The Shora Language Guidebook and Dictionary

Introduction

The word "Shora" is used to describe the culture, language, and theoretically, the people who belong to that culture and language. It has no adjective form because it already is an adjective. It means "all the people".

The language is fairly simple as it's the first one I made and thus not very far from English to begin with as well as having a great many shortcuts. That said, I use it to add flavor to my writing and not to be spoken or written outright, so it is perfect as far as I'm concerned.

If you'd like to have more context into the stories in the Shora mythology, that is an excellent reason to learn the language. I use it make the names of characters, give characters nicknames or endearments, and play around with untranslated dialogue. It could certainly give you big hints and secrets as to what I'm planning in a story.

Alphabet

While Shora does have its own writng system, it is not typeable as of currently and so I will be teachin you the romanized version in this guidebook. This version is perfectly readable and the version I use when writing anyway, so this is no huge lost other getting to see the cool characters I made for it. If you're still curious about what those looks like, even if you can't see them, the script is fairly similar to runic languages like Futhark, but it has a few more rounded characters.

As for the sounds that each character makes I will be linking to the IPA chart that I use as relevant, but in all honesty, I did not use IPA when I originally made it so I feel it's kind of unnecessary. I'm only adding the links for people who don't speak the same dialect as me or who speak English as second (or third, or fourth) language.

Grammar

The grammar for Shora is very simple as this is where I put most of the shortcuts. Because of this, though, it has some odd quirks that I think are cool and unique (and probably a bit unrealistic in terms of real linguistics, but language is fluid so maybe not).

This section is divided into two parts as these are the only things you really need to know to make functional sentences: Conjugation and Sentence Structure.

Conjugation

There only three ways to conjugate a word in Shora: past, present, and future. Each of these correspond to a suffix that you add to your verb to change the tense you are speaking in.

For the present tense, this suffix is "ja". For example, let's conjugate the word "dav" (to want or desire) in the present tense. "dav" is the infintive, and is not useable in this form. So to change it into a useable verb, you make it "davja".

• da dav vara = incorrect
• da davja vara = correct, meaning "I want food"

The past tense suffix is "po" and works similarly. In this case, if we want to conjugate "dav" again, we'd take the infinitive and make it "davpo".

• da davpo vara = "I wanted food"

And the future tense suffix, "tha", works just the same. We'll take "dav" one last time ane make it "davtha".

• da davtha vara = "I will want food"

So, to summarize: add "po" for past tense, "ja" for present tense, and "tha" for future tense.

Now the next question is how do you conjugate a sentence with two verbs? The answer is: it depends. You can actually conjugate all verbs in a sentence the same way I just taught you and it will be grammatically correct, however, it will probably chnage the meaning of your sentence. Let me show you what I mean.

Let's take the English sentence "I want to eat", for example. This sentence has two verbs and is in the present tense. How would you say it in Shora? First, you'd get your pronoun "da" for "I". We are already familiar with "dav" for "to want". You have also already seen the verb for "to eat" as well since it's the same word as "food", "vara".

Now if you were to just conjugated both verbs in the present tense, it would look like this:

• da davja varaja

This is grammatically correct, but let's think about what information each word is giving us. "da" is telling us who the sentence is talking about. "davja" is telling us that they want something currently. And "varaja" is telling us that what they want is to eat... currently? Well, yes! That's exactly correct. This might seem redundant when you're trying to say "I want to eat.", but a more accurate translation might be "I want to be eating", which is a slightly different idea. On this scale, such a difference might seem negligible, but in longer translations, it allows for a greater amount of nuance.

Section2b

Vocabulary

Pronouns, Prepositions, and Articles