#‘but qunlat has special words-‘ so what. it has a lot of words that are different from thedas common language! that’s how languages work!

[cuerue]

okay but people whining about the inclusion of words “trans” and “non-binary” in veilguard is so annoying to me. why does it bother you that those words aren’t replaced by some fantasy equivalent while words like “man” and “woman” are used all the time in the setting. why is it fine to say “man” but saying “trans man” breaks your immersion. think really hard about that one.

[cellarspider]

Qunlat 10/12: Profession Names

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Alright! Get your Qunlat name info here! It took me nine posts worth of setup to get here, and hopefully that’ll help folks to make their own names, rather than feel limited to words that are already in the dictionary.

We’ll start with Qunari names, or rather, professions. 

First, I want to start with a bit of IRL history, because frankly, the use of these titles has been treated as alien, when English does this all the time, ours are just fossilized into surnames. Abbot, Baker, Carpenter, Draper, Earl, Fletcher–I can go through the entire alphabet except for Z, and that’s just from English names! If you have a surname that’s a name for a current or former occupation, it means one of your ancestors did this job. Probably multiple generations thereof, because social mobility was not much of a thing. Also makes “Abbot” a pretty spicy name to inherit, come to think of it. Maybe they were the Abbot of Cockaigne.

Now, let’s be clear–we only know profession-names that have made it outside of Qunari territory. That limits us mostly to professions in the Antaam, Ben-Hassrath, and support staff. Our names, hell, all of our vocabulary is going to be skewed toward them. But we can make some general observations that can be broadly applicable.

The compounding and derivational rules we talked about last time also apply to names, so we can split them into a few major patterns:

Adjective-noun compounds: This is most obviously seen in Saarebas, “dangerous thing”. Note that saar and bas are the root words, with an -e- inserted between them. Unlike the other use of this infix, it seems to purely act as a spacer vowel, which makes the name flow a little better. This is not consistently applied to “r-b” consonant clusters, and it doesn’t seem to have a grammatical use. We’re in “do it by vibes” territory here.

Noun-agentive or verb-agentive derivations: Profession-names often take -ad or -aad as an ending: Ashaad, Arvaarad, Karasaad, etc. The wiki claims this is an Antaam thing, but that’s not true–Hissrad is part of the Ben-Hassrath, and that’s technically an Asala role. We don’t know what -aad might then mean, because even some Antaam roles use -ari instead. It’s worth remembering that, like the rest of Qunlat, -aad and -ari can be either plural or singular: Beresaad, obviously, is usually used to refer to those that collectively fall under a particular branch of the Antaam, while Ashkaari can refer to a single person.

Verb-noun compounds: These are quite common, and we’ll come back to these in Vashoth names as well. For profession-names, we have Taarbas, Viddasala, Karashok etc. These can be translated as “one who [verb]s [noun]”: One who keeps things, one who converts purpose, one who… somethings struggle, we don’t actually have a canonical translation for kara. We only know it appears in a lot of Antaam names for warriors, groups of warriors (karataam), and one untranslated word spoken by Arvaarad in DA2 (karasaam). I won’t speculate on its meaning here.

There are some that don’t fit these patterns: The salasari triumvirate use a special agentive prefix Ari-. Given its use as “people” in other contexts, this may mean “the people’s [x]”, or simply emphasize their role in reflecting the collective’s needs under the Qun. 

Others are of ambiguous definition or structure that we don’t understand: Arvaarad,⁽²⁾ Salit,⁽³⁾ Tamassran,⁽⁴⁾ Vidathiss,⁽⁵⁾ etc. I’ve got lots of speculations about these, which I’ve banished to the footnotes, but nothing concrete about them.

Other names, however, break the rules, and I want to explain why these may not sound right in translation.

Let’s use Bas-taar as the example. It’s supposed to mean “keeper of bas”, an equivalent to a warden or overseer for prisoners of war.

Anyone who has taken a peek at the dictionary spreadsheet may possibly have seen my annoyance about this name: Tevinter Nights actually explains the joke of the name to you. It sounds like “bastard”, you see. Very funny. Ha. I am amused.

But looking at how we’ve broken down the names here, one may see the problem: bas is a noun, and taar is a verb, making this a noun-verb compound. …Which we haven’t been doing, only verb-noun compounds. You could, theoretically, do it the other way, but it has grammatical implications. 

Let’s compare the name to a suspiciously similar one I already introduced: Taarbas. “(One who) keeps things”. This follows Qunlat’s overall word order of Subject, Verb, Object. Bas is the object that’s kept, so it comes second. Bas-taar implies bas is the subject, the one who keeps. Hence also Bas-Saarebas, a foreign mage. So, Bas-taar implies a meaning of “foreigner (who) keeps”. 

Because I am long-suffering but fair in my wrath, I will say there is a way to make Bas-taar work,⁽⁶⁾ but for the sake of general naming schemes, just know that you need to be careful with word order when creating compound words and names.

There’s one last thing to cover in this segment: given names, including nicknames. Because Qunari do have those, logistically you need those. Unless you’re the Valo-Kas and numbering your Ashaads, you need some way to tell people apart! And we know this starts early in life: Tamassrans working as teachers and carers for Imekaari may give them names–Bull was Ashkaari due to his inquisitiveness as a kid. 

These names may not stay with them as their official title, but it indicates that even when someone has a role–in this case “child”–they still can receive other names on a semi-formal basis. This ends up pretty similar to how people can accumulate multiple names throughout their lifetime in many cultures, such as courtesy names across East Asia.

And then there’s nicknames, given to someone by a non-official source. The only one we know of is Gatt, from gaatlok: nicknamed thus for his volatile temper resulting form the whole was-almost-a-magister’s-child-sacrifice situation. I’ll note that “gatt” as a word breaks our previously established phonotactics with that double T, but let’s let the guy have this one. He deserves it.

We’ll look at Tal-Vashoth and Vashoth names next time.

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Footnotes

(1) https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/11/dogs-dont-understand-basic-concepts.html

(2) Arvaarad has a canon translation: “One who holds back evil”, but I’ve never been able to make that fit. Ar should mean “hold back”, but the way vaar gets compounded into other words is… it’s rebracketing, like with asala-taar last time. If vaar means “evil”, Basvaarad would mean “one who is an evil foreigner”, and darvaarad would mean “one who is a place that’s evil”. Darvaarad has an easy fix: The suffix -dar is used in placenames. A place that holds back evil would be Arvaardar.

Basvaarad is especially weird though, because it first appears in Shepherding Wolves, a quest that uses the term Bas-Saarebas for a foreign mage. Bas-Arvaarad would be perfectly possible, but was not used. 

(3) I have almost no idea with Salit. Sala means “purpose”, so sal might be a root word of that. That would theoretically leave -it, which has been seen as a variant third person singular pronoun in astaarit, something that still annoys me for its Englishness. But no other name uses it or asit to refer to the person doing the job, so I can’t say for certain what it means in this context, or if I’m even breaking the name down correctly. Might be Sa-lit, might be Sal-it. I actually prefer the former, though it would make it even harder to parse.

(4) Tamassran is translated as “those who speak”, which gives us an odd new suffix -ran. It might be a synonym for “person”, or an unknown hyponym: a word that covers a smaller scope (ex. “child” is a hyponym of “person”). We don’t know anything about the rest of the word. Tamass would presumably mean “speak”, but it may, again, be a hyponym that specifically covers teaching and instruction. 

