Language

The Kokugo language is derived primarily from the modern-day Japanese language, and is intended for use in Jehvnar.

### Derivation of Language

Kokugo, just like any other language, has vocabulary, writing, and sentence syntax embedded within it. Much of the vocabulary and syntax is based on modern-day Japanese vocabulary; and the writing system is based on derived kanji (Chinese) characters. However, many Jehvnar-specific terms have been introduced into the language with exonyms and names transcribed from existing Jehvnar mythology and foreign culture. Furthermore, the writing system has been changed to solely use Chinese characters (man’yogana style), eliminating the natively-used Japanese kana syllabaries.

## Basic Writing

### Introduction

Kokugo uses a logographic writing system containing approximately 2,000 commonly used characters. At its core, each character represents a word or idea, and is mapped to particular pronunciations. These characters can then be used to write out sentences. There are two main methods of using these characters: semantically and phonetically.

### Semantic usage of logographic characters

Semantic usage involves using the characters for what they represent, for example, 日 would stand for “sun”, and 人 would stand for “person”.

All semantically-used characters are pronounced with the words which they represent, and most characters have at least two distinct pronunciations (the on’yomi and kun’yomi pronunciations). Sometimes, characters can have more than two pronunciations; but regardless, each pronunciation is used according to the context of the situation.

Examples of characters with their approximate meanings and pronunciations:

本 book; hon or moto

草 grass; kusa or sou

生 life; sei, i-kiru, shou, or nama

名 name; na or mei

#### Basics of multiple-character words

As mentioned before, Kokugo contains combinations of not only single-character words, but also of 2-character, 3-character, and sometimes 4-character words. Usually the constituent characters in multiple-character words are chosen for their logical meaning. For example, “dinner” would be written out with the character for “evening”, and the character for “food”, so thus, dinner could be transliterated as “evening-food” (夕食, yuu-shoku). Other times, the characters could be chosen for symbolic means: “mithril” would be written out with the character for “silver”, and the character for “mist” (霧光, mu-kou), as the symbolic meaning of “mithril” would mean “silver mist”. In short, multiple-character words could be thought of as the rough equivalent of “compound words”.

##### Examples of multiple-character words:

人体 body; jin-tai; “man” (人) + “substance” (体)

社会 society; sha-kai; “association” (社) + “assembly” (会)

神殿 temple; shin-den; “god” (神) + “hall” (殿)

製品 product; sei-hin; “manufactured” (製) + “goods” (品)

連金城 alchemy; ren-kin-jou; “tempering” (連) + “gold” (金) + “art” (城)

## Phonetic Usage of Logographic Characters

### Introduction

Phonetic usage involves using the characters’ pronunciations to write out things that have no solid meaning in of themselves, such as names, sound effects (onomatopoeia), verb conjugations (verb tenses), and particles (utility words). A similar phonetic system composed out of Chinese logograms, known as man’yogana, was used before in ancient Japan. For simplification reasons, the amount of phonetically-used characters here has been restricted to 48 characters. These 48 characters are used similarly to an “alphabet”. (Properly called a syllabary, because it uses syllables, not individual letters).

To the right is the phonetic syllabary, consisting of 48 characters and their Latin alphabet-transcripted syllables.

The syllabary is read from top-to-bottom right-to-left. First in the topmost right corner, it starts with the syllable “a”, then it moves downward on to “i”, “u”, “e”, and “o”. On the next column to the left, you can see that it starts with “ka”, then moves downward within the column to “ki”, “ku”, “ke”, and “ko”. You can also see the alternate pronunciations at the bottom of the primary pronunciation, too (“gi”, “gu”, “ge”, and “go”, in this case). Unlike modern-day Japanese, there are no accent marks (dakuten and handakuten) on the characters, and Kokugo does not differentiate on alternate pronunciations of syllables. Thus, discretion is often left to the viewer and context for using alternate pronunciations.

Moving on, you can notice a pattern for most of the “letters'' in the syllabary. They all start with a consonant (or two consonants), and a vowel at the end. For example, “ri” (利), would start with and R and end with an I. This goes back to saying, Kokugo does not use a phonetic alphabet, rather, it utilises a phonetic syllabary, or a group of characters that represents syllables, not letters.

##### Note Concerning Omitted Syllables in the Phonetic Syllabary

You may have noticed some syllables omitted from the normal pattern in the “-A, -I, -U, -E, -O” consonant-vowel sequence. These omissions are present in historical and modern-day Japanese, and it is not logical to recreate the “missing” syllables due to their absence in most of the language’s history.

