Merrin | Jedi Survivor

Merrin | Jedi Survivor

[The Horror and the Wild]

every time I think about my gender I get confused so I simply stopped thinking about it. it is not my problem

as a certified Conlang Enjoyer one of my favorite things is to analyze fictional language snippets for their pieces, and as i've been reading the drizzt books recently, i've been fighting a lot with how drow words work (why is this language so IRREGULAR it's worse than english istg), So!

pluralization in the drow language and how it works:

several things seem to be happening here, first, the "base" plural, is -in or -en. see: haszak/haszakkin [illithid], ilharess/ilharessen [matron]. consonant endings will also be doubled if they are not already.

then, there are the really soft consonants. think like the letter L; a word ending in the letter L would be pluralized with simply -n. see: gol/goln [goblin]. no doubling of consonants seems to happen.

in words ending with N, the pluralization marker seems to be -a. see: brorn/brorna [surprise].

then, we get some really weird endings, because the wiki has SIX recorded pluralizations. SIX. my instincts are that the three above are fairly common, and the following two are much less so and likely to be only seen in a few words, especially considering the words seen are both versions of "spider".

"orb": spider. plural, "orbb".

"lhorb": specifically a dangerous spider. plural, "lhorbbyth".

i would assume those are more archaic endings, but who knows!

then there's "rivvil", which means human, and gets pluralized to "rivvin". don't really know what's happening there, ngl, although my best guess is that it used to be "rivviln" and the L sound got swallowed into the -n by drow speaking fast, especially considering that word would likely be used most commonly during raids where a lot of things are happening and you want to get orders out fast.

there's also "kulg", which means blockage/snag/hitch, and "kulggen", which means deliberate rampart/shield. this does not necessarily break the rules seen earlier, merely implies that "shield", in drow, is literally smth along the lines of "blockages". (which, for a society built around cutthroat survival, does kinda make sense).

there is also "kyorl", which means to watch, and then "kyorlin", which means guarding/watching/waiting. that one's funky; it has the -in ending which implies plurality, but it seems instead to be a tense marker here. however, it could make sense that it literally translates to smth like "multiple to-watch" instead, and only loosely translates to watching. it could also be leftover from a shift in language; we just don't know. it also doesn't have the just -n from a word ending in L like you see earlier in goln.

you see this again in "quarth", to command, vs "quarthen", commanded/ordered. could be a tense change, could be a pluralization marker that in english encompasses a tense change.

other thing i've noticed:

apostrophes seem to be in use when words get combined. see: abbil [trusted friend/comrade] vs khal'abbil [my trusted friend/comrade]. this also implies that many words translated as one word (such as para'dene, scapegoat, or qual'laelay, argument/disagreement) are compound words as well. an apostrophe in a name might imply that it's an unconventional name, combining two words not typically used in drow names, rather than name fragments more often used.

other cool things, assumtions, and speculation:

qu'ellar [house], qu'lith [blood], and qu'uente [guts] all seem to have the same root, which implies interesting things about the literal translation of "house". makes sense though, given what we've seen of noble houses and how they work.

colnbluth [non-drow] is quite possibly a compound word, even though it doesn't have the apostrophe; dobluth [outcast] seems to have the same suffix, so my guess is that -bluth translates to something like banished/exile. given that, colnbluth could literally translate to something like "outsiders-banished", with a pre-existing plural on "outsiders". if pluralized differently, likely to be "colnbluthen", or remain "colnbluth"; i'm not sure. outcast, though, would most likely be pluralized as "dobluthen".

darthiir [surface elves/traitors] does not seem to have a plural form, or is the plural form already. my guess is this, like rivvil/rivvin, is a word that got eroded by speaking quickly on raids, and that older forms of the language had it closer to "darthirrin" or "darthiirrin" or smth, following the same -in/-en ending.

in conclusion:

the drow language is wildly irregular, rather complicated, and yet does still have Some common threads along words that make it feel like a real language. go forth and write fic well with this new information and analysis or whatever

Fuck yeah they gave it a mech