Ever wonder how an author develops a new language for their book? Nethergrim author Matthew Jobin is here to share the process with us.
Language and magic are often a large part of any fantasy novel, but readers don’t always realize how much time and energy authors put into developing either one of them. That’s where Matthew Jobin comes in. He’ll be explaining the process from development to research and right on through to how one affects the other throughout his series.
About ‘The Nethergrim’
Everyone in Moorvale believes the legend: The brave knight Tristan and the famed wizard Vithric, in an epic battle decades ago, had defeated the evil Nethergrim and his minions. To this day, songs are sung and festivals held in the heroes’ honor. Yet now something dark has crept over the village. First animals disappear, their only remains a pile of bones licked clean. Then something worse: children disappear. The whispers begin quietly yet soon turn into a shout: The Nethergrim has returned! Edmund’s brother is one of the missing, and Edmund knows he must do something to save his life. But what? Though a student of magic, he struggles to cast even the simplest spell. Still, he and his friends swallow their fear and set out to battle an ancient evil whose powers none of them can imagine. They will need to come together–and work apart–in ways that will test every ounce of resolve.
The second book in the Nethergrim series, Skeleth, will be available on May 10.
Language and magic in the World of The Nethergrim by Matthew Jobin
Even in our world, language is a kind of magic. How else can one explain the effect a truly great novel, speech or poem can have on us? Deep down in his heart, any writer must believe that arranging words in a certain order can cast a shape in the mind of the reader, one that conveys the ideas and images that once formed in the writer’s own mind.
It is thus obvious that the writer is very much concerned with exactly what sorts of words he sends marching before the reader’s eyes. When the writer creates a whole new world, he has in addition the consideration of what languages are spoken in his world in relation to the language in which the book is written. When he creates a world where words can do even more obvious (though I contend, no more powerful) magic than changing the minds and hearts of readers, he has even more to establish. Firstly, the writer must think about what kind of historical forces created the languages of his world, and thus how languages are related to each other. Secondly, he must consider how, within the pages of a novel, the power of particular words can be conveyed to show the reader their ability to make the sorts of changes people call magic.
I am, rather sadly, uni-lingual, the curse of many an English-speaking North American. I thus write in English, and began thinking about the languages of my books with the assumption that my characters were speaking a somewhat de-modernized, rather neutral sounding version of that language. I termed this language Paelic after one of the peoples who made up that language’s speakers, and then set myself to the task of working out how English as we know it came to be. Anyone who reads something like the medieval poem Beowulf knows that English, like many languages, has gone through numerous changes, so that in a thousand years it has become almost unrecognizable to its former self. Its root language comes from the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, but then historical events shaped it in unexpected ways over the ensuing centuries.
The Norman conquest of England in 1066 made French, a Romance language derived from Latin, the language of the new ruling class. The pressures and prejudices of the time imposed numerous Latinate words onto English; that and the passage of time is responsible for the language we know today. I decided that since I was going to use English to write, then my “English” in the books must have a similar history. I thus started with the present moment of the books and worked backwards, generating layers of history involving people known as the Pael, the Auscans, the Ghal and Dhanu in order to explain the Paelic of the books.
That worked well for the language in which the books are written, but what about other tongues? I would have a hard time believing in any human world with only one language in it, so I found myself considering a choice. Either I could use existing languages as foreign tongues — i.e. a “French,” a “Japanese,” and so on — or I could invent languages.
There are several problems with the first route. The first is that, by using “foreign” languages from Earth, I might run the risk of allowing stereotypes to leak into the world. These need not be harmful, but they might needlessly limit what I could do with my world. For example, would a foreign kingdom in my world that spoke “Japanese” necessarily have samurai? To me, that seemed too limiting. Another problem would come when the books got translated into other languages. Once I already set up, say, Dutch as a foreign language of my world, then what happens when the books get translated into Dutch? I would feel as though I had done my international publishers a great disservice.
