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The War Men's Brutal, Guttural War-Tongue (Shokurung)

Introduction

The War Men's Brutal, Guttural War-Tongue (Shokurung) is a harsh, unforgiving language for a harsh, unforgiving people. It consists mainly of grunts, yells, making cool-sounding noises in the back of your throat, and biting your tongue (or someone else's tongue, if you wish to express affection).

Grammar is exceedingly simple. There are no past or future tenses, as the War Men prefer to concentrate on the present, but there are several special War-Tenses: "angry," "enemy," "dead enemy," and "'angry' again for some reason." These tenses are marked entirely by changes in inflection, with no change to grammar and no conjugation. English-speakers find direct translations of War-Tongue crude-sounding; for example, "Make my axe better" is best said as something like "Good axe me." Such a crude language, while positively detrimental to getting anything done in peacetime, proves quite concise and to-the-point in war. However, there are a few songs composed in Shokurung, most notably Shokurung'a (My Axe).

Shokurung is not a difficult language to learn, but the lack of past and future tense does limit its use in day-to-day life. Still, in conventions, Shokurung speakers are barely outnumbered by English speakers--such is the language's popularity among fans of the series.

Phonetics of Shokurung

Because the War-Men never bothered writing, seeing it a waste of time, there is no proper written form of GWT. Transcriptions are performed using the Roman alphabet. All consonants are pronounced as in English. All vowels are always pronounced as: {A,E,I,O,U} as IPA {a,ɛ,i,o,u}

Phrases in Shokurung

Shokurung is an agglutanative language, in which morphemes are stacked into words and words are stacked into full sentences, uttered as if they were one word. This lends GWT to having short, to-the-point sentences.

Beginner's Shokurung

In addition to the established vocabulary, Shokurung also includes the j' agglutinative demarcater, which is used to prefix proper nouns when used in the langauge. This is done because names may appear similar to words that are part of the standard vocabulary and not including this demarcater can leave the meaning of the sentance ambiguous.

The use of j' can also be treated as the addition of a definate pronoun. In the case of Shokurung'Gr'z'tok (Gr'z'tok's Axe) there is no ambiguation so it is equivalent to Shokurung'j'Gr'z'tok, but Shokukung'Rahg implies a chief's axe, where Shokurung'j'Rahg implies the chief's axe.

Example Shokurung Sentences and Phrases

To assist in understanding of the spoken language, a sound clip of the following phrases said in order is here. (also: here.)

(Note: Slightly out of date, I realized I had gotten the grammar a bit off. Still, it's almost the same. I seem to have developed a chest cold, so I can't re-record it right now. -patkelly)

Shokirang Phrases

These are phrases in Archaic Gutteral War Tongue (Referred to as Shokirang by the War Men; a language that bears fair resemblance to modern Shokurung) that by their repetition have entered the lexicon proper--yet, it should be noted, in their original Shokirang.)