(5) This name spells Viddath wrong, which is a bit of a problem to begin with. Seen in Viddathari (“converted-people”), -ath appears to be a passive derivational marker equivalent to English -ed. Iss is translated as “experienced” in the context of weapons in DA2. So… Converted by experience?? But Vidathiss is described as a Ben-Hassrath reeducator, so “converts by experience”, “experienced converter”, or “converter of experience(d people)” was probably intended. That’d be Vidda-iss, Viddiss, Iss-vidda, or maybe even Iss-viddaad, depending on how you translate it. 

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(6) Okay. So remember that whole thing about possessed-possessor compound words, and how they can sometimes be unmarked? Bas-taar could be one of those. But that requires taar to mean “keeper”, though we already have it being widely used to mean “armor” or “materiel” more broadly. If you wanted to make it a person and improve the brain-rotting joke, Bas-taarad is literally right there. 

See? Said I was fair. I’ll judge the writers for explaining a bad joke, but I’ll do my best to make the bad joke work better.

[felassan]

Gamers For Groceries 2 event

A Twitch stream event from a few days ago. It can currently be re-watched here (it was fun & interesting, so I do recommend to check it out direct). This post contains some notes on things of particular interest & relevant timestamps, in case this is useful to anyone (for example bc of accessibility reasons).

First up is the All About Animating panel, a series of mini-interviews with game devs (animators) asking what they do, how they got there, and advice for anyone interested in getting into the industry. Some or all of the devs that were interviewed are currently working on DA4. They talked a bit about their day-to-day work and a lot about the craft of game dev animation in general. This segment runs from timestamp ~38 mins 40 secs to 1:07:50. Some notes:

[sounded like DA4] Right now the creature team are working on different creatures in a way which involves going through a lot of mocap data

At BioWare they have a pretty big technical animation team, to support their animators, so each tech animator has a different specialty. Tech anim involves animation support, character art support, and rigging the characters so that the animators can pose them

[not sure if re: DA4 work specifically, another project or a general comment on the craft] One of the featured animators’ area of specialty at the moment is faces and hair (building the control structure for face animations). First they had to decide how the face rig and its control structure would work. This involves a lot of performance capture of live actors for things like cinematics and gameplay animation, therefore the rigs for bodies and faces have to be able to accurately capture the full range of expressions and emotions that the actor is portraying. Right now the stage that this dev is working on most is setting up the heads that they’re getting through the pipeline from character art e.g. making adjustments based on feedback from the cinematics team. “Polish - just trying to get realism”

Hair tech has come quite a long way in the last few years [in the industry]

[not sure if re: DA4 work specifically, another project or a general comment on the craft] Hair is very complex to get right. “In the past most games have used card-based hair, which is basically like sheets of polygons with a texture on it that looks like hair, through layers of transparency. But real hair is strand-based, digital strands, so we’re starting to look into that kind of tech - try to get more realistic, more beautiful hair, but there’s always a performance cost to hair. Layers of transparent things are always an expense, they need to balance like, it looks good and moves well, but it doesn’t make your computer or console chug. [...] I guess we’re in the prototype stage but we’ve almost got a set pipeline. It’s always fun to experiment”

In Mass Effect 2 or 3, Miranda’s hair was as expensive as a whole character (!)

[on balancing hair costs/performance, general] It depends on things like character importance and how many characters are on-screen at the time. When you’re in gameplay fighting a bunch of monsters you’re not going to be giving full beautiful hair to all the characters and the monsters, as it will cost too much. (Having a helmet on is a convenient way to get rid of hair.) But if it’s a cinematic scene, with 2 characters talking to each other in a dramatic context, there’s a better budget for nice hair allocated

Some of the hair in Anthem was quite expensive in cinematics. They kept getting bugs from QA saying (for example) that a character’s hair was tripling the performance cost in the scene, so it would go back to character art so they could take away some of the hair cards. “Tough balance, quality versus cost”

“I wish all the characters could have beautiful strand hair”

For p-cap, a lot of the time they don’t want to be too prescriptive in terms of the direction that they’re giving the actors, as the actors know what they’re doing and have a lot of experience, so they give them vague instructions that they then riff off of

[sounded like DA4] They recently did a mocap shoot

[sounded like DA4] There’s a bit more productivity happening now in the pandemic situation; now that the animators are not all going to the capture lab in Vancouver in person for shoots, if it’s not their turn to direct a shot they can instead be working on something else on their computers (multi-tasking). ((Lead DA4 Producer Scylla Costa recently gave a talk at a games festival on the challenges of DA production during the pandemic. In part of this talk he talked about various benefits and drawbacks to the remote-working situation. He also talked about and showed some behind-the-scenes stuff for p-cap and mocap. Notes, images and link here))

[sounded like DA4] Special mocap suits were sent out that they can use with a laptop to go anywhere and shoot motion capture. It’s not as high fidelity as what comes out of the capture lab, but it’s really good for prototyping stuff. Before the pandemic they did some of this (going to a park and shooting some running around)

[sounded like DA4] In one of the shoots they had some actors who were really well-trained in dancing. They were trying to get them to do some combat stuff. This was a bit challenging in the pandemic situation as there’s only so much they can demonstrate/portray as an example to the actors from a distance on camera. “It’s hard to describe what a ‘dodge to attack’ is through the camera to somebody who has no idea what combat looks like in video games”

[not sure if re: DA4 work specifically, another project or a general comment on the craft] The pandemic has really affected performance capture for the face side of things badly, as in order to record, the actor gets dots painted on their face in specific locations by a makeup artist. They can’t do that right now because of social distancing/restrictions, so they haven’t been recording faces at the moment

The more detailed a face, the more joints it has, the more the cost to performance is

---

There was also the Writers’ Block panel, featuring DA writers Mary Kirby, Sheryl Chee and Patrick Weekes, and DA editor Karin Weekes. The timestamps for this segment are ~2:37:50 - 3:26:20. Some notes:

PW has never been weirder than when they were writing Cole on DAI

PW thinks that they accidentally wrote part of “Timber” by Kesha into Solas at one point and they were like “Well, okay, I have to stop listening to Kesha”

For Sheryl, after a while Blackwall’s VA always nailed doing his lines. She loved the quality of his voice and so after a while would always hear his voice while she was writing. This really worked out

^ Mary had this with Merrill. As soon as they cast Eve Myles she listened to several hours of her in Torchwood, and then just wrote to the way that she spoke as much as possible

^ PW had this with GDL as Solas and FPJ as Bull. As soon as they heard FPJ’s delivery, they were like “Oh, okay, I have to write some lines differently, because Bull is smarter than I realized”. With GDL they were like “Okay, he’s going to put poetry into anything I say, in the best way possible”. In early drafts of Solas lines there were parts where they [PW] wondered “Is this too melodramatic? Is this too tragically-angstful?” and then they would hear GDL and be like “Oh! [It’s fine] Game on!”

