Teonaht
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| Teonaht | ||
|---|---|---|
| Created by: | Sally Caves | 1962 |
| Setting and usage: | Fantasy setting of the Teonim | |
| Total speakers: | — | |
| Category (purpose): | constructed language artistic language fictional language Teonaht |
|
| Category (sources): | draws on Indo-European languages: Romance, Germanic and Celtic | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | art | |
| ISO 639-3: | — | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
Teonaht is a constructed language that has been developed since 1962 by science fiction writer and University of Rochester English professor Sarah Higley, under the pseudonym of Sally Caves. It is spoken in the fantasy setting of the Teonim, a race of polydactyl humans who have a cultural history of worshipping catlike deities.
Teonaht uses the Object Subject Verb (OSV) word order, which is rare in natural languages. An interesting feature of Teonaht is that the end of the sentence is the place of greatest emphasis, as what is mentioned last is uppermost in the mind. The language has a "Law of Detachment" whereby suffixes can be moved to the beginnings of words for emphasis and even attach onto other words such as pronouns.
Teonaht is a highly elaborated language, and many consider it one of the finest examples of an artistic language since the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. It is often cited, like Verdurian, as an example of the genre in articles on the world of Internet-hosted amateur conlanging.[www.rochester.edu/College/ENG/newsletter/conlang.html][1]
[edit] History of creation
The seed for Teonaht was planted when Caves was 5 and received her first kitten, as her childlike imagination made up the Feleonim, a race of winged cats. She started making the Teonaht language for these cats when she was 9 and beginning to learn Spanish. She was delighted to learn that adjectives followed nouns in Spanish unlike in English, and made this the first rule of grammar in her language. Caves was further inspired when she read about Tolkien and his "secret vice" in her teens. The language developed further as Caves grew up and learned more languages. In the late 1980s she put her language under much clinical grammatical analysis and developed the Law of Detachment and the zero-copula in her language. The Teonim developed into their present human form, but maintained their feline deities.
Caves continued to keep her language a secret as she grew up, even after she began writing science fiction and teaching. In the 1990s, however, with the advent of the Internet, she hosted a webpage on the language and joined the CONLANG message group. The language took off there and has year by year held the interest of online conlangers and conlang aficionados.
Aside from Spanish, Teonaht has been influenced by the other languages Caves has studied -- French, German, Old English, Old Norse, Old French, Latin, Middle Welsh, and Old Irish.
