Categories: Lore

Language

The language of the continent.

Due to literally being one Bauhinian Empire for thousands of years, everyone on the continent speaks one language. Though topolects and accents exist, the foundations of them are the same, and they always remain mutually intelligible. Here is all the info on the language! For a list of words in the language, refer to the lexicon!

Ancient vs. Modern

Ancient Bauhinian is quite a different language from Modern Bauhinian, though I'm too lazy to make two entire conlangs so either of these two ideas are fine and can and do coexist:

1. Ancient Bauhinian is the language described in this file, and Modern Bauhinian uses most of the same framework, except that some words in Ancient Bauhinian are discarded or changed because they were basically only used by aristocrats and were removed from daily use;
2. Ancient Bauhinian is the language described in this file, and Modern Bauhinian is literally any language you'd like. It could be English as that's what most of this website is written in. It could be Chinese. It could be literally whatever, and the puns specific to that language would always make sense.

Anything to make the plot work.

Ancient Bauhinian is a school subject in most places.

Phonology

Bauhinian features 8 vowels and 24 consonants.

Vowels

Consonants

Letters with no sound-alikes sounds like how they would in English.

Rules

Syllables in Bauhinian are constructed with one of these patterns:

1. a single vowel (a, e)
2. consonant + vowel (pa, mo)
3. vowel + consonant (at, um)
4. consonant + vowel + consonant (nam, wās)

But here are some restrictions:

1. Y cannot appear at the end of a syllable.
2. NG cannot appear at the start of a syllable.
3. J, Q, and X cannot be followed by Ā, Ī, or U.

Pronunciation

Special-ass consonants

When J, Q, and X are followed by A, E, or O, they are pronounced with a compound I + whatever followed them. To illustrate:

• j + a = jia (加)
• q + e = qie (切)
• x + o = xiu (修。或是跟你们喜欢管“脚脚”叫“jio jio”一样的)

This is reflected on the pronunciation alone. In written form, nothing has changed.

Long and short "I"

The vowel I is typically short in Bauhinian. However, if it's at the very end of a word, with no consonant behind it, it becomes a long I. For example, the Bauhinian word "sili" is pronounced the same as the English word "silly."

Merging

If two (or more) letters got together, they're pronounced as if there's only one of them there. For example, suppose a word somehow got to "to + o + ol." It would be written as "toool," but pronounced like "tol." Same goes for consonants but I guess that's more obvious: "tok + kuz" = "tokkuz" but is pronounced as "tokuz."

Stress

Stress is not important in Bauhinian. Do whatever.

Writing system

Bauhinian uses a syllabary, meaning each syllable is written as a single character. Please consult this handy graph:

(graph not drawn yet)

According to my calculations, the total possible number of characters in Bauhinian is 4392, so no way I'm drawing all that.

Font styles

tba

Latin transcription

Well most of Bauhinian you're gonna see here are Latinizations because writing those characters, saving them as pictures, and putting them here is tedious.

In Latin transcriptions, affixes must be separated by hyphens.

And if you don't want to type any diacritics at all, you can substitute the vowels ā, ī, and ū with aa, ii, and uu.

Grammar

Bauhinian is an agglutinative language, relying on affixes (only prefixes and suffixes here) to modify a word to give it additional meaning.

The basic word order of Bauhinian is SVO (subject, verb, object), but other parts of the speech can be flexible due to affixes.

Plural

The plural of a noun is denoted using the suffix "-nip." In Bauhinian, "plural" is only used when the number of things is uncertain. When the number is certain, no plural suffix is added.

Adjectives

Adjectives in Bauhinian are placed before nouns. For multiple adjectives, there is an order you need to follow, but I don't want to come up with it right now.

Emphasis

In English, adjectives can be modified by "very" or "a little," to represent a degree relative to a common, widespread notion of how the adjective looks like. For example, if you heard "the apple is red," you may imagine a red apple. But if it were "the apple is very red," "the apple is super red," you may imagine an apple that's redder than any you've ever seen. As for "the apple is not very red," you may think of the apple as still partially green, due to the commonly understood notion of apples being green before they turn red.

To express this idea in Bauhinian, you modify the adjective itself. To increase the degree, repeat the first syllable of the adjective (or the whole word if there's only one syllable) as many times as you'd like. To reduce the degree, add the suffix "-tik" as many times as you'd like. Note that doing this for more than one time will have society clock you as a brainrot kid!

Also this type of speech is not accepted in academia, and you need to resort to precise and boring ways to express how your beaker of clear liquid turned a tiny bit blue after 8 hours. I have not come up with the boring way to express it and I don't want to because it's boring.

Something is something

Telling someone about the property of something is a very common speech pattern. "The world is big." "The apples are red." "Sparky is the girl who's eating." "The boy standing there is Nightsun." To express these ideas in Bauhinian, you add the suffix "-nan" to the thing being described, and "-sīn" to the property being assigned to it. 有点像古汉语里的“什么什么者，什么什么也”。 In speaking, a pause is usually between the two words / phrases. In writing, there may be a comma to represent the pause, but it's omittable.

Cause and effect

This is literally the reason I made this in the first place but I just got too lazy to write it. One day.

Verb tenses

Bauhinian has:

• Past tense (did): -waq
• Present ongoing (doing): -tanka
• Present perfect (have just done): -…
• Future (will do): -…
• Just about to do: -…
• Should do: -…
• Must do: -…
• Want to do: -…
• And whatever more I can think of

Okay some of these maybe (definitely) can't be categorized as "tenses" in a grammatical sense but I don't care.

Saying "hello world"

Asking the real questions here! "Na-owa, lantap!"

Accents

Bauhinian

Literally the standard! I like to imagine they sound like the British.

Fantoni

Quite similar to Bauhinian, except they often mix up N's and L's. May pronounce "nat" as "lat," for example.

Atlasian

Likes to drag out their I's, making all of them long. "Filip" becomes "feeeeeleeeeep!"

Westavian

Pronounces NG's like N's. "Nang" becomes "nan."

Morelandian

Softens T's into D's like them yankees. "Ata" and "ada" are the same in their mouths. Also likes to connect consonants to the next syllable if that starts with a vowel. For example, the I in "yami + nāl" would usually be unaffected by the N in "nāl," but for the Moose would pronounce it like "yam-min-nāl."

Sylvandian

Pronounces V's like W's.

QnA