For localization, German words are often quite long so they often have to make sure that everything fits on the GUI

They think scenes like the romance scenes sound prettier in the Italian versions

Behind the curtain in creating the in-world languages: PW: “There are some awesome websites that have every elven word, like ‘Here are the translations and verb tenses and conjugations’ [etc], [...] and usually Mary and I get very sad slightly looking at those pages going like ‘Does that mean that we have to stick to that?’ [...] The rule is, if I’ve looked at the Wiki and the words, and I go ‘Here’s the correct grammatical way to do it’, and if that turns out to be too long or too many disconnected syllables and it just looks bad or sounds bad, then we shorten it to something simpler, because the key is we want to give the flavor of a foreign language, but we don’t have the world-building budget and capacity to make something that is going to be dictionary-real [in a way that] someone could go through and translate all the background things written on the old temple walls”. Part of the reason for this is the consideration for VAs, who already have to act while bearing lots of things in mind, like the cues in the script for each line

Mary: “For building a language, the first things that I started with for qunlat, elven and dwarven, was what words do we need to use the most? Greetings, farewells, words for friend and enemy, basic things that will come up easily in conversation. After that it’s ‘How difficult is this for other writers to use?’ Can they just pick it off the Wiki? Do they need just one word? Do they need to write whole sentences, and how does that work? Qunlat has almost no grammar to it because asking anyone to learn how to use Qunari grammar and conjugate verbs in a pretend language is impossible, and then once you’ve done that a human being has to be able to read it, while not knowing what any of it means”

PW: “One thing that I was really impressed with with Mary in particular doing, Mary was one of the big lore people across the entire DA series; I can look at a word and go like, ‘That has two A’s in a row, that’s definitely a Qunari word. That word is kind of long and maybe has some apostrophes and has a couple of flowy vowel sounds, that’s probably elven’, I think that’s what’s important. You want players to be able to look at a word, players want to feel smart, [like] ‘Oh I don’t know what that means but I totally know that’s a word from the Qunari people!’”. Mary: “Every language has its own set of phonemes, the sounds that they make, and the sort of word structure and spelling so that it gives a flavor to that language. Hopefully that is always chosen to be pronounceable, because again, very important that the words can be said by human beings :D”

Sheryl: “One of the fun things to do is to make up swear words in the fake languages [...] Recently Brianne wanted a word, I don’t know if she managed to find one”

The origin of bosh’tet in ME: it’s just saying “bastard” and slurring it

PW: “I feel like there are times when past writers kind of leave traps for future writers, where past writers will go ‘Okay, I’m going to write this detailed phrase in a codex entry but don’t worry, it doesn’t matter if it can never be said aloud, because it’ll never have to be voiced!’ and then, next game, guess what guys! Look what you have to make someone [a VA] say! And you’re like [facepalm], c’mon!”

Karin: “Now, four games in, we have pages and pages of all these examples, and I wanna say this, well that’s how we said something before, well that’s ridiculous, I don’t wanna say that, but now we’ve said it and it’s out there, so it’s like, how do we, y’know, how do we evolve, and sometimes we just go ‘Screw it! Languages are living languages! We’ll just say it like this now!’”

PW's favorite is the sarcastic Mythal’enaste, “Because it’s the sarcastic Mythal's blessing that basically means you’re getting screwed over somehow. I love it because Mythal nasty! Whoever wrote that clearly never thought that someone would have to say this out loud”

Sheryl wrote Bull’s joke icicles line. She also wrote Isabela’s big boats line - Jennifer took it out but then DG was like “No it has to come back”

They have a pun test, they get a few of them and have to allot them wisely so as not to oversaturate on the puns. “Is this good/bad enough to be one of the times that we pull the trigger? We did have one of those recently, I obviously can’t talk about it, but it was pronounced Okay to go ahead”

The ‘baby-est’ writer is Brianne, who’s been there 8 years

It makes PW sad that the players never get to see the writers’ temp-text [placeholder text when portions are a WIP]. “People have the best temp-text". Mary: “The number of conversations that I’ve temped in like ‘WELL. I hope nothing BAD happens HERE’”

Q. If you could bring in anybody from outside of gamedev, who would you like to work with and do a writer’s session with? PW: “I will say romance novelist Nora Roberts, she is really smart and also she knows how to write inside a genre, and do wonders within it. Her structure is so good. If you pick up one of her books, you know here’s when this is gonna happen, here’s when they’re gonna meet, here’s when this first moment will happen. We’re all experienced and I feel pretty good about that but I really like all of the things she does that way, and also I am a sucker for romance so I would love to bring a romance novelist in and just have them look at our scenes and go ‘Okay here, no, they should pull the tie so that the article of clothing comes open, we need a sense of how warm the skin is here’ - something like that. I’d wanna see what they could do with that”

“Luke writes the best worst lines”

“I’m always impressed with Mary getting away with lines. There are lines that I look at like, wow, you buried that one. [...] The only players who get that line, I feel like they earned it if they went that far into it. [...] And then Varric or Merrill says a ridiculous line in a one-time throwaway”

Karin: “The group dynamic, you’ll see conversations or snippets of a lunch chat or a thing we’ve been joking about and you’ll see it get pulled in, and how all of you [the writers] are able to take a normal kind of thing - as normal as we get as a group anyway - and then turn it into a moment, and use it to further the plot or use it to further a character. It’s just the cleverest thing and it happens in so many different ways. [...] The little snippet of life, then how you crafted it into this very cool thing”

Quartermaster Threnn was written by PW in half a day. “When I was writing Threnn, ‘Okay, this is a good-hearted [person], I was doing a little bit of Steel Magnolias, southern, no-nonsense, but like, blue collar Steel Magnolias’. This is someone accustomed to the ways of the world so she’s going to call a spade a spade. If you come up to her and you’re an elf she doesn’t recognize you and says ‘Buckets are over there’ because she thinks you’re there to clean, [but] ‘Anyone calls you a knife-ear you come to me I’ll take care of it’. It’s problematic but she’s trying - the good-hearted person rooted for the wrong group on every occasion. She was a proud Loghain supporter, she gets really exited if he comes to Skyhold.  That was a fun character for me to write because I had a viewpoint in my mind. I remember someone was like ‘Threnn is really important to me’. And you have to honor that, cause you’re like ‘Cool, it means so much to me that this connected with some part of you’”

---

Also of interest was the Mass Affection panel, in which BioWare devs looked back in over a decade of history to remaster a classic. It featured devs who worked on MELE. The timestamps for this segment are ~3:36:09 - 4:24:37. Some notes:

When the pandemic hit the MELE team were in a relatively awkward spot. They were really entering into what they consider full production and were on-boarding a bunch of teams, as well as training and on-boarding third-party external partner specialized teams worldwide. When the pandemic hit, BioWare and EA were super on top of it. They were tracking it weeks beforehand, getting everyone their computers ready, and getting everything encrypted. When the middle of March 2020 hit they were home rightaway. EA were nothing but supportive throughout the entire thing. They got money every quarter for stuff. It functionally ‘hit’ at 4-6 different times for them as the pandemic occurred in different places throughout the world at different times depending on each country’s response plan (and their external partners were in different countries). “So it was one of those things where it was just like, every day we’d come in like can we still work with this company anymore? Do we need to find someone else? Do we need to pull people in off the other projects at BioWare to fill gaps here and there?”

