Infernal Grammar

[Douglas Muir 406]

In my PBP campaign, the PCs recently found an inscription in Infernal that reads: "She is not allowed to lie." They were puzzling over it, and one player pointed out that "lie" has two or more meanings. That prompted the following:

In Infernal, that verb has a very specific meaning. (Otherwise, you can guess what would happen.)

She = intelligent female-gender, status presumed higher than you the listener/reader (1)

cannot = as with English, there's a bit of ambiguity in this verb: it can mean either "is incapable of" or "is not permitted to". The "not permitted" connotation is stronger than in English, though. Like, if an Infernal speaker were to say "you cannot cross the street when the light is red"? It would carry the implication that jaywalking is punishable by amputation or worse.

lie = are you surprised to know that Infernal includes many, many different words for "lie"? (2) The one used here means "to willfully and knowingly speak, write, or otherwise communicate a falsehood." This particular Infernal verb is very precise, and quite deliberately does not include incomplete truths, omissions, or statements that are deliberately misleading, as long as what is actually said or otherwise communicated is the truth.

(1) Infernal pronouns vary depending on the status of the speaker relative to the status of the listener. So, "I" and "you" have four versions each -- higher status to lower, lower to higher, equal status, and status-neutral (used when the relationship is not yet clear). Infernal third-person pronouns can have *ten* forms each for various possible combinations of speaker, listener, and person discussed. This form implies that the writer or speaker is higher status than you, and so is "she", whoever "she" is.

(2)Infernal also has a number of verbs for "telling the truth". Most of them translate as "tell a half truth", "tell a misleading truth", "tell a truth calculated to distract an enemy or cause despair", and the like. There is a verb that translates as "tell the whole truth, clearly and plainly". It carries a very negative connotation and is usually used only in the context of torture, mocking a defeated enemy, beating information out of a captive or inferior, or judicial procedure. (3)

(3) The Infernal words for "torture", "mocking a defeated enemy", "beating information out of a captive or inferior", and "judicial procedure" are all derived from the same root.

Doug M.

[Detect Magic]

I don't understand (1). Status higher than than "you"? I'm very confused.

[Quandary]

don't worry. amputation quickly resolves any confusion. [/partial truth to conceal more painful truth]

[...back to spanish subjunctive conjugation studies for me...]

[Detect Magic]

I'll keep my head, thank you. Better yet, I'll convince my next DM to allow me to play an Ettin. Then I'll have two (just in case).

[henkslaaf]

Are there any source materials on Infernal?

I'd like to learn :-)

[Douglas Muir 406]

Detect Magic wrote:

I don't understand (1). Status higher than than "you"? I'm very confused.

"You" = the person spoken to. A third person pronoun involves three people, right? The speaker, the person spoken to, and the person spoken about. In this case, the inscription is implying that (1) the person who wrote the inscription was higher status than the reader, and (2) the "she" mentioned in the inscription, whoever "she" is, is also higher status than the reader. If this seems kind of arrogant and obnoxious, right, exactly.

(There are actually RW languages that do something very like this.)

Doug M.

[Detect Magic]

I don't see where status is mentioned in the text. Where is it implied? Are we to assume that this is a characteristic of Infernal (and therefor not readily apparent)? Also, What real world languages do you mean? I'm not pressing you to be a smart ass or anything, I'm just not learned in any (that I'm aware of).

[Douglas Muir 406]

It's a characteristic of Infernal, at least IMC.

Which RW languages: Javanese, for one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javanese_language#Politeness (and that article barely scratches the surface).

Doug M.

[Detect Magic]

That's interesting. Reminds me of arabic culture. They definitely posture with one another in a similar fashion. Formal/Informal is very important to them.

I was always curious about the picture-perfect guest room my friend's mother kept for company. When he explained it to me, it all made sense.

His mother (like many middle-easterners) would invite someone into the guest room, bring them her best tea and snacks, talk with them for a bit, and then invite them into the downstairs living room.

They don't use that room for anything else. It's just for show. I can still remember the look of horror on his face when I sat on those stiff, pillowed couches. I wasn't aware of the social dynamic, or the significance of the guest-room.

