Meloy: ilùi estoit nosay maystroy
The nerdiness can only get worse at this stage.
I’m ever so slowly writing a little Esperanto novella, a fantasy parody. In this book, there are ridiculous sorcerers, and exceedingly ridiculous spells, and I wanted magic to be associated with an archaic language and full of mystery, as often one does.
Non-artificial languages are steeped in history, it’s easy to pick an ancient linguistic ancestor, like Latin, and make such use of it for this goal. But what about Esperanto?
Well, we do have over 120 years of history, but we have the Fundamento, and we make a considerable effort to make sure the core of Esperanto stays the same, so everyone can always understand each other. Have you ever read Esperanto text by the creator of Esperanto himself? Not only was he incredibly eloquent with the language, but he’s also perfectly understandable from all that time ago. If you’re interested in how he responded to people’s questions about the language’s grammar, like I was, read the “Lingvaj Respondoj“. Esperanto has indeed changed over time (take a peek here for more info), but nothing like the difference between Spanish and Latin.
So what can be done? Well, of course someone way smarter than me has already thought such a thing would be bloody cool. Have you ever heard of Arcaicam Esperatom? Archaic Esperanto (AEo)? It’s like an Esperanto code, designed to be to Esperanto as Middle English is to Modern English.
The best easy-access description of it I’ve found is the Esperanto-language wiki-page on the topic. It purposely adds complexity to the language, like more noun cases and verb conjugations, and gives it a slightly Latinesque feel. The title of this post is the Archaic Esperanto for the following:
meloj: ili estos niaj majstroj
badgers: they will be our masters
Sooo, all my sorcerers’ spells will be some lump of archaic obfuscation.
I’m thinking I’ll try to make spells be AEo tongue-twisters, or poems. Or perhaps in the realm of the more silly: food recipes, or instructions for electrical appliances, always spoken with great seriousness, because no sorcerer now knows the true meaning of the words!
For those who turn up here bored - why not translate the sentence below to archaic Esperanto!
La kuraĝa fiŝo, kiun la melo mallaŭte mortigis, antaŭe vojaĝadis de Parizo al Ŝanĥajo.
The courageous fish, whom the badger had quietly killed, had been travelling from Paris to Shanghai.
