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Sikliss

The primary language of the naga was Sikliss, which translated roughly to "the gods' speech". In naga mythology, their language was gifted to them by primordial naga deities, hence its name. Its true origins couldn't be traced because of the naga's poor historical documentation. ^d8bc7b

Dialects #

Every kingdom of the naga possesses a dialect of Sikliss, but the language does not mutate into a form that renders it impossible to understand by a foreigner. A Hiskrallion naga would easily be able to understand a Hisgession's speech, but would immediately pick out that they're from somewhere else.

An important thing to note is that the word "naga" is not the Sikliss word for their own kind- "his" is the Sikliss equivalent to the word "naga" in Tradespeak.

Writing System #

The Sikliss language is character based, with a symbol representing whole words or ideas rather than letters. Characters are written and read from right to left, top to bottom.

Verbs and nouns appear as large characters, with their modifying words surrounding them as smaller symbols. Most of the written forms of nouns and verbs are a form of circle with notches, dots, gaps or other small features periodically placed along the ring. The center of the character is reserved for a secondary symbol that determines the case and number of a noun or tense, number, voice, person and mood of a verb. Adjectives or adverbs are placed on the outside of the noun or verb, but a maximum of 4 modifiers is allowed in Sikliss.

Prepositions, modal verbs and linking verbs are all listed at the very beginning of a written sentence as a stack of 1-3 square-shaped characters.

Geographical Distribution #

Sikliss was primarily spoken in Legere's underground, in the six naga kingdoms.

Phonology #

Sikliss is based strongly off of hisses, a sound easily created by the shape of a naga's mouth. The primary vowels in Sikliss are soft pronunciations, like "ah" as in "laugh" or "tap", or "ih" as in "sick" or "kick". Consonants are mainly hard, guttural ones like the hard c sound (like in core, kill, or carry), l (low, lack, leave), sh (shake, shrivel, cash), hard g (gun, guts, chug), r (ride, run, grunt) and of course s (hiss, snake, grease).

There are a few other sounds that appear in Sikliss, but are rarer.

Syntax #

In normal Sikliss sentences, the verb is the first word to appear, followed by the direct object and then the indirect object. As an example, the sentence "I sharpened my sword" would be rearranged to "sharpened I sword my". Notice how the adjective "my" is displaced so that it is behind the noun that it is modifying. The same goes for adverbs modifying the verb. Prepositions are located after any adverbs. Modal and linking verbs like must, could, have to, etc follow behind prepositions. This is a general rule of thumb.

VERB > ADVERB(S) > PREPOSITION(S) > MODAL/LINKING VERB(S) > DIRECT NOUN(S) > DIRECT ADJECTIVE(S) > INDIRECT NOUN(S) > INDIRECT ADJECTIVE(S)

Sikliss sentences are short and snappy, and the language as a whole is designed to be spoken at a breakneck speed. Conjunctions are entirely absent. As such, repetitive sentences are common in speech. For example, instead of saying "I opened the box yesterday, and he opened it today," the straight translation from Sikliss would say "Opened yesterday I the box. Opened today he the box." A maximum of 4 adjectives or adverbs are allowed in a single sentence to describe their associated noun or verb. A maximum of 3 prepositions, modal verbs and linking verbs combined are allowed in a single sentence. Adding more than these amounts would be the equivalent of creating a run-on sentence.

Here are a few other examples:

  • "We are going to eat fish."
  • "To eat are we fish."
  • "The stone fell down."
  • "Fell down the stone."
  • "It is very expensive."
  • "Is it expensive very."
  • "I am not lying."
  • "Lying not am I."

This sentence structure holds true for indicative and imperative sentences, by interrogative sentences are slightly changed--the indirect object and its modifiers come before the direct object in that case. Auxiliary verbs do not appear in questions- in spoken Sikliss, an interrogative sentence is said with the same sort of emphasis that would be found in English for a question.

Words that are associated by ownership or possessiveness are often strung together to form a new word. As an example, the name of the language, Sikliss, means "the gods' speech" or more accurately, "the speech of gods". Possessive nouns/pronouns and genitive nouns would be combined into single words that would translate back into "wagon of mine", "carrot of the rabbit", and "dress of mother". However, sometimes words are condensed to become equivalent to the more standard form of possessiveness. In English, you should add a 's to the end of a noun to indicate that it owns the following noun. In Sikliss, the -al suffix can be added to a word combo to indicate the ownership of the last noun over the first. So you could rewrite sikliss (the speech of gods) as liss'sikal (the gods' speech).