##### Note Concerning The Mixing of Semantic and Phonetic characters in Sentences

In Kokugo, there is typically no difference or indicator as to whether a character is semantic or phonetic. Most of the time, the characters' usage will be mixed within a sentence. Thus, discretion is left to the reader to make out the meaning and context of the characters. The sheer amount of characters, combined with the difficulty of deciphering their meaning makes the written language extremely hard, and it contributes to the very low literacy rate of the nation.

### Usage of Characters When Writing Out Exonyms and Foreign Loanwords

Phonetically-used characters can also be used to transcribe loanwords from different languages into native writing.

An example would be to write out the foreign exonym, “Wesketh”. It would be written out as 宇衣寸計寸, spelled out as, u-e-su-ke-su (“Uesukesu”)

Further examples of names and words with phonetic usage:

* 保比止 Hobbit, ho-hi-to
* 保呂太宇无 Hollowtown, ho-ro-ta-u-mu
* 保不良太保无 Dahon Hoppler, ho-fu-ra ta-ho-mu (Names are written with first and last names inverted, so thus, Hofura Tahomu, or with inferred pronunciation, Hopura Dahon)

### Conclusion

In short, the individual characters are mapped to ideas, which can be used in writing, and conversely, the characters can also be used for writing phonetically, through the help of the characters’ pronunciations.

## Basic syntax

### 2.3.1 Subject-Object-Verb Order

The language follows a subject-object-verb order, compared to Commonspeak’s subject-verb-object order.

For example, to say “I eat fish”, it would be done as:

私加魚遠食宇 watashi ga sakana wo kuu

Translated literally, it would mean “I fish eat”, because of the subject-object-verb order. “I” is the subject; “fish” is the object; and “eat” is the verb. But why are there more than 3 words (ga, and wo, namely) in the translation? That is because of particles and verb conjugations, which will be discussed in the next section.

Notice that the characters in red above are semantic characters, while the characters in blue are phonetic characters. Recall that semantic characters are used for their literal meaning, while phonetic characters are used for their pronunciation, irrespective of the literal meaning. If you “paid respect” to the literal meaning of the phonetically-used characters, the sentence would literally mean: “Every day sky I addition fish distant eat roof” instead of “Everyday [proposition] I [subject] eat [verb conjugate] fish [object]”.

## Particles/Markers

### Word particles/markers

From the figure 2.2 above, notice how the particles/markers appear after the words. For example, in 毎日 (everyday), the proposition marker (天) appears after the word that it affects, to tell viewers that the word before it is a proposition. The same goes with 私; the subject marker (加) appears afterward, to tell viewers that the word before it (I), is the subject. The general rule is that particles/markers appear after the words they affect.

##### Examples of basic particles in Kokugo:

* 波 wa  Subject marker used to emphasise subject
* 加 ga Alternate subject marker used to emphasise object or verb
* 遠 wo Direct object marker
* 毛 mo Used for specifying additional information in sentence (similar to “too”)
* 天 de Preposition (time/place/manner) marker; conjunction connecting clauses
* 仁 ni Mostly an alternate of de; used as a purpose/sake marker (similar to “for”)
* 之 no Genitive marker (similar to “apostrophe S” in English)
* 止 to If, and, when, with (used within a sentence)
* 部 he Indicating direction going towards

##### Text examples:

彼加出来未世天 Kare ga dekimasen He [subject] can’t do it

曽加無駄 Sore ga muda It is useless

今日波良以日太 Kiyau wa ii hi da Today is a good day

店部行機未之太 Mise he ikimashita (I) went to the market

三年前仁彼女加亡久奈太 San-nen mae ni kare ga nakunatta 3 years ago, she [was] died

### Sentence markers

Furthermore, just as there are markers that affect words, there are markers that also affect sentences. Such markers can indicate things like the tense of the sentence, or the mood of the speaker, and so on. They appear right after the sentence. They can also be adjusted and combined with each other to give more specific meanings or additions to the sentence.

##### Few examples of basic sentence markers in Kokugo:

* 太 da Informal sentence ending
* 天寸 desu Regular sentence ending
* 天有留 dearu Formal/literary sentence ending
* 太太 datta Informal past tense sentence
* 天之太 deshita Regular past tense sentence
* 天有利未之太 dearimashita Formal/literary past tense sentence ending
* 之也無以 jiyanai (janai) Informal sentence negation
* 天無以 denai Regular sentence negation
* 天有利未世无 dearimasen Formal sentence negation
* 奈良 nara If
* 奈良波 naraba If (alternate form)
* 加 ka Question mark
* 与 yo Exclamation mark

##### Text examples:

天気波良以太太 Tenki wa ii datta

“The weather was good”

此礼波僕之椅子天寸 Kore wa boku no isu desu

“This is my chair”

私波一人天無以 Watashi wa hitori denai

“I am not alone”

頂機未寸加 Itadakimasu ka?

“Would you like to?”

何太与 Nani da yo!

“What!”