#mando’a extended dictionary

[ranahan]

hukan (n.): cloak, cape, poncho

Roughly equivalent construction to English “coverall”, or “one which can cover all”. So any garment that achieves that effect.

[ranahan]

Kar’taylir tor bal nu davaabir bic, dushne ehut.

Lit. “To know justice and to not carry it out, [is] the worst cowardice.”

Tbh the word ehut here carries both the senses of cowardice and despicability. It’s literally “Hutt-ness,” i.e. letting others suffer for your benefit and fight your battles and bear the risk, therefore cowardly and despicable. Mandalorians despise Hutts because they let others fight their (real and metaphorical) battles for them.

“To know what is right and not to do it is the worst cowardice.”

— Confucius, Analects

[mandalorianbrainweasel]

So I’m dicking around with a concept of basically the Canon (or my perception of it) Galaxy of GFFA and an AU Galaxy where the divergent point was roughly a thousand years before the Clone Wars get shoved together so basically double planets and the Mandalorian Empire of AU Galaxy and the AU Republic and Jedi Order are allies in a current war with the Sith Empire (am I dicking around with that concept too? yes) and my AU Mand’alor is meeting Jango Fett because Reasons and this exchange happens. Long post so under the cut.

Tagging @izzyovercoffee​ because of Mando’a bullshit I did.

Then, the Mand’alor moves to the Mando’ad in silver and blue and extends their arm. “Mand’alor Te Gotabor.”

The Mando’ad moves to clasp their forearm, only to be interrupted by the feral grins of his compatriots.

“Really?” he asks them, looking exhausted by them as they continue to grin. “Fine.” He turns back to the Mand’alor and grasps their forearm. “Mand’alor Te Haat’la, ruyot’ad Te Vercopaca.”

Basically, I’m further dicking around with language and titles. Titles, in this case, is me going “hey what if like the Moghul Empire the ruler takes a name symbolizing their goal as a ruler when they come to power” and making that their political name most of the time, like Naboo and Queen Amidala (yes there is dicking around about Naboo too. TWO characters have doubles in the AU Galaxy, one of them is Palpatine and one of them is Yoda and both have wildly different backgrounds tho Palps is still a Sith).

BUT LANGUAGE

I had an idea of what I wanted AU Mand’alor’s name to be. Translated to English/Basic, it’s “The Builder” but I felt “The Engineer” as a direct translation probably fits considering Te Gotabor is known for building fantastical fortress cities and the largest army in the galaxy (either one tbh). 

So I turned to Jango and went “what would his have been?”

I actually decided to do Jaster Mereel’s first! Because Jango came after “The Reformer” so that would probably have some effects on him and his government.

I chose to do “Te Vercopaca” which is (again) me dicking around. I took Vercopa, which is “wish; dream” and squished in the “kar” of “mandokar” which refers to a person who is Mando, who has the Right Stuff (mandokarla is the adjective form). Basically, this was me trying to make a good “The Reformer” title. I’m still not *happy* with it but yk.

[By the by, when Jango says “ruyot’ad” he’s referring to being in a lineage of Mandalor’e. Very formal way of saying he’s Mand’alor and the son of the previous/a previous Mand’alor. Exact translation is “past child” tho.]

So, what would Jango have done?

I also based both his and Te Gotabor’s titles off of their personal perceptions of themselves. Te Gotabor was raised by gorane, smiths. Jango is from a family of farmers. I thought about giving Jango a title related to that but there wasn’t a lot of great words already available. So, considering my idea of him tending to Jaster’s ideals but not making any big changes himself I decided that English/Basic translation is “The Steady.”

Best synonym we’ve got in the dictionary? The True. So, I decided to get “steady” or “traditional (kind of)” I’d go “Haat’la”. Why make it an adjective instead of a class of sentient like Te Gotabor and Jaster? Because he’s not “truth” he’s “true”. 

And thus, Mand’alor Te Haat’la.

Really, this is mainly me just dicking around. But I wanted to show people my thought process!!

[ranahan]

Hi! I skimmed your blog, but couldn't find anything on Mando'a for tattoos and related topics. Are there any words/roots in fanon or extrapolations from canon that you'd use for tattoos and such?

