#ALMOST FORGOT MELAT

[corpseofwires]

like black people are present in every single fucking genre and scene and popularized and straight up created several but people are so fucking hell bent on finding every possible excuse to not engage with their music because its easier than trying to confront their own racism. like okay well if its truly just a disinterest in most rap music then surely you listen to black artists in other genres right? who am i fucking kidding. of course you dont.

[flecks-of-stardust]

okay actually fuck it, i am by no means knowledgable in linguistics and i am once again worldbuilding/writing while half asleep. heres what i have so far.

also spoilers under the cut yall because half the reason why im doing this at all is to explain the names ive given some characters rip

i started off with finding an explanation for why isma named lheki, lheki, and settled on the idea that she noticed how curious they were and still are about the world, and essentially named them ‘wonder.’ once i started expanding on that it very quickly spiraled into hardcore linguistics worldbuilding and i again do not know what im doing. help

‘lheki’ comes from ‘lhekit,’ the noun form of wonder. dropping the -t suffix makes it mean, roughly, ‘to embody wonder.’ theres also adding a -tta suffix, ie lhekitta, to make it an adjective. so lhekitta means ‘wondrous.’

and then there was isma, and in some convoluted way i managed to extend it to “k’ishmat,” bravery. her actual name is K’ishma, ‘to be brave,’ because she’s the last of unn’s godly children and the youngest. it just got bastardized to Isma when she was taken to hallownest, because. yeah. hallownest.

melorrh comes from melat (meh-LAHT, hope) and lorrhak (new, fresh) and essentially means ‘fresh hope.’ also lorrhak is a different class of adjective than -tta adjectives because theyre states of being, ie something can Be new, but youd be hard pressed to find something that ‘embodies new-ness.’ something like that, idk. things are rough here. unsure if theres a second suffix that also denotes this type of adjective

and then theres possession, which is marked by a prefix of ve’ or fe’. dont know which is used when yet lmao. my only examples right now are “ve’Unn hirzet,” children of Unn ie greenchildren, and “ve’Unn k’uvir,” moss of Unn ie the mosskin. theres also “fe’zelseq cesil” which translates to ‘lands of green’ and is what unn’s domain is called but i dont know if i want to keep that Massive mouthful of a name oof

other things ive decided on right now are that very few words in zelseq begin with vowel sounds, and ones that do usually have a k’ prefix, or sometimes a t’ prefix, the ‘w’ sound doesnt exist in zelseq, and many sounds are supposed to sound harsh. i really wanted to do a sort of… subversion i guess? where arcleomen is melodic and soft even with its occasional clicking consonants (since theyre spiders and they have mandibles) and its spoken by the spiders, who are generally regarded to be terrifying and harsh and almost cruel (to hallownest anyway), and zelseq is all harsh and guttural sounds, kind of like leaves rustling loudly or branches scraping against stone, spoken by the gentle and almost noncombative mosskin. its why i said arcleomen is the french of hollow knight and zelseq is like russian, but idk if that comparison is apt anymore lmao

as a closing remark, this one thing is certain: “Unn” means something akin to ‘mother,’ but is non gender specific and could just as easily mean ‘father,’ ‘parent,’ ‘creator’ or even ‘life giver.’ titles and names are important to the mosskin, but theyre not usually hyper-specific like hallownestian tends to be. its looser but still pretty impactful, if that makes sense

anyway i should probably stop going at this for now because im making a Mess HhckHCKCHS

shit i forgot to add that they have like 8 words for green that all mean slightly different things because theyre plant based and green is Very Important to them. zelseq is one of those words and means something to the effect of ‘vibrant, lush, healthy green.’

i am currently attempting to do a linguistics and figure out the mosskin language. send help im in a little too deep i think