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!

Now we have Twitter too!

I've recently created a Twitter account, check it out https://twitter.com/#!/ArassarShelak

Keep in touch, don't miss any news on what's happening with the Khalani Project! I will post new information, update alerts and interesting links, now you can all follow me also in Twitter.

Khas arashad!

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!

The Greetings

We learn from the games that the Protoss have very specific greetings. In the first StarCraft series we are saluted by the advisor, as soon as we start the Protoss campaign, with "En taro Adun!". We learn from the manual that Adun is actually a historical figure very important in Protoss lore, among other things he helped the Dark Templar escape to Shakuras after the retreat of the Xel'naga and the division between the Khalai Protoss and those who rejected the Khala. The salute is oft translated "In honor of Adun!", the actual rendering is closer to

en      tar       -o      Adun

/ɛn ˈtaɾɔ aˈdun/ 

for    name     his     Adun

The structure obeys Khalani rules of syntax. The possessive construction in Khalani is

noun + possessive + "possessor"

So literally means "for his name Adun" which translates to "for Adun's name" or, what is the same, "for Adun's fame/glory/honor", tar is actually a concept which englobes what we regard as fame or renown. This is a very common and standard greeting among the Protoss. We are also told that both Khalai Protoss and Dark Templar acknowledge Adun as a very important figure, and the Nerazim (or Dark Templar) have another salute which they commonly use among themselves

Adun toridas

/aˈdun ˈtɔridas/

Adun shelter-DEF-PRES

Which translates literally as "Adun shelters (you)" but can also be translated as "May Adun give you refuge" as he did historically to the Dark Templar allowing them to scape the madness in Aiur. Here the verb is tor both the definite and present suffixes to mark the Present Simple. I will further explain how these are used in following posts.

It is worth mentioning that before Adun's time Protoss used the greeting "en taro Khas" (featured in my profile) with the same meaning but using the name of the famous Khas which discovered the psionic link all Protoss share and instituted the Khala discipline. Other common salutes included

Khas arashad

/kʰas aɾaʃad/

Khas be-praised

 This would most likely be used only by the Khalai, the followers of the Khala. Also there were many other salutes available for Protoss, similar to these, "Adun guide us", "Honor guide us" and so on, this could be used in this way:

tar        -o    Adun   ruulas

/ˈtarɔ aˈdun ˈruːlas/

name    his   Adun   guide-PRES

This would be translated as "May Adun's name guide us", which could be shortened to "Taro ruulas", "his name guide us", and another common greeting:

var         -un       ruulas

/varˈun ˈruːlas/

honor    our        guide-PRES

Oft translated as "Our honor guides us", which can in turn be used with some other possessive suffix and combinations to denote "my honor guide us" or "Adun's honor guide us" as the moment demands. Next time I'll be writing about the possessive suffixes.

About inconsistencies

Many will be aware of the fact that there is no real agreement on Khalani transcriptions into the Roman alphabet. The fact is that there was no standard whatsoever followed in any of the novels and authors just went as they wanted when facing the problem. The StarCraft quotations were no better in this respect. It seems they were intended as an approximation to English pronounciation, but in fact confused more than they helped for lack of a standard way to actually express the sounds of Khalani.

While facing the challenge of creating a consistent language for the Protoss I had to make some decisions on the way the words and phrases would be transcribed. Most of them will show no significant changes from what fans are used to seeing in such places as the StarCraft Wiki, some others had to be changed in favor of a standard or agreement. My approach was intended to be as close to the known transcripts as possible, while at the same time taking the similarities to make fixed rules. I will include the IPA of most words and sentences when needed. Links to show how the vowels and different consonants sound will be provided.

Some diphthongs and consonant clusters will be hitherto standardized. For instance the famous name Raszagal will here stand for /'ɹaʒagal/ which would sound very close to English "rashagal" the way Zeratul pronounces it in StarCraft II. Or the example below Adun toridas! is written in IPA for better understanding.

A different matter is the one about the tribal names of the Protoss, which I think are Human translations of the actual names in Khalani, since they represent stars and constellations as are named by Humans. So this will be addressed also in following posts.

En taro Adun!