The BG Language Creation Guide

Grammar and Dictionary of [atinU]

Compiled by Robert Graves -- 2007

The language is called [atinU]; it is a Romance language spoken by the inhabitants of [ibrU]. [ibrU] is an Earth-like planet in the constellation Libra orbiting the star know to humanity as Gliese 581, a red dwarf which is much dimmer and cooler than our sun. [ibrU], however, is much closer to Gliese 581 than the Earth is to the Sun, so the red star is enormous in the [ibrU] sky, fives times the size of the Sun in our sky. [ibrU] has an axial tilt basically the same as Earth’s (approximately 24 degrees) and revolves completing around its sun in 13 Earth days or four [ibrU] days (an [ibrU] a day is about 3.25 Earth days) in an a relatively un-eccentric orbit (like Earth’s). Thus each day on [ibrU] is a season: inhabitants experience all four season every solar week-year. The extremes between the seasons are mild as the planet as a whole is extremely temperate with temperatures ranging from 32 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit (for the real science inspiration of [ibrU], see Appendix B). [ibrU] has two rocky, misshapen moons that might remind an Earthling of Mars’ two battered, meteor-like moons. The environment of [ibrU] has influenced in a couple of ways included in the language description and construction below. For one, since the temperature only barely reaches freezing, ice never gets very thick and stays merely thin, glassy sheets. Thus, the [atinU] word for ice combines the words for thin and water. Another way the environment impacts the language is that because each season only lasts one day, the birds of [ibrU] fly extremely fast; thus, the [atinU] words for bird and fast are the same. Also, as [ibrU]’s two moons look like giant stones, stones are called “little moons” by combining the words for moon and small. Finally, because the sun is so big and red in the [ibrU] sky, the word for sun means “red giant.”

As said above, the language is a Romance language, which requires some explanation. The language is to be featured in a SciFi story that sort of plays of the old convention of SciFi of having distant aliens speak English. In this story, Earth astronauts travel to [ibrU] only to find very human-like inhabitants speaking a very familiar language. The crew’s linguist confirms that the language is indeed an unknown Romance language, and together the linguist and the crew’s rhetorician reconstruct the history of [librU], the people of [ibrU].

A few thousand years ago, during the reign of Augustus, a benevolent tribe of aliens visited Earth and studied humanity. They found humankind to be hopelessly hierarchal and doomed to eventual annihilation via war. These aliens take a small Roman town’s children with the notion of giving wildly creative humanity another chance at building a society without the hierarchal behavior so prevalent on Earth. The children were taken to Mars for psychological conditioning and training in earth-shaping: using personal and social energy to cause the earth to form topographical features that may be dwelt in. This is explains the pyramids on Mars, that have mathematical dimension and proportion suggesting intelligent design but yet appear as natural topography to NASA satellites. Mars was chosen for a couple of reasons: 1. it was an easy step from Earth to acclimate the children to the idea of being away from their home, and 2. Mars with its red color and sky and its two moons is in some ways oddly similar to [ubrU].

After the training and conditioning on Mars, the children were taken 20.5 light years from Earth to [ibrU], where their descendents remain. The linguist easily recognized their language as Latinate as it follows several rules (see Appendix for current rules) for the formation of [atinU] words from Latin words (as described below), which is due to the fact that the Roman children of course spoke Latin. But the language also exhibits some traces the language spoken by the benevolent aliens.