There was a bug on Virmire at the part when you’re coming into the STG camp. If the Mako had its new boosters on and you came hurtling in really fast, it cut to the cutscene, but the Mako hit a jump and when Ash was like “What do we do now?” the Mako ended up literally flying around in the background sideways and then crashing into the camp

Another bug: when they were re-tuning the guns, the physics force on some of the guns with Hammerhead rounds was so high that when you were fighting some of the Thorian Creepers, you could ragdoll them so hard that you could basically embed them in the roof. They’d be moving so fast that they’d penetrate all the walls with their legs dangling out. It was so easy to do and you could do it to everybody. You could launch a geth halfway across an Uncharted World

Another bug: with Shepard’s casual appearance in ME3, if you didn’t have it set up perfectly correctly it would default to Grunt for some reason. You’d be walking around as Grunt, going on dates as Grunt, and your face would be all scrunched up because it was all mapped to human bones still, so it was just, like, Nightmare Fuel of Grunt

Another bug: in ME2 on Illium when trying to recruit Samara, the Asari enemies just would not stop screaming - regardless of whether they were hit or not, it was endless screaming. Later one of the devs got an audio file of the scream, endless and looped, and now one of the devs has it on their phone and uses it for their morning alarm tone

“Shepard would come up to characters and they’d just be screaming”

---

There was also the Programming Variables panel, talking about what hurdles game programmers face. Some [or all?] of the devs that were part of this panel are currently working on DA4. They talked a bit about their day-to-day work and about the craft of game dev programming in general. The timestamps for this segment are ~ 4:24:46 - 5:06:02.

[source]

[insights/notes from Gamers For Groceries 1]

[☕ found this post or blog interesting or useful? my ko-fi is here if you feel inclined. thank you 🙏]

[kaaras-adaar]

The Term Kadan + Culture

The term KADAN

Literally, “where the heart lies;” friend. An all-purpose word for a “person one cares about,” including colleagues, friends and loved ones. Also means “the centre of the chest.” X

I have written metas about Kaaras’ knowledge of Qunlat (or the lack of as a child) before. When it comes to Kaaras’ household, his parents tried desperately to keep as much knowledge of the Qun from their Vashoth son. They had fled their past lives to escape it and wanted Kaaras to know nothing of the lives they had lived under the strict religion and society.

But that’s HARD.

You simply can’t forget where you’ve come from when it’s all you’ve known, especially for two people who knew so little to nothing about the Southern world. Whilst Aban (Kaaras’ mother) was a Tamassran and taught languages, she was gifted in knowing the Common tongue, which is why Kaaras speaks it so well (as well as his Fereldan upbringing), but it’s also the reason why Kaaras speaks more formally than any usual commoner. His mother knew the formal tongue (that of higher classes/nobles). Anaan (Kaaras’ father) didn’t have the same gift for languages. He struggled, and often times when they needed to speak in private, they would go back to Qunlat so Kaaras didn’t understand–especially if they were talking about troubled times. They didn’t want their son worrying.

As a child, language is exceptionally important, it’s also when it’s the easiest to learn. He grew up knowing a few Qunlat words here and there (curses he learned in Qunlat earlier than those in Common), and it’s the same with terms of endearment. He heard the term Kadan being used within his household enough to know that it was a term of endearment that his parents shared with each other.

In saying that, Kaaras did not learn proper Qunlat until he was much older. Much of the language was foreign to him because he only heard bits and pieces between his mother and father, and that stopped when Kaaras’ father died when he was 12.

Picking up the language via travel and with mercenary members who were Tal’Vashoth and knew the language, it became easier for Kaaras to put the language together than others, ONLY because he was familiar with some terms as it was. He’s not perfect at Qunlat. He can hold a decent conversation and translate some documents, but there are still gaps here and there that he doesn’t understand.

The term Kadan is something special for Kaaras. I think I had an old meta post saying that the Inquisitor is unfamiliar with it in game, but for Kaaras, his reaction is not unfamiliar, it’s surprise. Surprise that Bull would call him something like that when he knew it was something his parents shared between each other. For him, it’s not a term he’d throw around lightly, it’s not used for friends (like it may have been used with Sten in DAO).

To Kaaras, this is a term of love and devotion. It’s purely a romantic one, and it’s only said to someone who has earned that special place within his heart. He doesn’t often use it, because he’s grown up with Common terms of endearment. But this is a term rarely used that can’t quite be translated into the common, because it feels so much MORE than just “lover”. It’s more than that, it’s intimate, and the way he saw how much his parents loved each other when they used that term.

So no, Kaaras doesn’t say Kadan easily, it’s not common for him to use it, and he doesn’t throw it around. The term is something very close to him, especially when it comes to his mixed cultures.

For Kaaras, the Qun and Qunlat is something he KNOWS is in his blood, it’s heritage, his past, where his parents came from, but he also distances himself with it because he doesn’t feel he has the RIGHT to call it his culture as he didn’t live there. He is Fereldan. Ferelden is his home, his upbringing and learning, and because of what his parents taught him as a child, he’s always been conflicted.

He’s always felt like he should be ASHAMED of his Qunari heritage (especially since his parents kept it all secret until he was older to ask and properly enquire), but as he gets older, he wants to learn more and more about the life that could have been, and that he shouldn’t be ashamed of his heritage.

Yes, he is a proud Fereldan man (even though he was actually born in Starkhaven in their travels down South), but that’s been his life and upbringing since he was a babe. But he also holds his parent’s culture and traditions still close to him. It’s a part he’s always wanted to explore, but it’s hard when he feels like he’s stuck between two VERY different worlds that don’t support each other, and for Kaaras, that has always made him feel like an outcast to both of his cultures.

Kaaras is bicultural, and I want that known. I want it knows that it’s not been EASY for him either because of it. Just because he has horns and grey skin doesn’t mean he’s any less Fereldan, and just because he didn’t grow up under the Qun doesn’t take away his heritage and culture from his parents and how their traditions and culture affected him as a child with parents who essentially knew nothing about Fereldan culture and customs.

If you asked Kaaras, he would say he is Fereldan, because he considers himself as such and grew up there. But that doesn’t take away his Qunari heritage either, especially when he grew up with parents who still practised what they knew and brought a lot of their own culture with them.

[emerald-amidst-gold]

Please tell us more about "Soulful Communication" if you don't mind it.

I never mind talking about my little crazy theories, so get ready for another word dump! Thank you so much for the ask! ❤️❤️❤️

Communication could be an exceedingly tricky thing. It could either pan out the way one wished or it could have an adverse effect, leaving a situation worse off than it was to begin with. Sometimes, depending on the connection one had with another, the means of communication were second nature. You could speak freely with that person without a single hiccup or you could merely sit in utter silence, but still communicate using the air between you; through barely perceptible gestures, minor facial expressions, or whispered sounds. 

Communication was an art form in its own right, and one Fane was not adept in. At best, he could manage a sense of civility with the people around him, even those who were ‘close’ to him, but there were times when the young draconic elf was practically incapable of managing any form of communication; good or ill. He could go practical days without conversing with a soul around him unless he had no choice. Sadly, most of his inner circle would simply take that as him being ‘standoffish’ or ‘pissy’, and he couldn’t fault them, really. He wasn’t standoffish, not by a mile, but pissy? Definitely. It was a primary trait of the dragon now mortal. However, there was a lot of baggage to unload around that crude term for his general disposition. Such baggage included one, major focal point; his past, both as a dragon and as a mortal. Both aspects determined a lot of who he was now, and there was nothing that could be done about that. He was who he was and he would not be warped into something he wasn’t merely because it was ‘improper’. In body, he was an elf, but in mind and soul, he was a dragon, even if it had taken him almost twenty five years to finally remember that important aspect of himself. 