I don’t think I have written anything about tattoos, no! And I didn’t have anything in my dictionary either.

The English word for tattoo is a loan from Samoan tatau, which comes from ‘to tap, to strike,’ from the traditional method of tattooing.

And well, this delves pretty far into speculation and headcanons, but there’s one root in Mando’a that could mean the same thing: *dad. I’ve backformed it from dadita, the mando tapping code. The end -ita seems to be a couple of suffixes smashed together (compare kelita, shokita, akaata, etc), leaving the root *dad-. I first thought it might mean something like ‘tap,’ but then I was delving into dialectal English (mostly Tyneside/Geordie and military and naval slang) to figure out some etymologies, and it appears *dad just might come from Geordie dad, ‘blow.’ In my dialect, I’ve used it as a root meaning “rap, knock, tap.”

So back to tattoos! If you wanted to repeat the Polynesian etymology, then tattoo could be something like dadun, dadan, daduk, dadur, etc.

Or alternatively, you could of course derive it from somewhere else or compound it from some other existing roots. For example, Aay’han Community’s dictionary has bev’salan, which is meant to translate to ‘needle-colouring’ I believe. Umei no Mai has pelga’dan, ‘tattooer,’ from pel’gam, ‘skin,’ demar, ‘to carve,’ and -an (same suffix as in e.g. goran). I might have made these something like besal and degam or dengam or demagam instead, but that’s just a different style of compounding.

[ranahan]

More thoughts:

I’ve seen jua’vod (from juaan) suggested as a term for cousin (originally coined by Batsutousai, I believe). But try saying that quickly a couple of times: it would pretty quickly corrupt into ja’vod. Which I rather like—it looks superficially like “good-sibling,” even if the etymology is actually different.

So your cross-clan relatives could be called:

Cousins (regardless of how far removed or the exact relation—think “clan person of same generation”) would be either vod or ja’vod, depending on how familiar you want to be. I’m thinking ja’vod is more like “there’s a clan-relation there but I don’t know them personally” kind of a connotation. (Ja’)vod’ika is of course also an option for younger cousins.

Aunts and uncles (or clansmen a generation older than you) would be ba’ja’vod (I just didn’t like how ja’ba’vod sounded like :P) or ba’vodu, depending on familiarity.

But people of your grandparents generation would typically merit either ba’buir or another honorific. Elders are respected, after all.

Clan and kinship are important in Mandalorian culture. So I think it would be very common to (invite people to) use familiar terms even for distant relations. I’m thinking the more distant terms are very polite (it wouldn’t be rude to use them), but it’s that politeness itself that creates a distance. So they can be more loaded terms than the English equivalents.

Or use just the canon terms. It’s a working system without any additions.

i keep trying to phrase a post as like a helpful tip for people who like worldbuilding but. i have to be honest with myself. it is not a helpful tip because no one asked for it. i just want to rant about kinship terminologies.

[systlin]

I've never been a huge Star Wars fan, but all your recent posting about Mandolorian(?) Stuff and extended EU *stuff* has gotten me really interested. Do you have any recommendations for beginner reading for the EU, focusing on the Mando'a(?) ((Also you're one of my favorite blogs and helped the resurgence of my SCA habits, and now I have an etsy store for jewelry and am in the process of patterning out and hand sewing Landsknecht garb...)

@mandowords is a blog full of mando words and a few videos teaching the language

http://mandoa.org/ has a mando’a/english dictionary

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWI5exrT3rg_HfuGS3OXNkQ videos going over mando’a pronunciation and words

For beginner reading in the EU, I’d personally start at Shadows of the Empire, set between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Then Truce at Bakura, which takes place immediately after Return of the Jedi. Then go for the Thrawn trilogy, the Rogue Squadron books, and whatever else looks interesting. 

[ranahan]

Planet Mandalore, after being glassed by thermonuclear weapons. Here’s a closeup:

So that’s similar to real-life Trinitite (glass formed by the heat and pressure of atomic bombs), like this:

Image by Shaddack

Now that’s from the Great Purge of Mandalore, but Mandalore has been devastated by or orbital bombardment before in the Dral’Han and I think we can assume it looked similar, if less complete.

