Tho Yor: Language of the Ancient SIth (part 1)

The time has come for me to give you all a peek into one of my languages...

 The language is called Tho Yor, but first a tangent!!!!

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I have already posted a few posts here and to those that have joined the Glossopoeist family, thank you! I am sure that it has crossed a few minds when reading my posts and I think its time to give a bit of backstory to me. When I started my degree I was a creative writing major. Now due to my affinity for procrastination, one semester I forgot to sign up for all of my classes. One of the only classes that was left was an intro into Linguists. At the time all I thought was, "oh cool, I like learning languages." A cringe-worthy statement, but I didn't know any better! I started the class and.... 

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...I WAS HOOKED! It was fascinating to me and my love for linguistics continues to grow day by day. Now, my interest in Conlangs began in an equally intriguing way. The creation of this first conlang of mine was in fact a class assignment! I was in my third year of my Linguistics degree and there was a class offered about Conlangs. (F***ING COOL RIGHT?!) The class had requirements that students had to have reached a certain level in their linguistics studies and for good reason, because the one assignment for the whole semester was to create a functioning, linguistically sound language. The language could be about ANYTHING (and I mean anything). I had peers who created languages for ghosts, space dolphins, robots, goblins, magic, and even a creolization of multiple languages for a fictitious group of people who had been trapped in an airport together for years. ​

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So the next time you start to think about your next conlang the sky is literally the limit. Your conlang can be about ANYTHING! When I was taking the class I knew VERY early on what my language was going to be about. For those of you that are Star War nerds; welcome you are one of us! If you don't know there is a great book called The Book of Sith by Daniel Wallace. This book is a fictitious collection of historical Dark Side texts found by Darth Sidious.

There is a section of this book that talks about the Sith'ari (ancient sith) species. Fun Fact: our modern day notions of the Sith were actually an identity stolen from this species of beings from the planet Korriban. These species were beings that were made up of what we now call "Dark Side" force energy. To them it was just apart of them and their planet. This species was the one that taught the very first Dark Jedi the ways of the Dark Side. Sadly, just like our world's history, the Dark Jedi would conquer the planet and enslave the Sith'ari species. Stealing the planet and stealing a shortened version of their name, the Dark Jedi became known simply as Sith. This section of the book fascinated me, even before I studied linguistics, because there is a section that shows the orthography of the Sith'ari species and there it talks about how the Dark Jedi went about translating this. Here is where my conlanging journey began, I decided to do a language for the ancient Sith based on this information.  

Now some of the readership here I am sure there are those of you that are hardcore Star Wars fans that are saying, "Um....wait, excuse me, but all this already exists" My answer to those fans is yes you are correct. For those of you thinking "what the french toast", there was an article written in Star Wars Insider #134 by Ben Grossblatt, a fellow linguist, who dabbled in conlanging for the purpose of The Book of Sith and this article of Insider. 

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However, in my opinion, Grossblatt broke the cardinal rule that I wrote about in my last blog. His focus for the language felt like it has a very heavy focus on the orthography, which I give him many kudos for because from an anthropological linguistic perspective it's very accurate in my opinion. This is because the orthography takes into account the arid desert that is on planet Korriban and that mediums for writing would have been limited to either the desert ground or stone.  So, I decided to fill in the gaps that were left and create the language from the ground up. My focus began first and foremost with the sound inventory, but that's for another time. Stay tuned for Part 2!