KHAZALID – BASIC STRUCTURE

Whilst Khazalid undoubtedly has a formal grammatical structure it is very hard for an outsider to figure out what it might be. In general, Khazalid places the subject before the verb and the object afterwards, but emphasis of pronunciation alone can sometimes determine a word's position within the structure of a sentence. In other cases the importance of a particular word can demand that it be placed first in the sentence. Such words are often placed first out of respect and then again in their proper place later on, for example, 'the King – I went to see the King.' When repeated words are written or carved they commonly appear as individual runes at the start of a sentence and Klinkarhun elsewhere.

The first principle of the Dwarf tongue is that almost all of its words represent solid physical things. There are surprisingly few specific words for abstract concepts. As a result many words double up as both a physical thing and an abstract concept strongly associated with that thing. For example, the root word for 'big-stone' is kar and the most common word for a mountain is karaz – the 'az' ending denoting a single material thing or specific place. The same root word, kar, is also used to mean enduring in the form 'karak' – the 'ak' ending denoting an abstract concept. Thus Karaz-a-Karak, the name of the Dwarf capital, means 'enduring mountain' or literally 'big stony stone place', though the name is more attractively rendered into Human speech as Everpeak.

Curiously the Dwarf word for the race of Men is umgi whilst its abstract form of umgak means 'shoddy' – the Dwarf word being equivalent to 'man-made'. This demonstrates just how important it is to look at the end of Dwarf words – for it is these special 'signifiers' which usually tell you what the word actually means. There are many types of signifiers, some of which are given below, and by combining the different signifiers with root words it is possible to expand the basic Khazalid lexicon given in this book.

Although root words are often used on their own, many Khazalid words consist of a root word followed by one or more signifiers. So for example:

Some root words don't exist in a separate form at all. If a root word consists entirely of consonants it is usually written with an extra 'a' at the end but this is dropped when a signifier is added. For example, 'Ska-' is the root for 'thief', 'theft' and 'to steal'.

As in the example above – verb signifiers usually appear at the end of words. In Khazalid, almost every noun has a verb form which is usually denoted by '-it' in the present tense and 'ed' in the past. Tenses other than the simple present and past are denoted by additional words before the verb rather than by different endings – the equivalent to 'will steal' (an skit) in the simple future tense. Although separate words, these are often written together as shown.

THE KLINKARHUN

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