The fandom-assigned color meaning is light green for lust for peace. The peace movement on Mandalore rose in response to the Dral’Han. What’s the chance they picked that color to symbolise the devastation that war had brought to Mandalore?

Maybe I’m slow and this is obvious, but I just blew my mind by realising it. Not sure if teal for healing is related or not.

Mando’a word for light green wouldn’t be something like “spring green” or “jade green” but something like “desolation green.” Ahan’vorpan, maybe.

[ranahan]

prudii bal rang

Lit. shadow and ash

The meaning is "(not even) (with) the help of gods". From the epic Dha Werda Verda that recounts the battle between the Taung and Battalions of Zhell, where a massive volcanic eruption turned the Taung's last stand into a victory and was consequently seen as a (sign of) help from gods.

Prudii bal rang! For heaven's sake! Ti prudii bal rang. Gods willing (lit. with shadow and ash, figuratively “with help from the gods”). With a lot of luck. Ne ti prudii bal rang. Not a snowball's chance in hell (lit. not with shadow and ash, figuratively “not even with the help of the gods”).

[ranahan]

Lise mircir oramud, a nu’lise mircir oram.

You can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail a revolution.

—Fred Hampton

[ranahan]

Random headcanon:

I see fics where mando characters (like Jango) denigrate the tea of other characters (like Jaster, or Obi-Wan) as “leaf water”. But like… shig is *the* drink in Mandalorian culture. Yeah, people drink caf, but it’s still the secondary option.

Tea is served anywhere and everywhere. Business deal? Negotiation? Getting to know someone? Welcoming guests? Tea.

Coffee may also be served, but it may be an afterthought and of a considerably worse quality than the tea (the equivalent of stale bagged tea next to the coffee service)

Coffee is called ne’tra behot or ne’tra shig. Actually, most non-alcoholic fancy drinks are called something-shig, because it’s just that ubiquitous it’s almost a synonym for a drink.

In Mando’a, it’s a shig’ud, not coffee break, and shig’yaim, not café.

tldr: Calling shig “leaf water” would be the equivalent of calling coffee “bean juice” in English—it makes the character calling it that seem eccentric more than the character drinking it. Or else marks them out as someone who grew outside of the Mandalorian space where caf is more common than shig.

[ranahan]

There’s nothing wrong with the existing Fando’a words for a book. None of them compel me though. Here’s a thought that just came to me:

taylaar, lit. “hold a song” or “song-holder”

Could literally be translated just as “a holder” or “a preserver” too.

Since Mando’a is supposed to be mainly an oral language and histories are encoded in songs. So a “song holder” would be a history book (or a genealogy—one of the first kind of things written down to be preserved), which would eventually come to mean a book of any kind.

[ranahan]

Headcanon accepted! Mixed ancestry makes a lot more sense than essential sensory organs being sexually dimorphic.

However, if you wanted to use the canon explanation, there could be some subtle quirk in foetal development or an incompatibility between Twi’leki and human genomes, that meant that male foetuses with mixed ancestry were more likely to develop ears rather than cones, even if in aggregate both sexes could develop either cones or ears depending on their specific ancestry.

Btw, I’m loaning this into Mando’a in the absence of any native terms. I think terms for alien physiology (features that were not present in the Taung) would be prime candidates for loan words. I have a similar loan-word etymology headcanon for Togruta montrals, but head-tendrils would probably have a native Mando’a word, for example.

I think it would become either chara (pl. charase) or char (pl. chare), depending on whether the -a would be analysed as a (archaic) plural suffix or not—they do become naturally in pairs, after all. It could even become charan (pl. charane), if people usually spoke about them in plural.

Ears Vs Cones

One of the more well-known physiological characteristics of Twi’leks is the presence of their ear cones or tcharan [sing. Tchara] in the place of ears in some members of the species.

According to the official canon, females have cones and males have lobed ears. This makes very little sense to me. Yes, there are sex-linked traits, genetically, that is a thing. But having sensory organs with completely different functions honestly doesn’t seem reasonable to me, partly because of my head-canons on what exactly tcharan do. It’s safe to assume that if the females are in an environment that requires the functions preformed by the tcharan, then so are the males.