He thought like a dragon, moved like a dragon, and communicated like a dragon. And communication for dragons was complex, to say the least. Dragons communicated through their eyes, the depths of colors able to reflect a myriad of emotions if the dragon who bore them was open enough. If a dragon set its gaze on you, it wasn’t because it was looking for a meal. No, it was trying to communicate with you, even though it knew you could not. Such a thing was not designed to frighten or undermine another creature, but because speaking with eyes was the only form of language his kin had. It was no different than a language like Elvhen, dwarven, or qunlat; the words foreign to anyone who did not learn them or grow up around those who spoke them. However, if one could somehow manage to understand such languages without so much as an inkling of its context, then that person immediately gained the respect of those that did. And if one actively sought to understand, to learn? Then that person gained trust. 

Respect and trust were two morals that resonated with Fane’s draconic soul because that was what he highly valued, as did all dragons. Gaining his respect was easier than gaining his trust, however. Respect was simple, as it came in many forms, but trust? Trust was special. Trust was sacred. Trust was soul binding. Especially for Fane; his trust having been sundered by someone he had considered family. So, gaining the dragon’s trust was increasingly difficult, and many within his own inner circle hadn’t managed it yet. Only one person had ever gained his respect and trust, one elf, ironically.

This was another concept of dragons that I wanted to play around with, and has carried over into why Fane can detect a person’s emotion through their eye color. It’s not the movement of the eyes that makes it possible, it’s the hue of them. Dragons communicated with roars, growls, chirps, but their deepest means of communication were through their eyes since each dragon had a different two toned hue. As such, this is why in most of my stories, Fane is fixated on eye color, especially Solas’s. It helps him understand the world around him, and allows him to keep his mind in check when something pricks at insanity.  This was also me wanting to dive into how Solas and Fane operate with regards to their romantic relationship. Since both Solas and Fane had been alone and disconnected from people for so long, they don’t require constant interaction with each other. Sometimes, I find, they go days without seeing one another, or if they do, they don’t speak outwardly to one another. It’s comfort of presence, and a connection of souls. Solas learned to communicate with Fane as a dragon by using his eyes since Fane would not allow a telepathetic connection (hence why Solas doesn’t realize who Fane is through his voice). So the title ‘Soulful Connection’ is a play on how dragons themselves connect and communicate as well as how Fane and Solas’s bond runs soul deep. 

Thank you so much for the ask @noire-pandora! Always love talking about my crazy mind! ❤️❤️❤️

[kaaras-adaar-a]

The Term Kadan + Culture

The term Kadan

Literally, "where the heart lies;" friend. An all-purpose word for a "person one cares about," including colleagues, friends and loved ones. Also means "the centre of the chest." x 

I have written metas about Kaaras’ knowledge of Qunlat (or the lack of as a child) before. When it comes to Kaaras’ household, his parents tried desperately to keep as much knowledge of the Qun from their Vashoth son. They had fled their past lives to escape it and wanted Kaaras to know nothing of the lives they had lived under the strict religion and society.

But that’s HARD. 

You simply can’t forget where you’ve come from when it’s all you’ve known, especially for two people who knew so little to nothing about the Southern world. Whilst Aban (Kaaras’ mother) was a Tamassran and taught languages, she was gifted in knowing the Common tongue, which is why Kaaras speaks it so well (as well as his Fereldan upbringing), but it’s also the reason why Kaaras speaks more formally than any usual commoner. His mother knew the formal tongue (that of higher classes/nobles). Anaan (Kaaras’ father) didn’t have the same gift for languages. He struggled, and often times when they needed to speak in private, they would go back to Qunlat so Kaaras didn’t understand--especially if they were talking about troubled times. They didn’t want their son worrying.

As a child, language is exceptionally important, it’s also when it’s the easiest to learn. He grew up knowing a few Qunlat words here and there (curses he learned in Qunlat earlier than those in Common), and it’s the same with terms of endearment. He heard the term Kadan being used within his household enough to know that it was a term of endearment that his parents shared with each other. 

In saying that, Kaaras did not learn proper Qunlat until he was much older. Much of the language was foreign to him because he only heard bits and pieces between his mother and father, and that stopped when Kaaras’ father died when he was 12. 

Picking up the language via travel and with mercenary members who were Tal’Vashoth and knew the language, it became easier for Kaaras to put the language together than others, ONLY because he was familiar with some terms as it was. He’s not perfect at Qunlat. He can hold a decent conversation and translate some documents, but there are still gaps here and there that he doesn’t understand.

The term Kadan is something special for Kaaras. I think I had an old meta post saying that the Inquisitor is unfamiliar with it in game, but for Kaaras, his reaction is not unfamiliar, it’s surprise. Surprise that Bull would call him something like that when he knew it was something his parents shared between each other. For him, it’s not a term he’d throw around lightly, it’s not used for friends (like it may have been used with Sten in DAO). 

To Kaaras, this is a term of love and devotion. It’s purely a romantic one, and it’s only said to someone who has earned that special place within his heart. He doesn’t often use it, because he’s grown up with Common terms of endearment. But this is a term rarely used that can’t quite be translated into the common, because it feels so much MORE than just “lover”. It’s more than that, it’s intimate, and the way he saw how much his parents loved each other when they used that term. 

So no, Kaaras doesn’t say Kadan easily, it’s not common for him to use it, and he doesn’t throw it around. The term is something very close to him, especially when it comes to his mixed cultures. 

For Kaaras, the Qun and Qunlat is something he KNOWS is in his blood, it’s heritage, his past, where his parents came from, but he also distances himself with it because he doesn’t feel he has the RIGHT to call it his culture as he didn’t live there. He is Fereldan. Ferelden is his home, his upbringing and learning, and because of what his parents taught him as a child, he’s always been conflicted.

He’s always felt like he should be ASHAMED of his Qunari heritage (especially since his parents kept it all secret until he was older to ask and properly enquire), but as he gets older, he wants to learn more and more about the life that could have been, and that he shouldn’t be ashamed of his heritage. 

Yes, he is a proud Fereldan man (even though he was actually born in Starkhaven in their travels down South), but that’s been his life and upbringing since he was a babe. But he also holds his parent’s culture and traditions still close to him. It’s a part he’s always wanted to explore, but it’s hard when he feels like he’s stuck between two VERY different worlds that don’t support each other, and for Kaaras, that has always made him feel like an outcast to both of his cultures. 

Kaaras is bicultural, and I want that known. I want it knows that it’s not been EASY for him either because of it. Just because he has horns and grey skin doesn’t mean he’s any less Fereldan, and just because he didn’t grow up under the Qun doesn’t take away his heritage and culture from his parents and how their traditions and culture affected him as a child with parents who essentially knew nothing about Fereldan culture and customs.

If you asked Kaaras, he would say he is Fereldan, because he considers himself as such and grew up there. But that doesn’t take away his Qunari heritage either, especially when he grew up with parents who still practised what they knew and brought a lot of their own culture with them.

[irafatum-a]

VERSE: WICKED EYES AND WICKED HEARTS

     A city elf born along the borders of Nevarra and the Free Marches, Rose grew up in a world full of abuse and neglect. She has very few positive memories when it comes to her mother and can barely remember her father, as her mother claimed he either ‘disappeared’ or ‘left because he wasn’t man enough to be responsible’, to the young woman the story always changes and oft times she suspects it was due to her overbearing mother for his leave, but that made her no less resentful to him for abandoning her in the process. Much of her young life spent learning to thieve and trick human’s and even other elves, doing what little she could to survive and keep herself safe from the clutches of the sick and perverse, as her own mother did very little to actually guide or care for her. Because of this she’s developed a nihilistic view of not only people but the world, and thus forced her to be independent and resourceful -- even cutthroat to a degree. 