Luckily for me, I had a resource. It so happened that I had taken my PhD in an Anthropology department, and one of my best friends from graduate school was a trained linguist. With his help, and later the help of a student of another of my colleagues, I was able to formalize my ideas about the other languages of the books into rules based on how languages change and develop in our world.
One of the first things my colleagues told me was that I should decide how the languages are related, much in the same way that, for example, English is more closely related to German than either of them is to Turkish. These relationships are created by historical realities, so I first had to decide what sort of history I wanted. This, for example, guided my development of the languages Auscan and Thurvic. I decided early on that the peoples who spoke those languages bore some historical relationship to the speakers of Paelic, so I generated their words from a similar original base.
The second thing I was challenged to do by my colleagues was to settle on the sound and feel of the language. I was told something about Tolkien’s languages that stuck with me. The reason why Orcish sounds scary is all of the guttural sounds, all the g’s and k’s with l’s — Uglúk, for example. On the other hand, Elvish sounds pretty because it tends avoid those sounds and concentrate on sounds that are made at the front of the mouth, such as namárië. Say both of those words, and you will find yourself saying the first in your throat, and the second at the front of your mouth. That creates a difference in feeling that Tolkien exploited to the full.
I took a similar approach; as an example, the ancient and no longer spoken language of Dhanic was created with a strong emphasis on airy, complex consonants, such as vahadh, Dhrakal and ahilan. For the remnant kingdom of Üvhakkat, I wanted to create a language whose musicality belied their complicated and often harsh history. For that tongue, I used a large number of long vowels and doubled consonants: riivhi and hekki should give the idea. Lastly, I worked up the kingdom of Mitilán, the homeland of my character Elísalon, as a successor kingdom to the Dhanic empire, and so the words of Mitiláni are derived from the lexicon of Dhanic. If you put the lexicons of Mitiláni and Dhanic side by side, it should become clear that quoñod comes from ghonot. In that way, as the series develops and the reader encounters the wider world, the cultures and languages will have a history whose reality shines through.
In the Nethergrim series, there are moments when people say particular words that have dramatic effects — spells. As any reader of the series knows, spells in the world of the Nethergrim are not a simple matter of rattling off a prepared series of words. In fact, the words, gestures and objects of the spell are only props used to focus the wizard’s mind, which is where the magic is truly done. As Edmund relates to his friends, spells change each time they are cast, fit to the moment when they are done, meaning that the words might be modified to suit the instant when the spell is created.
It thus made no sense for me to assume that a spell must be cast in a foreign language to the wizard’s native tongue. If Shakespeare is as great as Virgil (and he is), then English is as great as Latin, so therefore a spell in English is as potentially mighty as one in Latin. In my world, the better the wizard understands the meaning of the words he says, the more powerful his spell, so in most cases, he will utter words in the language he knows best. This means that the words of the spells that Edmund and other wizards use are little snippets of poetry, or exhortations to the elements, or twists of logic that convey the thought in the wizard’s mind. I found this to be a fresh and fun approach to magic, and one that harmonizes well with the concept of the world I have created.
There is more that I would love to tell about the language of the Nethergrim books, but I don’t want to get too far ahead of the plot! Suffice it to say that, as a writer, I believe that words matter very much indeed, and have constructed the world of the books with that very much in mind. If you are yourself in the process of creating a book or series set in an alternate world, and are considering how the languages of your books should work, here is a bit of advice. In any place where your characters go, ask yourself: what was being spoken in that same place a thousand years before? If you can confidently answer that question, then you are well on your way to making something that casts a powerful spell upon the minds of your readers.
© 2016 Matthew Jobin, author of The Nethergrim series
About the author
A native of Canada, Matthew Jobin holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Stanford University. He lectures in anthropology at Santa Clara University. The idea for The Nethergrim came to Matthew as a young boy exploring the forest surrounding his home. Intent on telling the story of this fantasy world, he’s been developing it and its inhabitants ever since. Matthew lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Tina.
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