Common Reason Tongue

The Spraecha — the reasoned speech, the Razoenra Spraecha — is the one language of the Known World. This page describes it as it is spoken now. For its history see Brain Rot Tongue and the three stage pages; for the words themselves see the Lexicon.

Sound

Five plain vowels: a as in father, e as in bed, i as in machine, o as in go, u as in rule. A sixth, y, is the short i of myth.

Four diphthongs give the language its whole character, and mislead every English speaker who meets them:

Spelling	Sound	Example
ae	the vowel in eye	Daes, a slave, is DICE
oe	the vowel in boy	Moejor, my owner, is MOY-jor
ei	the vowel in day	Boendei is BOYND-ay
wy	the vowel in win	Jwygor is JWI-gor

English reads oe as a long o and ae as a long a. They are not. A reader who takes moe- as "mo" and ae- as "ay" will mispronounce four of the commonest words in the language.

The consonants are ordinary with four exceptions. Ch is the ch of loch, not of church. Dh and th are the two sounds of English that and thin. Zh is the s of measure. And ll is the Welsh ll, made by putting the tongue where an l goes and blowing air past the side of it; forty-four words use it, and nothing about a word's spelling predicts it beyond the doubled letter itself — Grael and Goyl take the ordinary sound, Braell and Daell take the other, and a learner simply learns them.

Stress falls on the second-to-last syllable, always: Ther-PLAE, Moe-JOR, Boe-CHA. Words prefer to end in vowels, which gives the language its singing quality, and words get shorter over time rather than longer. The commonest words in daily use are the shortest in the dictionary.

How it changed

A handful of sound changes turned Middle CLT into what is spoken now. Word-initial h often becomes ch. Between vowels, t becomes dd, k becomes ch, p becomes f, and b becomes v. Before i or e, s becomes sh. These are tendencies and not laws, and the exceptions are everywhere in the dictionary: Haerl keeps its h while homi became choema; bata keeps its t while bota became boedda. The reason is the arrivals. A language whose speech community closes finishes its sound changes; this one never closes, because adults keep arriving, learn from whoever is around them, and put back into the pool whatever their own mouths do. So the shifts ran hard through the oldest vocabulary and never quite finished. Compounds resist too, and so does anything coined after a change had run its course.

Grammar

The grammar is small and has barely moved in nine centuries. What changed was the shape of the words, not the rules.

• Word order is subject, verb, object. Mwy rein beva alkoe: I drink rum.
• The copula is bi — am, is, and are — the only irregular word in the language, and it never changes. Peif bi djaerv: they are bold.
• Tense is a particle directly before the verb: rein present, waes past, goen future. Mwy rein beva, mwy waes beva, mwy goen beva.
• Negation is nei before the verb. Mwy nei knoeva: I do not know.
• Plurals are marked with chrai, before or after the noun. Chrai Noet: stars.
• A question is marked with cae at the end. Wy rein knoeva Peif cae: do you know them? The interrogatives — Wota what, Wyat where, Bwae why, Hostra how — go at the head of the sentence, and cae still closes it in formal speech.

Two particles carry weight beyond their grammar. Vai is the topic marker, set at the head of a sentence: vai Myfeil, mwy nei knoeva — as for the heart, I do not know it. It belongs to philosophy and formal argument, and using it casually sounds like a man giving a lecture in a tavern. Feira means truly, sincerely, for real: philosophical weight in the Academy, ordinary emphasis in a market, and in a measure it means exactly — keiloe feira is a true thousand.

Marking a claim as your own

eimoe goes before a claim and marks it as the speaker's own judgement rather than settled fact. To leave it out is to assert. To put it in is to concede that another person might reasonably hold otherwise.

It is a small word carrying a great deal of weight, and the Academy is careful with it. A man who states a contested thing without eimoe has said something about himself as well as about the thing.

Asking

Six question words, all of them at the front of the sentence.

Word	Said	Asks
Hwa	/ˈhwa/	who — which person
Wota	/ˈwo.ta/	what — which thing, or what kind
Wyat	/ˈwɪ.at/	where — the place of a thing or a person
Wena	/ˈwe.na/	when — the time of a thing
Bwae	/ˈbwaɪ/	why — the reason of a thing
Hostra	/ˈhos.tɾa/	how — the manner or means of a thing

A question word at the front does not excuse cae at the end in formal speech, which learners find redundant and which is simply how the language is. Casual speech drops cae and lets the tone do it.