     During this time she had many wild dreams of being free with the Dalish or having a nice home and husband, as any young girl does, but quickly abandoned these fanciful delusions upon the realization that the Dalish were no more welcoming than the shemlen, and a dutiful husband seemed all but a naive desire with how little her mother made and the fast-encroaching day when she was to be arranged to wed an elf from a neighboring Alienage. Instead of accepting her fate, young Rose had decided that she would adventure to Orlais and become a bard; many exciting tales had been sung from these passing minstrels about the countries beautiful cities and the thrill of The Grand Game; if she could be as good as the bards whom traveled Thedas, maybe -- just maybe -- she could climb the social ladder that elves were often barred from. All she had to do was kill enough...

     Stealing what money she could from her mother and betrothed, Rose left for Orlais on the back of a wagon and took a scornful look to her old home; this was most certainly not a place she would ever return or long to be. No, her future was in Orlais now, and all she had to do was get there alive. The journey to the beautiful city had taken months and a lot of self sacrifice, but once she’d made it through the gates Rose was elated to see that the songs did this land no justice; Orlesians were certainly pompous in not only their fashion but the designs in their buildings and mannerisms. And though she had initially been excited to be there, she quickly found that the Alienages in Orlais were far worse than the one’s in her hometown, she began to panic upon the realization that she very well may be right back where she started -- at the bottom with no hope of climbing the ladder out of the slums, even worse so that she knew no one here in this small space, nearly smothered in suffocation by the crampedness in which these elves lived. All hope seemed lost until she was offered a hand by a shemlen in a mask of gold and silver, he called himself; Marquis Francis Duret, a well-off nobleman looking to rise through the ranks of nobility through thievery, assassination and espionage. How opportunistic of him to find she -- a girl foreign born looking to rise in social standing -- to be his living weapon. Though Francis may have been a skilled Bardmaster himself, there were certain things tailored to his reputation that even he would not dip a finger in, but a beautiful elven woman could... none would be the wiser.  The Marquis often spied among the coming new travelers for susceptible targets for his tutelage, and in Rose found a promising pupil; maybe even obedient. 

     But the young elf quickly found that she was in a living nightmare; all the years spent under Francis had been one of slavery. She quickly found that the shemlen, though outwardly disgusted with the word, merely covered it in a new one; Servitude. There was no denying that she did, in fact, live a privileged life with her Marquis but it came at a price; her body and mind were not her own to do with as she pleased, and was often used for experimentation or sexual release. Quickly the young woman was looking for ways to escape her mentor, honing her skills as a bard to hopefully use them against her once benefactor turned abuser. While under his guidance Rose was subject to many tortures in hoping to make her stronger, one of many happened to be turning to the rituals of making Reavers; traveling to the Imperium to conduct the ritual -- one that nearly turned the young woman mad, though she survived. In his crafting of his pupil he had little realization that he was forging a monster that would in turn devour him. 

     During the events of Inquisition, when the Inquisitor closes the Breach and begins to form a small army in hopes of discovering the Divines murder and the Conclave’s explosion, Francis took this opportunity to send Rose off in hopes of finding information. The Marquis was certain that with the Inquisition growing in influence and power that the Orlesian nobility would turn their eyes upon them in worry, and should he have any political secrets could ascend him higher to Duke. Forcing his pupil to go would give others little suspicion of him and should Rose be caught -- damned with her, let her die. She, however, saw this as an opportunity to acquire allies against the Marquis and eagerly took to travel through the snowy mountains, being greeted as a traveling bard to sing to the weary pilgrims and warriors.

     The Inquisitor can recruit Rose as a companion and take her along on quests, can romance her or acquire her friendship and help her overthrow the Marquis so that she may ascend to Bardmaster and attend the Grand Game. Taking her with you to Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts will allow you bonus dialogue and special events due to her knowledge of Orlesian culture, language and fashion, giving you an edge during the ball. Should you make an enemy of Rose instead she will turn on the Inquisition and abandon the fortress entirely, either being enslaved by the Marquis ( timeline dependent ) or killing him and ascending bard status, using information acquired from the Inquisition to help advance her status among the nobility and become a highly sought-after Bard. 

     One of her special talents is her song; it can allure and confuse depending on the situation at hand or her intent. Even in the presence of other bards many will eventually look only to Rose; as she was trained in song and dance, using her natural good looks and beautiful voice to arouse and beguile. Rose also has a specialization in the Reaver class, and depending on the timeline will enhance these abilities or she will fall to the madness of not only the dragons blood, but her own WRATH. 

Name: Rose, Rose of Thorns ( Bardmaster status ), Rose of The Bards and The Carta ( timeline / verse dependent ) Age: 24 / 25 Sex: Female Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual Race: Elf 

Mother: Deva ( unknown ) Father: Yevrand ( unknown ) Sibling(s): None ( unknown )

Mentor / Bardmaster: Marquis Francis Duret Employer: Barone Malatesta ( twice removed to Francis )

Skills: Bard and Reaver  Occupation: Bard / Bardmaster Birthplace: Between Nevarra and Free Marches ( closer to Free Marches ) Current Residence: Orlais / Skyhold ( timeline / verse dependent )

ALIGNMENT TRACKER

    Chaste ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ● Lustful    Energetic ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌●◌◌◌ Lazy    Forgiving ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌●◌ Vengeful   Generous ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌●◌◌◌ Selfish       Honest ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌●◌◌ Deceitful            Just ◌◌◌◌◌◌●◌◌◌◌ Arbitrary      Merciful ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌●◌◌◌ Cruel       Modest ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌●◌◌ Proud          Pious ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌●◌◌◌ Worldly      Prudent ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌●◌◌ Reckless Temperate ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌●◌◌◌ Indulgent     Trusting ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌●◌ Suspicious    Valorous ◌◌◌◌◌●◌◌◌◌◌ Cowardly

BIG 5 PERSONALITY TRAITS

EXTRAVERSION

★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ : outgoing ★★★★★★★★☆☆ : risk-taking ★★★★★★★★★☆ : excitement-seeking ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ : physically adventurous

AGREEABLENESS

★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ : trusting ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ : compassionate ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ : empathetic ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ : enjoys company

NEUROTICISM

★★★★★★★★★★: angry ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ : depressed ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ : anxiety ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ : emotionally stable

CONSCIENTIOUSNESS

★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ : self-disciplined ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ : hard-working ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ : prepared/dutiful ★★★★★★★★★☆ : aims to over-achieve

OPENNESS TO EXPERIENCE

★★★★★★★☆☆☆ : likes new things ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ : likes novel settings ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ : intellectual/ideas/imaginative ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ : enjoys art/culture/adventure

GENERAL SKILLS

★★☆☆☆ Climbing ★★★★★ Riding ★★★★☆ Swimming ★★★★☆ Tracking ★★★★☆ Cooking ★★★☆☆ First Aid ★★★★☆ Pick-Pocketing ★★★★☆ Survival

ARMOR AND WEAPONS

Light armor or heavy armor?:  Light / Medium  Favourite weapon: Daggers / Claws ( Reaver ) Name of your weapon(s):  Unknown; she does not attach herself to weapons Fight with shield?: No

★★★☆☆ Edged weapons ★★★★★ Dual Weapons ☆☆☆☆☆ Crushing weapons (mazes, clubs, etc) ★☆☆☆☆ Two-handed weapons ★★★☆☆ Thrown weapons (knives, axes, javelins) ★★★★★ Archery

