Well speaking for myself, I did it because I find it truly fascinating. After discovering Tolkien in junior high school--thanks entirely to my most influential mentor, "Magistra" Karen Knapp--I became intensely interested in comparative linguistics and artificial languages. Being the days before the internet, I did not know at the time that others had been doing this for years. Today they call themselves Conlangers ("constructed language-ers"), but at the time, I fancied myself one of perhaps only a handful of individuals world-wide who spoke a tongue understood by no other living person.

Originally just a writing system I would use to keep private notes to myself, my language developed and grew to include very rich grammatical rules, an extensive vocabulary with etymological considerations; and eventually inscriptions, hierograms (sacred writings), and poetry. Its grammer is inflected with three cases and encompasses several moods and three tense systems--each with a perfect and an imperfect--with simple and progressive action being synthetically represented. There are four adjectival/adverbial degrees, four genders; and singular, dual and plural suffixes along with a number of tranformative affixes and many logical conjunctions, correlators, subordinators, rogators, inquisitors, and gramatically active determiners. Rathvardic has a past history with a proto-language, "Slasing", and a future direction--a mutation vector.

Since I began this back in junior high, I have learned much about the spoken word. I've studied a number of languages (dead ones in particular!) and linguistics in general, and there is much I would do differently if I could, but like any speaker of any real language anywhere, I'm stuck with history and the mother tongue as is currently exists. I've been indulging the idea of starting fresh but have yet to actually begin. Till then, I'm the only speaker of Rathvardic and because it is the language of my personal notes, that is the way I wish to keep it.

I would consider it immensely satisfying if someone unfamiliar with constructed languages were to stumble across my own attempts and as a result, find the inspiration to undertake a similar labor of love. There can be no real practical outcome of such an undertaking--if we've learned anything from the failure of Esperanto--but as a work of art, even an intellectually abstract thing can be of great beauty. And when such a creation develops into its own literature and art and culture, then it has truly taken on a life of its own. It is the child that has grown up.

It is with this hope that I share the following short poem.

Because sívrǔn follows its associated preposition, eth, hen[s] not strictly necessary except to indicate definite pronoun.

éslis wǔlthsem, Ambidirectional construction: which noun-form functions as the adjective (no adjectival suffix present). Best taken as an appositive or a kenning.

wǔlthsem, Transliterative remark: Notice absence of a stress virgule on the stressed, first syllable. The stress occurs on the diacritically marked ǔ. Rule p16.

cént... ǔlin, appositive.

ri, Auxiliary introduces weak hortatory subjunctive (rhetorical imperative mood). Rule p52.

Note usage of both forms of the preposition, "of": line 2, si; line 4, sei. The latter adds to the assonance in line four.

ei, Preposition for änésslathin.

twéithorn, Poetic genitive (archaic Slasing form).

Notice that the poem begins with mellúviel ("sing") and ends on the word thénnyǔld ("silenced"): "Sing... silenced."

Notice how the final trochee of each line enjambs with the initial short syllable of the next line to create an apparent dactyl to introduce the two dactyls that follow; this eases the line breaks and in doing so, syncopates the second hemistich, now with its lone, two-syllable foot.

Another noteworthy feature is the over-all architecture of the poem: in an admittedly classical sense, the poem sounds perfectly balanced and complete by the end of the fourth line. The final coda line however, suspends our anticipation until we reach the final word, thénnyǔld, "silenced", thereby increasing its effect dramatically.

Copyright © 2004 - 2011 Brian Zegarski, all rights reserved.