Knowing Your Field of Study
We’re not the first people to invent a language. Not by a long shot. There are nearly a thousand constructed languages in the world (conlangs), some of which consisted of only a dozen words and phrases before they were scrapped, some that took lifetimes and were ignored, and others that flourish because they make sense, they sound cool, or the culture surrounding them is interesting. Some famous conlangs include Esperanto and Lojban (both constructed as languages meant to be simpler than other languages and spoken internationally), Elvish and Klingon (which were made famous by the culture surrounding Lord of the Rings and Star Trek, but were not originally meant to be spoken en mass), and small, personal projects like Talossan or Verdurian (which face the challenge of actually gaining more than a number of students in the hundreds). So many conlangs have been lost forever, with no speakers left alive, yet others, like Esperanto, have over one hundred thousand fluent speakers.
Varn is a fictional world, and its languages are a priori, a term meaning “having vocabulary made from scratch”. It does not draw on existing languages, nor does it attempt to replace or surpass any. It’s also not merely an exercise, because they’re being put up here on the world wide web for millions of people to see. Its success depends entirely on your willingness to learn and your interest in the culture or sound of the languages.
A lot of learning a language is knowing how to learn a language. This website has a guide to teach you what’s important in learning a language. Sometimes dull, and though the trial videos are limited, it will give you a better general idea about learning languages. Maybe we’ll eventually develop a Rosetta Stone-like program in order to standardize the learning for you guys.
Until then, feedback is an amazing thing, and you can let us know what would make this more interesting for you guys. Expect some sort of “common phrases lexicon” to pop up soon. Thézum so far seems to be the most complete language, grammatically, so also expect some updates there, very soon.
The most difficult thing for us is finding a way to make it easy and enjoyable for you to learn.
Âma Hëm Hël, (“bye for now” in Thézum)
-A/N
Each Day the AboveFog We Give Thanks
The AboveFog, or the Super Hums of the sky, are a focus of religion on Varn. The only thing that can be seen of them from the ground are the tentacles, which mostly dangle aimlessly from the fog. The only other parts of the Super Hums that can be seen from the ground are the shadows of their bellies. From this we get the sacred symbol used to depict the AboveFog, as carved by the Théz and Dhel.
The Théz word for AboveFog is ”SītDhô” (pronounced sight-thou). They have revered the mystical beings since they first became sentient and have worshiped them steadfastly throughout their development as a species and society.
Since the AboveFog have physical being, the Théz do not have a need for idols, but they do set up shrines in honor of their deities. Some groups of Théz even follow around the shadows of the AboveFog until they recede back into the unknown.
They do not have a different story for each Super Hum, either, but rather most of their legends involve a collective or community (though rarely more than one Super Hum is seen at a time from the ground; they can sense others hidden in the fog).
Some of these stories do have singular Super Hums either rebelling or growing old, which shows that they find even the things they worship to be fickle and mortal sometimes.
A Source of Inspiration
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNLfNe12BKE
This is the link to a feature length documentary about hypothetical lifeforms on another planet. We did not make the film, nor do we own any of the rights.
It’s a neat, scientific endeavor and, essentially, we’re exploring the same sort of thing but looking at it from a cultural and linguistic perspective when the species are more advanced. We will be making biological assessments about the creatures on Varn as well, and eventually we’ll hopefully have an even better idea of the whole world than all of the theoretical things in this film.
Enjoy, but remember that this isn’t our work. Don’t claim it’s ours and we won’t get in trouble. Nobody gets hurt. 
-A/N
The First Hōn
Welcome to Varn History 101.
First thing’s first: how do the inhabitants of Varn keep track of time?
- The largest measurement of time is a Hōn. It is the equivalent of about 2.5 Million Earth years.
- Below a Hōn in length is the Rôn, of which there are 5 in each Hōn.
- Each Rôn is divided into 500 Ô. Each Ô is approximately 1029 Earth years.
Now it’ll be easier to look at the smaller increments of time and work to a midpoint:
- the smallest amount of time is a Heet, the equivalent of 1/4 of a second.
- 400 Heet go into one Së, which is about 100 seconds.
- 400 Së make one Ön, 11.1 Earth Hours.
- 3 Ön make one Kën/ P’ôt/ Wëétūr (a “Day” in Dhel, Thézum and SïnThsaéTh respectively), also equivalent to 33.3 Earth hours.
- 402 “Days” go into one Hën, a Varn “Year”. This the same amount of time as 1.4 Earth Years
- 735 Hën are in one Ô.
This sets the basis for all scientific chronological study of Varn. The concept of time was first invented by the SïnThsa when they began taking down records on their walls. The time it takes for “one day” on Varn is a few hours more than the Earth day. Since most of the creatures of Varn don’t have any optical receptors (excluding Dhel), they figured out the length of their day’s length based on temperature. They actually function better in the cold and can therefore qualify as “nocturnal” by our standards.
The First Hōn
Essentially, it was dark and quiet, with very little visible life.
That was all.
Dhel Font (Downloadable)
This is a downloadable font for the script that the Dhel species uses in their writing. Not all letters have an English equivalent in terms of phonetics, so some of the key placements are arbitrary. Being a True Type Font (.TTF) it can be installed on most Operating Systems and used with most keyboards. It was created using myscriptfont.
A later post will give more insight as to the sounds of Dhel and the writing system employed by them. For now, just have some fun messing around with the way it looks.
-A/N
Super Hum Sketch 1
Super Hum
This is one of the first multicellular organisms to have developed on Varn. It floats through the metallic fog of Varn’s atmosphere and proves to be a mystery to the inhabitants of Varn. Called “The AboveFog“, it is worshiped by Dhel and Théz alike. The name “Super Hum” itself comes from the SïnThsa word Hum, used to describe the awesome creature.
It exhales Hydrogen gas from the vents in its body, and has a skirt of thin hairs/ cilia that are used to pick up nutrients in the metal-rich air. Both of these features are also used for directional control, though it cannot see where it’s going as this species has not developed any sensory parameters.
-A/N
Single Celled Oxyder Sketch 1
Single Celled Oxyder
This was the first of the life on Varn, composed of metals and metal oxides. These cells began to form colonies of midair “balloons” which later developed into Hums.
Ăsōma/ Ōtma/ hWënté/ Hello
Welcome to the world of Varn, the Upper System. This blog is used to track developmental progress of the creation of this fictional world. There are a few things that go into to whole process of creating Varn: the story, the way it looks, and the way that the creatures speak. On the blog, all three of these will be updated when new information is “uncovered”. There are three sentient species located on Varn: Dhel, Théz, and SïnThsa. Each of those has its own language, which will also be developed and updated on this blog.
Glad you could join us on this adventure,
Alex and Nathan
tonguesofvarn
