At peace...

In my last post I promised to look into the phrase 'Und lara khar', translated in a Starcraft book-series as "Be at peace!". So as I promised, this is it. First of all the phrase is a wish, used as a farewell greeting between two individuals, but it can be also used with a group.

The first "und" part is a Khalani particle for making a wish, kind of an optative mood or a kind of auxiliary morpheme. Here it is stating "I hope that...", it is followed by "lara khar", this means quite literally "with peace" (Notice that "khar" has already been stated as meaning "peace"). The thing is that the whole phrase literally means "May (you) be with peace", the pronoun is obviated here as the meaning is pretty straightforward from context.

This conjunction, lara, means "with, alongside, next to" and is very similar to other conjunctions in other languages such as Latin "apud". In this case the peace is wished to be "with" or to accompany the person to whom it is wished, and this is how Protoss normally say this expression "with peace", not using "at" as in English but rather "to be with a state of mind", to be "accompanied by peace".

In any case, the full sentence would be;

Und nas lara khar

May you be with peace, i.e. 'Be at peace'

But you could also say, more grammatically;

Und laranas khar

May peace be with you

Notice the subtle difference in meaning and the -nas ending which is the second person singular. All pronouns are appended this way to this particular conjunction. If we were to substitute it for the first person singular (I, me);

Und laranakh khar

May peace be with me

Here the pronoun changes when it is attached to the conjunction, as the other sentence would have been;

Und ankh lara khar

May I be with peace

Of course the verb "to be" is obviated, since there is no such verb in Khalani, so it is understood from the particle "und". This is also applicable as a normal "with" conjunction, thus;

Ankh laranas, Nas laranakh

Me with you, you with me

Or in a sentence;

Und taro laranakh var!

May you honor his name with me!

This is all for today, next time we'll see some more pronouns!

Adun toridas!

New ways of greeting

Lately I've been thinking we don't have that many ways of greeting each other in the Protoss' language, or even also how to say 'farewell'. I would like to propose now some for the followers of the blog according to the growing lexicon we have now.

We are all very well acquainted with such greetings as the famous en taro Adun! or Adun toridas (this specially for Dark Templars), or even also with some also mentioned and re-interpreted in this coherent attempt of the language as taro Adun ruulas. We can now use some of the new following ones:

• En Aiur. This is the classical "For Aiur", not a lot of mystery there.
• En var. This is also used in the games "for honor".
• Var en nas. I'm now coining this one with the meaning "honor for you", it could be used as a farewell also.

Myself I started to use some of the following as well:

• Taran/Tarum arashad. Which I've translated as "your name be praised!" (with the variation for singular or plural). This I particularly use as a farewell.
• Terr en nas. Meaning "respect to you".
• Taran/Tarum varad. "Your name be honored".

So, I hope you enjoy these new greetings and farewells and use them in your games or role-plays. More is about to come soon enough, stay tuned!

 Adun toridas!

Waiting...

Sorry for the long wait. I am back now and as a special treat we are going to talk about the verb 'to wait' in the language of the Protoss. You may have heard this expression in-game, when uttered by the Dark Templar:

Zerashk gulidas

The meaning of it you may discover using the Lexicon. I have translated it as: Oblivion awaits! which I think is suited for the character.

Zerashk      gul-id-as

Oblivion   wait-DEF-PRES

The verb is in the present and it may also be translated as: 'Oblivion is waiting'. You may notice that as in the case of toridas you need a defining tense suffix -id before the present tense -as. This happens in most of Protoss verbs, and there are only few exceptions which will be later explained.

In fact you can also use zerash as a verb to mean 'forgotten, be forgotten', so you can get a phrase such as:

Khar   zerashad!

peace  be-forgotten

Forget peace!

Used seconds before attacking a nasty foe and destroying an enemy army. I leave you with this for now, and hope to write soon! Don't forget to comment if you have any questions or just want to leave a greeting!

Taro Adun ruulas!

Possessive Suffixes

Here I have prepared a chart of the main Khalani possessive suffixes. This suffixes are used as seen in the example "En taro Adun!" in order to convey possessiveness of the subject and also as common possessives, taroon Arassar my name is Arassar.

Person	Singular	Plural
1st	-oon	-un
2nd	-an	-um
3rd	-o (masc.) -im (fem.)	-im

Note that there may be dialect divergencies, but these account for most of the Khalani possessives. It is worth mentioning that there are also left-overs of a very ancient honorific possessive system that used to also indicate the power relationship between speaker and possessor.

You may note that these are used very frequently in greetings, so we have

En tar-o Adun!

for Adun's (masc.) name

but we also have

En harud-im Raszagal

for the memory of (fem.) Raszagal

This is composed of harud memory and the suffix -im for the 3rd person feminine, thus "her memory". Note that -im can either be the 3rd person singular feminine or the common 3rd person plural. It is common for groups of people to use the 3rd person plural suffix as a kind of title, kind of how it is used in "Your Majesty" and such constructions.

Neraz-im

The Dark Templars

Taldar-im

The Forged (ones)

This is common practice and you will see it pretty oftenly.

Well, this is all for today! If you have any doubts just comment!