Short version of the above, I came up with ideas that I like a lot better than the official “differently shaped ear-things that work exactly the same as human ears.”

So what do tcharan do?

Keep reading

[ranahan]

Without much deliberation, noodles have quietly become shiike to me.

No deep thought, just a mashup of shun, briik, and shi, but it stuck anyway. I’m actually not even 100% sure whether I came up with it on my own or whether I might have picked it up somewhere else. Just, you know, they look like shiike don’t they?

[ranahan]

Eventually I’m gonna get this thing edited and eventually it might even have a search function…

[ranahan]

Dral’Han & derived words

I think Mando’a should have a whole bunch of words indirectly or directly derived from Dral’Han aka the Mandalorian Excision, and I finally got around to making some.

Ahan (n): desolation, waste, wasteland, desert

I’m really leaning on the “desolate, lifeless” sense here, not just some place that receives less rainfall. Ahane is applicable to any lifeless place, whether that’s a hot desert like Tatooine, a cold desert like Antarctica, lava flats like Mustafar, or a man-made hellhole like Melida/Daan. Very much the same energy as “wastes” in English. I’m thinking Mando’a has another word for “wilderness” or “arid landscape” as well, that leans more on the drought and less on the annihilation.

Construction is equivalent to viin ‘run’ > iviin ‘speed’ or vaar ‘early’ > evaar ‘new’. Should possibly be ehan(?), but I didn’t like the sound, so.

Ahanyc (a): desolate, barren, wasted, deserted, empty, lifeless

Ahane (n): lit. wastes, barrens, deserts. A collective term for the Mandalorian deserts formed by the Dral’Han.

Hane (n): wastes, barrens, deserts; a common part of place names on Mandalorian worlds affected by Dral'Han (e.g. Sundar’hane, the Sundari Desert aka the Sundari Wastes)

A more casual/contracted version of ahan/ahane that could be extended to mean other kinds of deserts as well.

Ahan’choruk (n): lit. desolation rock. Metamorphic rock formed by the heat and pressure of the bombs of the Dral’Han; a general term for impactites formed by bombs instead of natural processes.

Hanil (n): 1. An amulet, carving, or other item made from the glass formed in the Dral’Han. Sometimes left in their natural, irregular shapes, sometimes worked into shapes of extinct Mandalorian plants and animals, sometimes carved with inscriptions. Botanicals are common motifs due to the green colours of the material. Specimens that incorporate pieces of pre-Dral’Han material are especially valuable. Hanile are symbols of remembrance, defiance, and rebirth for some and pursuit of peace for others. Sundari had a famous large mosaic made from desert glass, in a style preceding Mandalorian cubism.; 2. a sigil in the shape of a hanil, typically in a jade-green color and shaped like an extinct plant or an animal, often a flower or a leaf.

Inspired by Māori pounamu and jade carvings of various other cultures.

N.B. trinitite is radioactive, although the radioactive particles decay quite fast. After a couple of centuries, it should have been safe. Trinitite from the Purge of Mandalore during the Galactic Emprie however, would still be somewhat radioactive at the time of The Mandalorian/Book of Boba Fett—not terribly dangerous, but not exactly something you would want to make jewellery from.

And then there should also be a name for the stone that hanile are made from, i.e. basically a Mando’a word for trinitite, but it’s not quite congealing right now. Bedral, behan, hanab (be + han), tehan (teh + han)? I would have made it dralurok, but I already had that down as “diamond”. Basically I’d like there to be a general term for the subclass of metamorphic rocks formed by nuclear weapons (which I imagine are many and varied depending on where the bombs dropped), and a more compact “trade term” for the specific kind which makes pretty trinkets like hanile.

? (n): trinitite formed in the Dral'han, aka Mandalorian desert glass, aka Mandalorian jade (called so after its greenish colours)

[ranahan]

I think this could be calqued into Mando’a—the idiom translates pretty well in regards to the culture. The equivalent construction in Mando’a would be ash’tal’galar.

jemanden zur Ader lassen

literally: to bleed someone

to exploit someone financially

In former times, barber surgeons mastered the art of bloodletting and cupping, for which they were well rewarded.