I guess part of the thing that is interesting to me, and I guess being a student of Literature, I am horribly fascinated with fictional languages. How extensive is the vocabulary of the Old Tongue as it exists right now? I’m assuming that there is more of it than we have seen in the novels. And do you know if there were rules set down to explain the creation of the vocabulary? And kind of alongside that, is there—obviously I kind of take the answer about London to be a similar question, or a similar answer towards whether or not there’s an actual philological basis for the Old Tongue—part of what I’m wondering is…I’ve been using the Shienaran phrase “ Suravye ninto manshima taishite “ as sort of our closing for the podcast. I’m tentatively wondering how badly I’m butchering that.
Oh, you’re spot on. Spot on.
Yay Andrew!
Sweet!
Jim actually spoke pretty extensively in public about the Old Tongue, and I even pulled up a letter that he had written about it in which he says, “The Old Tongue is based on, for example, the languages: Gaelic, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and some additions of my own—bridging material if you will. Grammar and syntax are a blending of English, German, and Chinese with some influence from a set of African languages read about long ago, and all but the oddities of structure long since forgotten.” He has converted constructions…the thing about the Old Tongue, the way that it’s constructed…it is a very loose language, like Latin I guess; it can be presented in almost any order and be intelligible to someone who knows it, and there are several conventions involved in it which could be explained for a longer podcast, but those are the basics. He really did pull them from a lot of different areas, and he started by constructing the language—as I recall there is a list of 850 or 880 common words that you need to know to be able to speak in English, and I don’t know who created these, but he had that. We have file, and he modified that, kicking out some words like ‘electricity’ and so forth that wouldn’t be useful in this, and adding some others, and putting definitions to them in Old Tongue. I never added it up, but he said we had a file of about a thousand words, and this dictionary will be published at a later time.
Great.
That is awesome.
And that will be part of the encyclopedia, actually.
That’ll be great.
I can’t wait. That sort of leads me into my next question which is something that, two years ago when Brandon was out on the Mistborn tour—the last Mistborn book tour—during an interview, I asked him if he could please come up with some way for us to say phrases having to do with the Light, such as ‘Walk in the Light,’ or ‘May the Light illumine you’ in the Old Tongue, and he said he would do his best, and I think he just forgot. But we do have the audio; he kind of sort of promised us. We’re hoping that maybe you can bail him out on this one. [laughter]
Well, I think all will be revealed in the encyclopedia.
Aww, I can’t wait that long!
Except what isn’t revealed.
How far is the encyclopedia coming? People ask me about it occasionally, and I’m like, ‘I dunno; they’re working on it.’
Well, it’s been back-burner recently because we’re doing Towers of Midnight , but that’s my next project to get back into, doing basically the skeleton for it, and after A Memory of Light we will go full bore on it.
Oh, excellent. I remember Harriet saying that it was due one year after the final book, whenever the final book is out.
Right.
And we’re working on it in between when we get time, when we’re not doing podcasts and so forth. [laughter]
Oh, now you’re making us feel guilty. [laughter] But not very.
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