Pronouns

Mwy is I. Wy is you. Wys is we. Peif is they, he, and she alike, and is the ordinary word for a person.

Gender is marked only where it matters, and with a prefix: broe-Peif is he and sei-Peif is she, casually; da-Peif and ma-Peif are the formal equivalents. Most speech marks nothing at all, and a listener who needs to know asks. A native speaker finds the idea of building that guess into the word itself faintly exhausting — you would have to look at the person, decide what they are, and be right, all in order to say good morning.

What a speaker chooses instead is the word itself. A slave says Jor of a free person and daes of another slave, and uses Peif only when she does not know which she is looking at. A free person uses Peif for anybody and daes when the distinction matters. The casual broe- and sei- run sideways and downward, between equals and to slaves, which is why a slave does not use them upward.

Possession

Possession is marked by a prefix on the thing possessed. There is no separate word, and nothing at all happens to the possessor.

Prefix	Said	Means
moe-	/mɔɪ/	mine, my own
woe-	/wɔɪ/	yours
ae-	/aɪ/	theirs, his, hers
woes-	/wɔɪs/	ours

So moe-chandei is my hand, woe-Ael is your eye, ae-Famrae is their household. The prefix is written with a hyphen, takes no stress of its own, and leaves the stress of the noun where it falls.

There is no formal possessive and no separate word for of. A thing belonging to a named person is said by putting the two together, and the order carries it.

Two possessives are words rather than constructions and are worth knowing on their own. Moejor is what a slave calls her own owner, and moedaes is what an owner calls his own slave. Both are moe- fused past recognition, and neither is ever said with the prefix pulled back out.

Address

Da- and ma- are the authority prefixes, masculine and feminine, attaching to any word of station: da-Jor, ma-Jor. Broe- and sei- are their casual counterparts, brother and sister, attaching to anything: broe-daes, sei-daes. Jor is what a slave calls any free person, Jwygor in the formal register; Moejor is my owner; daes is the everyday word for a slave. See Address and Titles for all of it.

Two registers

Formal speech keeps its particles separate — mwy rein knoeva, mwy nei knoeva, chrai noet — and the question particle is always there; vai appears often. It is the register of the Academy, of philosophy, of law, and of anything written. Casual speech fuses everything: the tense particle becomes a prefix on the verb, mwy reiknoeva; the negation fuses, mwy neiknoeva; the plural becomes a suffix, Noetrai; the question particle disappears and a rising tone does the work. It is the register of the market, the Therplae, the workshop, and the street. Nobody is taught the difference. Everybody has it by six.

Making new words

The world coins words constantly and anybody can do it. A new thing usually takes a compound: Haerlchaz is salt fish cooked with Chiaz, Vaeskbach is Vaesk baked, Aernthorn is an iron thorn, Keiloe-Streid is a thousand strides. A word taken from a trade or a place keeps its own shape, which is why technical vocabulary often ignores the sound changes. What a coiner should respect is the sound of the thing: penultimate stress, a preference for ending in a vowel, no cluster a person cannot say, and brevity above all — a word used every day will be worn down to three or four letters within a few generations whether its maker likes it or not. And a word should look like its ancestors, though not too closely, even when nobody remembers what they were. That is why Glufri is bread and Byoef is death and neither announces where it came from.

One prefix survives from an older way of building words. wyn- reverses the action of whatever it attaches to, as Wyndreis from dreis and Wyndrif from Drif. It is no longer productive: the words that carry it are inherited, and somebody coining a word today would reach for something else.

Accents

One Spraecha, six accents, and a good deal of local slang that does not travel. Stormharbor cuts the formal letterforms into its beams and doorposts in an angular script shaped for chisel and grain, read more slowly than it is written; sailors' speech is the most mixed in the world, because crews from six cities drink in the same streets.

Hidden truth — not known in Teraell

The language was built before the Fall, out of the memes of our world, by people who could not otherwise understand each other. See Brain Rot Tongue.

See also

• Brain Rot Tongue · Proto CLT · Middle CLT · Modern CLT · Address and Titles · Liberty Caps · Address and Titles · Names and Naming · Lexicon:Modern