Re: The Melting

Jesse:
> > I'm not even this clear as to how the Yivrindi interact with
our world. I know that they have a completely separate conworld,
Aratasa, with its own history and origins, but I know that some
of them have at various times crossed over into our world and
inhabit our timeline. My informant,  Narnagol, is one of these.
He's very vague about how he got here from Aratasa, though.

Sally:
> We share some problems in common, then! :)  My original Teonim
inhabited a world and a time completely separate from this one,
but over the years I have been more and more invested in
bringing them into this world and hit upon the "melting" as a
kind of fantasy/sf explanation.

Yay, I'm not alone! I've been struggling with similar issues
regarding the Rozhen, the people who speak Rozhendi. The
language itself has frustrated me immensely, not to mention
trying to figure out the people and how they interact with our
world. I've been "working" on the language for over a decade
now, and what do I have to show for it? Practically nothing. A
few (less than 100) lexical items, and a few tidbits of grammar
here and there, and that's all. It's quite odd; all of my other
languages I was able to sit down and create. When I needed a
word, I could just say, "all right, the word for X will be
"blahblahblah", and that was it. I had entire grammars all
concisely laid out in tables and lists, needing only to fill out
the dictionary.

But Rozhendi's frustratingly different. It's like I'm
discovering it rather than creating it. I feel it much more
deeply than any other conlang of mine, and oddly it's somehow
more real despite there being so much less of it. I just have,
and have had since the beginning, these vague feelings and ideas
and notions about what the language and its speakers are like,
and I just know sometimes what is or is not Rozhendi, regardless
of what I'd like it to be, or what I'd like to be able to do
with it. And on the occasions I have sat down and tried to
sketch out a whole grammar or randomly generate vocabulary, it
just hasn't worked. Often I've gotten *some* particular word or
grammatical feature out of such sessions, but I've also thrown
out countless notebooks and stuff that were full of stuff that
just wasn't Rozhendi. I can't stand it, because this is the one
language I want to have and be able to use more than any other,
but at this rate I'll be lucky if I have enough grammar and
vocab down to put two sentences together before I die! :)

I do know the Rozhen are human, I'm sure of that. More
enlightened or capable than we, perhaps, or able to tap more of
that unused brain capacity, but human nonetheless. But I find
myself with conflicting ideas about them which are still somehow
inexplicably all true, illogical as that may seem. For example,
I have long envisioned them the way we often envision the
ancient Greeks or Romans -- dressed in flowing robes and
toga-like vestments, women with the one boob hanging out (all
right, so that one's probably the result of 20-year-old
horniness), strolling through wide boulevards of columns and
marble. Yet I also cannot shake the certain conviction that they
are contemporary and of the modern world; they watch TV and send
emails and chat on the phone. There is something of a Rozhen
diaspora, I suppose, ethnic communities scattered across the
world, but they also have (or had) an island homeland called
Atheléa  -- yes, shades of the Atlantis myth though the phonetic
similarity in the name is coincidental -- although I haven't
been able to work out which ocean or sea it is in. I have
thought at times that it might be deliberately hidden or
protected by some sort of "magic" or technology which we do not
possess or which was lost to us, with the result that most
people (apart from them, of course, and certain select or
fortunate others) cannot see it or find it and do not know that
it even exists. An Atlantic location might explain the otherwise
inexplicable presence of loanwords (unless the similarity in
form and meaning is somehow always entirely coincidental) from
various European languages, whose presence might make sense in
the speech of diaspora communities, but not in the language of a
deliberately isolated island with an ancient literary tradition.
At one point a number of years ago, a friend was helping me
"create" Rozhen culture, and he designed a religion based on
Wicca with one god and one goddess, but I was never able to make
it fit in with my "vague certainties" about the culture. I
haven't been able to work out what other religion(s) they might
practice, though. Another inconsistency: the Rozhen are very
warm and friendly people, who welcome and embrace as one of
their own anyone who demonstrates an honest interest in their
language, culture, and way of life. Over the centuries there
have been occasional travellers from other parts of the world
who stumbled across Atheléa and settled there; there's
definitely ethnic mixing in the Rozhen heritage, no one "Rozhen
type". And of course in the diaspora, Rozhen have intermarried
and mixed with the local people wherever they went. So why,
then, is their home country hidden and obscured from the world?
What happened in their past that led to that?

Alphabet is another thorny and irksome issue. There is an
original Rozhendi alphabet, created by a friend at the very
beginning, before I even had an inkling of what the culture was
like, but it now just doesn't fit with the aesthetics of the
language or the culture; yet even though it *looks* wrong, it is
the writing system which *feels*most Rozhendi. But I still just
can't see them writing like that, at least not all the time.
They would find it ugly and not reflective of the beauty of
their language, which is very important to them and needs to be
expressed visually as well as aurally. I've tried using other
invented alphabets, but again nothing really fits. I think using
the Latin alphabet is increasingly common and trendy, especially
among younger Rozhen, but there's no way older generations would
use it, and certainly not in Atheléa. Maybe they use another
writing system I've yet to work out, but then how the heck do I
write anything in the meantime?

*Sigh*. I've written an emormous email now, and gotten myself
all frustrated again just thinking about all my frustrations! :)
Oh well, hopefully some of you will find it interesting, if
overly verbose.

Thomas

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