Baronh is a fictional language

Fictional language

Fictional languages are by far the largest group of artistic languages. Fictional languages are intended to be the languages of a fictional world and are often designed with the intent of giving more depth and an appearance of plausibility to the fictional worlds with which they are associated, and...

 created by Japanese science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 author Morioka Hiroyuki and used in Crest of the Stars

Crest of the Stars

is a three-volume space opera science fiction novel written by Hiroyuki Morioka with cover illustrations by Toshihiro Ono. Beginning in 1999, the novels were adapted into anime series, the first of which ran for 13 episodes on WOWOW...

and Banner of the Stars

Banner of the Stars

is a series of science fiction novels written by Hiroyuki Morioka, which serve as sequels to Crest of the Stars. The series is ongoing. Three of the four novels in the series have been made into anime.- Characters :Main characters:...

. The name Baronh means "language of the Abh

Abh

The Abh are space-dwelling people in the fictional universe of Crest of the Stars. They are the rulers of an interstellar civilization with feudal government and social structure.- Definition:...

".

Origin

The Baronh language is derived from the ancient Japanese language

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

, spoken until the beginning of the ninth century and recorded in Kojiki

Kojiki

is the oldest extant chronicle in Japan, dating from the early 8th century and composed by Ō no Yasumaro at the request of Empress Gemmei. The Kojiki is a collection of myths concerning the origin of the four home islands of Japan, and the Kami...

, Man'yōshū and other ancient documents. It is not precisely the ancient language itself, but a reconstructed one which is named Takamagahara language after the mythological heaven in Kojiki. In Crest of the Stars, Japanese revolutionists seeking to remove foreign influence from the Japanese language created their own "purified" version, which removed borrowed words and expressions and revived ancient ones. It was these revolutionists who established the colony that created the Abh, giving them their language.

After the Abh were freed from slavery, their language quickly, in a few generations, changed into the form seen in Morioka's works of fiction. Having not been allowed to write as slaves, the Abh previously had no writing system, and that is the biggest reason why this change proceeded so swiftly. In order to write Baronh, an alphabet called Ath, which means "letter", was created, based to some extent on the Japanese kana

Kana

Kana are the syllabic Japanese scripts, as opposed to the logographic Chinese characters known in Japan as kanji and the Roman alphabet known as rōmaji...

.

Grammar

Baronh is an inflectional or synthetic language

Synthetic language

In linguistic typology, a synthetic language is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio, as opposed to a low morpheme-per-word ratio in what is described as an isolating language...

: affix

Affix

An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes...

es are attached to a fixed stem to express verbal aspect and mode, and case in nouns and pronouns, Nouns and pronouns have seven cases which affixes were derived from particle

Grammatical particle

In grammar, a particle is a function word that does not belong to any of the inflected grammatical word classes . It is a catch-all term for a heterogeneous set of words and terms that lack a precise lexical definition...

s in the Japanese language. Some Japanese particles remain as such.

The seven cases of Baronh are:

1. nominative
   Nominative case
   The nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments...
   
    (used for the subject of a verb or naming a noun),
2. accusative
   Accusative case
   The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions...
   
    (used for the direct object of a verb),
3. genitive
   Genitive case
   In grammar, genitive is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun...
   
    (used to indicate relation or possession, often represented by the English "of"),
4. dative
   Dative case
   The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given, as in "George gave Jamie a drink"....
   
    (used of the indirect object of the verb, often represented by the English "to" or "for"),
5. directive (originally used to show the direction of movement, similar to terminative
   Terminative case
   In morphology, the terminative case is a case specifying a limit in space and time and also to convey the goal or target of an action.-Usage in Estonian:In the Estonian language, the terminative case is indicated by the '-ni' suffix:...
   
    or lative
   Lative case
   Lative is a case which indicates motion to a location. It corresponds to the English prepositions "to" and "into". The lative case belongs to the group of the general local cases together with the locative and separative case...
   
   , but used to show a location without movement in modern Baronh)
6. ablative
   Ablative case
   In linguistics, ablative case is a name given to cases in various languages whose common characteristic is that they mark motion away from something, though the details in each language may differ...
   
    (separation, source, cause, start point of movement)
7. instrumental
   Instrumental case
   The instrumental case is a grammatical case used to indicate that a noun is the instrument or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action...
   
    (instrumental, and a predicate of a copula
   Copula
   In linguistics, a copula is a word used to link the subject of a sentence with a predicate . The word copula derives from the Latin noun for a link or tie that connects two different things.A copula is often a verb or a verb-like word, though this is not universally the case...
   
   ).

There are four types of declension

Declension

In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...

 of Baronh nouns. In the first declension there is usually only one vowel

Vowel

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...

 and its place shifts according to its cases. For example, Abh is Abh in its nominative but changes as Bar in its genitive.

Adjectives have no change. Most of adjective consist of a stem and the ending -a, like bhoca ("large") or laca ("high"). A verb can be used as a sort of adjective in a form of its stem and -a affixes like the gerund

Gerund

In linguistics* As applied to English, it refers to the usage of a verb as a noun ....

 in English. Usually adjectives follow nouns like lartnéc casna (literally "princess first"). Adverbs have no change and many adverbs were derived from adjectives, like bhoci ("largely") or laci ("highly").

Spelling

Baronh is written both in Ath (their own letters) and in some other alphabets, like the Latin alphabet

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...

.

Each letter of Ath has its own sound, though some combinations like bh stand for other sounds. Such combinations appear between consonants letters.

Every vowel is clearly pronounced except occasionally "e". When "e" appears as a part of affixes, it frequently becomes silent (for example, byrec [byːr] 'fleet', cluge [kluːɡ] 'relax').

Some consonants become silent at the end of word or in a series of consonant letters. Digraphs

Digraph (orthography)

A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...

 in are used for fricatives. For example bh stands for [v], mh for [ɸ].

Greetings

• Cluge sa?: "Hello" (literally "Are you relaxing?")
• Fe cluge: "Hello" as a reply (literally "I am relaxing.")
• Carsisto!: "Hello" (in office: literally "Let's work")
• Bile éna!: "Bye" (literally "Good voyage")
• Froranto: "Farewell" (literally "I will never forget [you]")

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