Archive of Our Own ^beta

Notes:

Source and Grammar:
The Yecht Fradi language seems to be derived from the Celtic branch of Indo-European languages (though I find a proto-Celtic dictionary useful, my Proto-Indo-European dictionary has been far moreso). Many of the roots are recognizable (look at “sky teeth” daintnem and think “dental”), and the grammatical structure seems predictable and uncomplicated. It looks like verbs conjugate just like Latin and many of its modern daughter languages with unique endings to indicate the person and number of the subject (it looks like the endings are nearly identical to those used in Latin and they might correspond with French), but I would surmise that word order is relatively stable because unlike Latin and ancient Greek, I don’t see many recurring endings on nouns that would serve as case markers. Those that are present are probably indicating plurality. Participles look suspiciously Latin, which is why I’ve translated carants as “you caring” from the base "car" meaning care, a connecting vowel "a" the "nt" present active participial marker and "s" which would be the singular second person marker. It’s totally regular, so I’m attracted to assuming this is correct, but it’s worth noting so it doesn’t become a problem later.

Sound Shifts:
From the codex, we get a nice list of easily-translatable nouns, but not many verbs, and it’s in verbs that I would expect vowel gradation and other shifts, so I’m not sure yet if that’s an active feature of this language, though I would guess not (in my experience with ancient Greek and Latin, those shifts are often tense markers, which is probably not well-developed in this conlang). I do, however, see consonantal shifts, particularly with gutturals, that seem to be dependent on placement within a word. For example, the root for “heart” is cred when it is the first part of a word, as in credgwen, but it appears as gred when it follows another syllable, as in dorgred. Changing from unvoiced to voiced is a small shift, but it’s something worth keeping in mind when trying to translate and isolate root words.

Progress and Process:
I’m still working on collecting samples of the language to try and translate (and making the time to translate). Sadly, many of the place-names in the game are going to be useless in translating verbs, pronouns, particles, and so on, so it’s going to be slow going, but I’m confident that it can be done. If anyone would like to contribute, screenshots of captions would be fantastic along with context (context is so helpful with this kind of work).
My process is identifying the same roots/constructions/particles in different samples that can help “verify” that a proposed translation is correct. For example, the phrase that merchants shout at De Sardet, A to, oi, probably means “hey you,” but I need to see all those words in other contexts to see if it’s plausible (I’m pretty sure it’s literally “to you, hey,” but I’m assuming the demonstrative pronoun and preposition are basically Latin).

I’m not a linguist, though I have some “functional basics” that were taught to me by the professors who taught me ancient Greek and etymology in college. In addition to ancient Greek, I’ve studied Latin and German. For me, this is good fun, but I’m sure I’m not “the right person” for this job.

I wouldn’t recommend using this to try and compose original phrases in the Yecht Fradi language because there’s a lot that has to be done to a root to make a word, let alone a sentence, but I hope this dictionary and guide will eventually get there. I’m happy to help with projects, and I’d be even happier to accept help with this one! If you use this guide, please credit and link back. Also, check back for updates and expansions! 😊