The Ananagyu

This is the race of vampires I outlined a while ago in my weblog. Since mentioning them, I’ve been playing around with them a bit more and I’m currently sketching a language for them. There are several different subgroups I know of at the moment, like the elegant Ennyos Vladyu (‘Nosferatu’) and the Wambilyu (‘Vampire’). Humans are known to them as Romyu, a word derived from the name early humans gave to themselves.

All I’ve up about them right now is some notes. I fully intend on fleshing this out and putting their language online.

Background notes

Here’s a little thing I wrote over a year ago (2002-01-08 to be exact). It used to be up on my original weblog on weblogs.com, but seeing as I’m consolidating everything I decided to move it here.

Needless to say, I’ve changed my mind about them a bit, so I intend to update this to take that into account some time soon.

I haven’t edited this. It’s all train-of-thought stuff that I wrote whilst watching Habit.

Many years ago, far away from earth, there was a species who, like us, evolved sentience, discovered technology, science, philosophy, civilisation, and space travel. But during this time some of their number discovered a form of immortality. And they changed. They established themselves as an elite. Their abilities came with a price: their bodies were unable to produce certain substances they needed to survive without special food. Their peons became the herd to produce the food they needed—in their blood.

Millenia passed and it came time for them to leave their homeworld. They created generations ships to carry themselves to worlds they could either adapt themselves to or adapt for themselves. One of these ships came across Earth.

They found certain incompatabilities between themselves & the native life so they changed themselves and integrated their peons with a native species. They took this opportunity to enhance what they themselves were capable of to give themselves a greater sense of grace and the limited ability to deform themselves.

They hid themselves amongst their herd, doing their best not to allow themselves to be discovered. They used they subtlety to once again make themselves dominant over their herd: us.

Well? There it is. It’s pretty open ended. I tried to keep it that way. This isn’t SciFi for those who might think otherwise—it’s the basis of a gothic horror. Whatever science fiction elements there may be in it are simply there to explain why & how both we & they exist. In that universe, their manipulation of out ancestors explains why there’s a missing link between us and the other apes in the fossil records, for instance.

What are the vampires like though? Well, amongst us, they make themselves look like us. They are humanoid but have a limited ability to change their appearance. They do look rather more androgynous than humans, in fact they are neither male or female. They cannot reproduce by themselves and require a human host for their offspring. They take a male form when they wish to impregnate; female, to act as a receptacle for human sperm.

They are capable of mating with one another, but their numbers are neither great enough, nor are they ever concentrated enough in one spot to comprise a sustainable gene pool. They use human genes to enhance their own genetic diversity. Human pollution is so minimal though that the crossover matters little and irregardless the genetic markers for vampirism are dominant.

They have control over when they are fertile and rarely produce an unwanted child. They keep strict control over their numbers to ensure their existance is thought of as a myth and that they don’t endanger the existance of their foodsource.

They are largely amoral when it comes to humans. They feel that as their creations, we belong to them. However, unless crazed or hungry, they rarely kill. This is not so much out of sympathy for humans but to protect themselves from lynching.

Sometimes they do form friendships with humans but this is taboo. It’s considered playing with your food.

They like to push forward human innovation sometimes when they feel things are going too slowly and feel bored with their surroundings. It happens when you’re immortal.

They inspired the myths of the incubi and the succubi demons in medieval times.

Radical shape-shifting is quite painful for them, especially the direct transformation from male-form to female-form and vis versa. Many stay in one form or the other for lengthy periods of time, only performing the transition when need be.

a-Illiyar

The name of the language translates literally as “of the words”. If you’re interested, the root word is the irregular liquid-fortis noun “Ildiat”, meaning “word/symbol”.

Nouns

The language has three cases: Absolutive, Oblique, and Genitive. It’s essentially an ergative language.

There are two articles: the definite article and the partitive article. The partitive article is used with the partitive form of the noun and has the same form as the singular definite article. The definite article has two forms: the singular i(y)- and the plural a-. The singular article causes an initial mutation (partitive does not). The mutations are:

The iy form only appears in front of nouns starting with a vowel.

The partitive is the form used when counting, even if the number is one. The singular is used for single objects, and the plural when the number is unknown. Using the partitive with the number one reinforces the fact that there is one and only one object. The partitive, when used without a number, must take the article. this gives it the meaning “some” or “any”. When used with numbers, the article is dropped.

Nouns fall into two conjugations:

Strong nouns

Strong nouns have a stem that ends in a consonant cluster consisting of a nasal, rhotic or liquid consonant followed by a voiced stop, which may also be followed by a liquid or rhotic consonant if the initial consonant in the cluster was a nasal. Nasals may be bilabial (m), alveolar (n), or velar (?). Thus the pattern may be lb, ld, lg, rb, rd, rg, mb, mbl, mbr, nd, ndl, ndr, ?g, ?gl, and ?gr.

The paradigm for nasal-fortis is Wambliy (usually translated as Stalker).

The genitive is characterised by assimilation of the cluster. In the oblique, the cluster changes voicing.

There are other varieties, including liquid- and rhotic-fortis. The behaviour is predictible across these two as well. In the case of liquid-fortis, the patterns are: lb, lp, ld, lt, lg, lk. The rhotic-fortis patterns are: rb, rp, rd, rt, rg, rk.

Lenis Nouns

Paradigm is «Romyi» (Human)

All the other regular nouns belong to this group. Note that nouns in this paradigm whose roots end in a voiced consonant have that consonant unvoiced for the genitive case, e.g. Vladyi > Vlada > Vlata.

Conjugation table for the noun Romyi:

Some Collective Nouns

The collective form is used when referring to pluralities considered as a single unit, e.g. Humanity, Birds.