions, and we will talk about some of them now.

We won’t go too far to the south or east: they have Yashutiya there with her kitsune, and in general the atmosphere is its own and quite specific. Let's look, again, at modern betas. And we immediately see (it’s easy to search on the Internet) that they have at least five villages where entire clans of werewolves live - and they don’t even hide!

two in the north of Digitania, one Lorlandian, called Kara (Carragh), the other is Kiyatlandic, Alloa (Alloa, Alamhagh). What is there, that there live people who turn into wolves;
two in the south of Digitania, one to the west, Botian - Trevilan (Trefilan), another to the east, Vandian - Tregir (Tregear). In the first there live both wolves and bears (!), and in the second - foxes;
the last one on the mainland, north-west Gesia, Duat, is called Trebryvan (Trebrivan, Trabrivan). There are foxes and wolves in it.

What is most interesting is that people from the last two listed villages have a tradition that can be traced back to the twelfth century - the Tregirians take spouses from Trebryvan, and the Trebryvanians, accordingly, vice versa. So that werewolfism is preserved and does not degenerate. And even tens of kilometers of sea don’t stop them, that’s right!

So, finally, I will appeal to all possible werewolves who are reading this text. As you can see, there are people, not too far away, who are not at all worried about the situation they find themselves in - so you too just... don't be afraid to be yourself.

17/01/202122/01/2021

Glinnarians and religion

Promised post, hooray! A brief and very frisky digression into the Glynar beliefs, pahahaeeee

1. The world was created by one One (literally the One, in claynarya he is Ierthíal) God.
2. For the creation of which he created five smaller ones - there are still disputes about whether to consider them also gods or something like angels - the so-called Higher.
3. All of them correspond to the five elements: fire, water, earth, air and thunder.
4. They were created differently so that everyone would work on some aspect of the created world.
5. When the work was completed, the One invited them to take a closer look at what they had done, and they were horrified - what he had created was very ephemeral, fickle and literally fell to pieces.
6. Then the One breathed the spark of creation into the world and it began to look… well, decent.
7. Agarad (Supreme-thunderstorm) was a little upset because the One could do such things, but he could not, but he did not show it.
6.1. People who are human were invented by Afadar (fire), Alvians - Avetu (air), Dvergians - Igrenna (earth), Gearts - Ilidas (water), Dragars - Agarad (already existed).

8. Some time passed there, Agarad captured several particles of other Higher Ones, which were placed in the so-called Telellair (long history) and imagined himself a demiurge.
9. In particular, it was as a result of his actions that we got the same werewolves and someone else.
10. A war broke out for Telellayr, in which a great many people perished; ended with the fact that Agarad's cuckoo drove off completely, and his experiments acquired an absolutely monstrous character.
11. As a result, he was beaten, tied up, and the rest of the Highest took him to the court to the One.
12. He grunted dejectedly and explained two things:
— the world initially created by the Higher Ones was molded obliquely and crookedly due to the incompleteness of their understanding of the plan; how an artist painting a picture can convey only a part of what he sees in front of him, but far from all;
- and if Agarad did not show off, but did just what he has a soul for, then it would turn out very, very well.
13. As a result, Agarad became completely discouraged and went into eternal exile.

Now we understand why the Glinnarians worshiped first five, and then four. But why eight?

14. The elves and dragars, who communicated with the Higher Ones, eventually realized that each of them (except Agarad) combines two principles, which can be conditionally called male and female. And they manifest themselves in different ways, and sometimes even both together.
15. Therefore, in their view, each of the four was divided into two. For example, Avetu became Avetu proper (who is a man), the lord of the winds, and his wife named Royna, the mistress of the stars. The rest suffered the same fate.

16. From my story, you may have noticed that I describe the Higher Beings as quite real beings, with whom someone communicated there a long time ago. This is true; it is difficult to say how much of these legends and beliefs are embellished and fictional, but the core of this does not change.

17. The exact nature of the Highest is very complex and difficult to describe. These are beings whose consciousness is entirely located in the metaphysical (non-material) layer of space - how to describe it in our physical-materialistic terms?

18. Docking the Supreme with other religions is a separate issue that is worthy of a series of articles, each forty pages long.

14/01/202122/01/2021

Glynnar letter

Surely many of you have once and somewhere encountered inscriptions made in a strange vertical script, consisting of very similar vertical lines. A considerable number of you also know that this type of writing has been used by the Glinnar elves for countless years. But how does it work? This is what we will look at now!