CRAFTING SKILLS

★★★☆☆ Herbalism ★★★★☆ Poison-Making ★★★☆☆ Traps-Making ☆☆☆☆☆ Armor-Crafting ★☆☆☆☆ Weapon-Crafting ★☆☆☆☆ Rune-Crafting

INFLUENCE SKILLS

★★★★☆ Acting ★★★☆☆ Appraisal ★★★★☆ Bribery ★★★☆☆ Diplomacy ★★★☆☆ Gambling ★★★☆☆ Interrogation ★★☆☆☆ Leadership ★★☆☆☆ Public Speaking ★★★★★ Seduction ★★☆☆☆ Trading ★★★★★ Trickery

ROGUE SKILLS

★★★★☆ Lock picking ★★★☆☆ Disarming Traps

TALENTS:

★★★★☆ Sabotage ★★☆☆☆ Scoundrel ★★★☆☆ Specialist ★★★★☆ Subterfuge

SPECIALIZATIONS:

★★★★☆ Assassin ★★★☆☆ Duelist ★★☆☆☆ Shadow ★★★★★ Bard ★☆☆☆☆ Ranger ☆☆☆☆☆ Legionnaire Scout ★★★★★ Other ( Reaver )

OTHER

★★★☆☆ Read / Write

LANGUAGES:

★★★★★ Common Tongue ★★★☆☆ Elven Language ★★★★☆ Orlesian ★★☆☆☆ Antivan ☆☆☆☆☆ Rivaini ☆☆☆☆☆ Ander ★☆☆☆☆ Qunlat ★☆☆☆☆ Tevene ☆☆☆☆☆ Ancient Tevene

[sineatcr-blog]

HEADCANON; DRAGON AGE AU

Ardyn Lucis Caelum was born in Tevinter a long time ago. He was the eldest of two brothers, whole family members of a noble Altus house. Unfortunately for Ardyn, however, he was a black sheep -- disapproving of much of the way Tevinter was run and their treatment of slaves and elves alike. Forsaking his place as future head of the family, he left Tevinter and made a name for himself as a healer, barely managing to avoid arrest as an apostate thanks to his country of origin.

Eventually, the Fourth Blight began, and Ardyn made a nuisance of himself in the besieged areas, fighting Darkspawn and healing the injured until he was recruited properly into the Grey Wardens.

He passed the Joining, and fought alongside Gaharel in the liberation of Hossberg as well as the final battle in Ayesleigh against Andoral, earning himself the title of Senior Warden in doing so.

After this, things settled again into peace, but Ardyn soon found himself antsy. The mage, though skilled in combat magic, was a healer by nature, and soon found himself wondering if he could find a way to heal the taint -- not from Wardens, but from the normally afflicted. And so he set to work on devising a way to do so.

Unfortunately, while he was healing the afflicted (with blood magic, honestly, but being Tevinter he was a bit more open to the idea), he was also taking their taint into himself. This soon became obvious when his Calling manifested far too early to be normal -- nonetheless, Ardyn headed to the Deep Roads. 

However, he did not plan to die or become corrupted. He had a plan. If he could heal the taint in others, drawing it into himself, then maybe he could purge it. He just had to find Darkspawn to test his theories on...

Four centuries later, Ardyn is no longer human, but he is not a ghoul, either. Centuries of experimenting upon darkspawn have given him a way to prolong his own life, albeit...at a price. He is caught somewhere between man and monster, partially a tainted and corrupted ghoul -- but still human in mind, still himself. He has yet to find a reliable cure for the taint, but he has managed to keep himself alive long enough to keep looking. Even if that means he’s all but a Darkspawn himself.

Being so corrupted, he heard the Call of Urthemiel, awakened prematurely by the Architect’s experiments -- and he left his own laboratory within the Deep Roads to investigate, knowing that this was the beginning of the Fifth Blight.

He headed to Ferelden, where the Blight was focused, and though he missed Ostagar and avoided the Wardens’ journey, he kept track of what was happening as he watched from the edges, healing what he could and listening to the Call as he went, keeping tabs on the darkspawn that way. This eventually led him to meet with the Architect personally -- after speaking, the two shared some of their research with one another, both having similar goals in mind.

After this, Ardyn left Ferelden, traveling through the Deep Roads and studying darkspawn, eventually discovering red lyrium and studying that as well -- though after his trip to the surface during the Fifth Blight, he ventured above ground more often to keep an eye on current world events, having missed four hundred years.

When he got word of the Conclave and the Breach -- and more importantly the red lyrium and Corypheus -- Ardyn set out to the Inquisition. He didn’t join outright, knowing his appearance would raise quite a few questions and some alarm, but he hovers around Skyhold, using his healing magic to aid the Inquisition when he can, without drawing too much attention to himself.

He also occasionally uses his knowledge of the Deep Roads to go help out anywhere there’s darkspawn activity, or anywhere that needs an extra hand or two, whether for healing or combat skills.

Ardyn is a friendly, charming man -- eager to talk and hold conversations and befriend people, but a lot of that is a facade of his old self, before his Calling and transformation. Four hundred years of solitude in the Deep Roads have left him a much changed man, tired and partially insane, with his research most of what he clings to to remain himself. Beneath his veneer of good-natured cheer he’s very quiet and exhausted most of the time, a bit snappish and irritable, and carrying the burden of far too much knowledge.

He experiences regular headaches and chronic pain -- thanks to an old injury to his left leg and hip that never healed correctly -- but he makes do nonetheless.

The voices of the Darkspawn are constant in his head, but he’s learned to tune them out or listen for anything specific he needs -- he can ignore them now thanks to his research and magic, but it’s still a burden to carry.

Appearance-wise, he’s a man of about his mid-thirties, tired-looking, pale, and scruffy, wearing black robes with a brightly colored scarf (probably highever weave or ring velvet) around his neck. He carries a very old-looking staff of black laquered wood with an obsidian-bladed bottom and a dark wood carving of a crow atop it, and probably has a good dagger or three on his person at all times. He almost always also has a dark leather satchel on him, containing his notebooks and research.

His clothes hide the darkened veins of the tainted, and a hood as well as his longish, unkempt hair tends to usually hide the hollowed cheekbones and slightly glassy eyes. Other than that, he looks pretty much human.

Though he’s most fluent in Trade and Tevene, he can speak most languages -- Anders, Antivan, Orlesian, Rivaini, and Qunlat -- fairly well. He also knows some scattered bits and pieces of dwarven and elvish, thanks to his research.

Ardyn is a talented mage that focuses on the schools of Creation and Entropy, with dual-specializations of Spirit Healer and Arcane Warrior. He can either hang back in combat, keeping his allies healed and protected while tripping up the enemy with Entropy spells, or wade right into it with his Spirit Blade at the ready. 

He also knows a decent amount of blood magic, but only uses that when conducting his research -- he never uses it around others, both aware of the taboo and because his blood is darkened with the taint.

[cellarspider]

Qunlat 5/12: Nouns and Pronouns

⭅ Previous =⦾ Index ⦾= Next ⭆

Having talked about the aesthetics and phonology of Qunlat in our previous entries, we now begin diving into grammar. This will cover the basics of how nouns and pronouns work, and a special guest appearance by verbs!

Yes, I am excited about this! Grammar is one of the most fun parts of making a language for me. Prepare yourselves!