Let's skip the history of its origin (most likely, it was created by Fodallein in some crazy 10100 BC) and go straight to the principles.

It is read from top to bottom and left to right; its main element is such a slash, as shown below.

Let's first understand how the signs corresponding to p, t and c (P, T, To). All of them... are written down by this single line!

Would this line be read as p, t or c, depends on its place of attachment to the previous element. p is attached below everything, t attached in the middle c is attached above everything. Of course, if a word begins with one of these consonants, there will be no previous element there, so a small extra hook is used to indicate the reading:

As you can see, p attached to the hook at the bottom, t - on the side of him, and c and is completely located partially above the hook. This should be clear; now let's see what happens if a word starts with a vowel a.

Everything is gradually starting to become clearer. The line without a hook with another thing on the right is a; The image above shows how the black line is read depending on where it is attached.

All other consonants work on a similar principle. For example, in the image below we can see readings for b, d, g.

The principle is still the same, only the upper part of the corresponding feature differs from that of the voiceless consonants shown earlier. It doesn’t seem that difficult, right? Ha, if only!

Firstly, we still have vowels left. With them everything is much simpler, for each of them there is a separate sign attached to the right to the previous element; if a word begins with a vowel, it is attached to an empty standard line, like a upstairs.

We also have f/ph, bh (f, V) th, dh (English) thin and this), ch, gh (X, rec. boohgalter). They all use the trait of their corresponding sound from plosives (p For f, c For ch...) with a small squiggle on the left:

Now watch the trick.

Instead of writing a separate squiggle on dh and th, we simply connect them. And there are a lot of such ligatures and spellings; some of them are used almost always in writing, some almost never (only by certain authors). Here are two more examples for a better understanding:

And, as I already said, there are not two, or three, or even ten such ligatures. That is why this writing is so difficult to adequately represent in digital form (in Unicode, for example), and that is why modern Glinnarians prefer to use romanitsa in correspondence - it is read much more clearly than their madness, and is adequately presented in digital form .

10/12/202022/01/2021

About Therianthropy

Again a find and again a small digression, only not historical and cultural, but scientific.

Lycanthropy (or, more correctly, therianthropy - from el. θηρίον "beast" + ἄνθρωπος "man") is a group of hereditary diseases characteristic of the genus Homo. Caused by several different related mutations on the X chromosome; type of inheritance - X-linked recessive.

There are four different courses of the disease:

chronic: a person can, at will, magically very quickly rebuild his body, thus turning into an animal (which one depends on the type of mutation);
subacute: a person cannot control his transformations, and they occur spontaneously, under the influence of various exogenous and endogenous factors;
acute: a person uncontrollably turns into a beast and back; the number of such transformations can reach ten to twenty per hour. Usually ends in death without proper magical medical assistance;
asymptomatic: a person cannot turn into an animal (and, without being examined, it is unlikely that he will ever know that he is a carrier of a mutation).

A subacute course can develop into an acute one with severe exhaustion of the nervous system; chronic - very rarely in subacute; asymptomatic of almost everything and remains asymptomatic.

Since with such a rapid restructuring of the structure of the body, nervous tissue suffers a lot (which, in fact, is destroyed, and then almost reassembled), the body stops the pain that occurs (and they are very terrible, believe me) in two ways:

in 5% percent of carriers (a harmless variant) - turning off the cerebral cortex and the rest of the nervous system. The person thus sinks into a state like fainting and total sensory deprivation, waking back up after the transformation is over;
the rest 95% - throwing into the blood a huge amount of adrenaline, serotonin and endorphins. This whole hormonal cocktail overloads the sensory system, which makes pain feel more muted.

And the second method has many unpleasant side effects. A person, if treated regularly and often enough, becomes an adrenaline-serotonin addict and begins to do it more and more often; the body does not have time to produce hormones, their supply is depleted, as a result of which depression develops ... Well, not to mention the fact that the nervous system itself cannot withstand frequent appeals and begins to collapse because yes.

For such people, various complex preparations have been specially developed. The principle of their work is the same: firstly, they contain all the above hormones in the right proportion; secondly, they themselves oppress and suppress sensory systems, which makes it less painful and unpleasant.

And here's the thing: we found some vials of this drug... made in the first half of the fourth century! First half! 4th century AD! No; It's clear that Alvian medicine was very advanced even then, but all the same, the discovery is very sudden - especially since the examination is unlikely to lie. The werewolf who had this thing with him was very lucky.