So, the first rule of thumb: Canon Qunlat’s grammar is simpler than English, or Indo-European languages in general. There are so many words and fiddly bits that these languages insist on that Qunlat does not use. This is sometimes to its detriment, and can limit what we can express in Qunlat, but it makes it easier to learn the canon.

First! There is no distinction between “the thing” and “a thing” in Qunlat. In English, “The” is a definite article, referring to a specific object, while “a” refers to any, indefinite single object: “the cake is on a table” versus “a cake is on the table” gives you a different feel, right? The first one is a specific cake, put… somewhere table-ish. The second is an unfamiliar or generic cake sitting on a particular table.

“Sten ash noms” could mean “Sten looks for a cake” or “Sten looks for the cake”. Doesn’t matter! There are also no clearly defined words for “this” or “that”. However, we do have a potential way to get more specific, which I’ll talk about when we get to pronouns.

Many languages don’t have the distinction between “the” and “a”. Latin, Sanskrit, Japanese, Polish, and Swahili don’t have them, to name just a few. Qunlat doesn’t either. The one article Qunlat arguably does have is one we don’t talk about very often: the negative article.

“Maraas itwasit.”

“Nothing go-out.it”

 “No one is going out”

Maraas is technically a pronoun in most of its uses, primarily meaning “nothing”, but it has been used flexibly enough to also be used as a negative article. Anywhere that English would say “No [noun] [verb]...” should probably use maraas in Qunlat. 

Moving on to plurals, or rather, the total lack thereof: Qunlat doesn’t really distinguish between singular and plural the way most European and North African languages do. While English demands you use tide and tides, Qunlat has only one form: meraad. Even stuff that seems to imply plurality actually doesn’t: -ari as a suffix is referred to in the Fandom wiki dictionary as denoting a group, but this is inaccurate. It means either “person” or “people” depending on context. Qunari is both singular and plural–A person of the Qun, or people of the Qun. The same goes for Ashkaari, Bessrathari, Imekari, and all the rest.

There are many real life languages that lack this feature or consider it optional–hell, English has a lot of words that have no plural or no singular form. One fish, two fish, red fish, an ambiguous number of blue fish. But many parts of the language still cue you into the number: “the red fish is swimming, the blue fish are resting.” Other languages have plural and singular forms for adjectives as well. But some languages don’t care about this plural nonsense.

In particular, New Guinean and Australian languages may not have any plural noun forms, while languages like Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Malay have ways to make nouns function as plural, but don’t require them. In such cases, you’d either count the number of objects (“five friend” “五个朋友”), or use a less specific description (“many friend” “很多朋友”). Or, as long as context is clear, you don’t need those markers at all. The word for “friend” can also mean “friends”.

Qunlat, due to its small dictionary, has limited ways to do this. We have no numbers to work with. Thanks to the term Ben-Hassrath (“Heart of the Many”), we can reconstruct that rath is likely how you’d say “many”: “rath kadan” would mean “many friends”. But you don’t need to do this. You could speak about any number of friends by simply saying kadan. Does that seem vague? Well, East Asian languages get along just fine like that. But Qunlat gives us a second way to specify how many people we’re talking about: Plural pronouns!

Pronouns in Qunlat follow a very Indo-European style. 

Ala - I, me Ara - you Asit - she, he, him, it, they (singular) Assam - we, us Ost - you (pural), y’all  Adim - they, them (plural)

There’s a couple things to note right off the top.

First: There are no gendered third person pronouns in Qunlat. None. And there’s no distinction between a person or any other thing either, so no “it” equivalent either. This is similar to colloquial Finnish, where every single person and object can be referred to with se. 

Second: There is a distinction between singular and plural “you”. Ost and ara are words the games don’t always use right. English-speakers who have no “y’all” or “ye” or “yinz” in their dialect need to be careful around this. Ara is calling one person “you”, while ost is calling two or more people “you”. They are not interchangeable. When an assassin says to Bull “Ebost Asala, Tal Vashoth!”, it’s wrong. Bull is big, but he’s not plural big. He is not two smaller tal-vasoth in a trenchcoat.

Third: There is no distinction by grammatical case–no “She” versus “her” or “I” versus “me”. English and many other Indo-European languages consider this to be absolutely essential for fluent speech: “Me looks for he” or “Him look for I” sounds wrong, it has to be “I look for him” and “he looks for me”.

In Qunlat? “Ala ash asit” and “Asit ash ala.” They do not change. The verbs also do not change–you may have noticed that it’s “I look” but “he looks”: Indo-European languages often alter the verb depending on who’s doing an action (but not always–jeg elsker deg, Norsk!).

Qunlat doesn’t really do this, but it does do something interesting.

Ala ash asit.  Ashala asit.

These both mean “I look for it”. The subject of a sentence–usually the participant doing the action–can be stuck onto the end of the verb. This is a simple form of “verb person marking”. It’s a fun feature that allows Qunlat sentences to be restructured based off of what flows best. 

When you want to explicitly name the subject of a sentence, you can use person marking, or not bother:

Sten ash noms. Sten ashasit noms.

Both mean “Sten looks for cake”. Simple! Flexible! …With a couple irregularities.

Dragon Age II and Philliam, a Bard! agree on one bit of irregularity to verb person marking: rather than “ebara” for “you are”, it appears to be spoken and subtitled as “ebra”. “Ebasaam” also gets rendered as “ebsaam”. The others are unchanged. However, Trespasser lists “ebasaam” in a viddathari’s conjugation practice, so I’d consider -ara and -asaam to be the “dictionary” versions of the suffixes, while -ra and -saam are used as appropriate by fluent speakers.

In one of the very first sentences of Qunlat we hear in the games, we appear to have an irregular third person pronoun: “The tide rises, the tide falls” is said as “Meraad astaarit, meraad itwasit.” This is found nowhere else in the language, it’s entirely a one-off. In WoT2, astaar appears unconjugated, indicating the original intention was that the verbs would be astaar and itwas. Either the third person pronoun would have an abbreviated form like (a)ra and (a)saam, or it would just be, well, “it”. …But given the two facts that “asit” unambiguously shows up throughout the rest of the series and is never abbreviated, and that one of English’s third person pronouns is “it”, I’m not a fan of that! I like “aarit” as an alternate form. That’s my decision, it might not be everyone’s, that’s how conlanging goes.

So, I want to demonstrate a couple of options one could take at this stage, to give you a flavor of the choices one makes while conlanging:

Aarit could be an alternate form of asit used next to certain sound combinations like “ast”, avoiding the repetition of astasit. That could make things feel better if we used any verbs ending in -s: resaarit instead of resasit, for example. We have some words that work like that in English: “a cat”, “an alligator”. Given the flexibility of -ara and -asaam, this is possible.

Alternatively, this mystery pronoun could be used to differentiate between individual things: some languages don’t just have a third person pronoun, they have a fourth person pronoun. In English, a sentence like “She looks for him, and she finds him” could mean one person finds one other, but context could change that! It could be saying “Sarah looks for Muneer, and Asli finds him”. Or it could mean “Sarah looks for Muneer, and she finds Steve.” 

In our example Qunlat sentence, “meraad” is the subject for both verbs, but who’s to say the Qunari think of each tide as being the same object? They’re qualitatively different each time. Asit appears to be the default pronoun in simple contexts, but Arit may be wheeled out to refer to a first subject that might be confused with any others you intend to talk about. Complicated? Yes. Languages can be like that sometimes. 

That’s what makes them fun, and makes them really fun to build. You can make something subtle and expressive using little decisions like that. 

Tune in next time for verbs!

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