Supposedly, from his perspective, it's all a charade. It's not polite (or considerate), in his opinion, because it's forced. His mother doesn't want to do those things, she has to.

I still find it odd.

[Detect Magic]

I've always imagined celestial to sound like music, and abyssal/infernal to sound monstrous, but hadn't put much more thought into it than that.

I like what you've done with the language. I hadn't considered what Infernal grammar might consist of. Now I do.

That said, this seems spot on, especially considering the importance of hierarchy in a LE/Planar culture. I can't help but imagine an imp scrambling before Asmodeus himself, struggling to construct the right sentences to appease him. As the imp stutters and pauses, Asmodeus grows bored. When will it ever end? Sometimes even the Lord of Hell needs a holiday.

[Douglas Muir 406]

Abyssal grammar is very different. Lots of irregular verbs. (Actually, pretty much all the verbs are irregular.) On the other hand, it's an agglutinative language that allows a clever user to generate all kinds of neat neologisms on the fly.

YMMV, but I imagine Abyssal as sounding rather slobbery, with lots glottal stops and labials and plosives. The vowel sounds tend to be long and drawn out. It sounds arrhythmic and gurgly. It's a great language for gloating, for evil monologues, and for mad, howling raving at the moon.

Infernal is all complex vowels, harsh gutturals and fricatives, hisses and clicks. Good spoken Infernal is staccato and rapidfire. You know the South African language with all the clicky sounds? Imagine that being barked by a senior Prussian officer in an SS uniform.

Most mortals find Infernal unpleasant to listen to, but if you're Lawful Evil you may well fall in love with its precision and its power. Sometimes you just need a language with eight different ways to say "flay alive" and entire grammatical declensions devoted to violence, treachery and deceit.

Doug M.

[Douglas Muir 406]

A bit more on Infernal, for no particular reason.

Infernal is very, very rich in honorifics. Choosing the correct honorific is a major social minefield. If you choose one that's too weak -- like addressing the Ice Devil as "Great Fearsome Lord" instead of "Most Fearsome Lord", for instance -- it's an insult. Choosing one that's too strong is just as bad, because it forces the recipient to correct you. Instruction in Infernal spends a lot of time on this.

There are a lot of humilifics -- words to indicate low status -- as well. They're not quite as dangerous as the honorifics, but they're not without risk, either. If you say to a senior devil, "your obedient servant greets you" instead of "your obedient and humble servant greets you", you're risking at best a sharp rebuke. At worst, the devil may ask you to demonstrate that you deserve the promotion you've just given yourself.

Doug M.

[Icyshadow]

I'll dot this thread. Always good to keep tabs on linguistic threads like this.

[GozrehTime]

I agree that Infernal should have a strong honorific system.

Actually, I might even be inclined to say that there's a very high degree of artificiality in the lexicon. Phonemes might be assigned arbitrarily (but systematically) to certain concepts. There have been attempts to do this for human language (e.g. John Wilkinson), but the effort is, of course, futile. Yet in fantasy worlds, all is permitted. Thus, the words for "lie" might contain the same consonant cluster, but with different vocal infixes (think non-concatenative morphology, as in Arabic). Also, verbal conjugation and nominal declension would have to be very strict. I suggest a profusion of nominal cases and a wealth of inflectional affixes on verbs for tense, aspect, and subject/ object indexing.

Traditionally, contracts with the Devil were conducted in backwards Latin, no? Perhaps the language might be parsed similarly. Verb-initial word order, prefixes instead of suffixes, and a highly synthetic inflectional system.

[Douglas Muir 406]

There is indeed a high degree of artificiality in Infernal. Asmodeus made it up, after all, after his departure from Heaven. In some cases, he drew on Celestial; many Infernal words and roots are twisted mockeries of Celestial originals. Most, though, are completely arbitrary. Asmodeus finds that fitting; you pick something arbitrary, right at the start, and then you rigidly impose it forever.

Doug M.

[Douglas Muir 406]

Yes, verbal conjugation and nominal declension are very strict. Absolutely strict. There are no irregular verbs in Infernal. None. It's a language governed by rules with no exceptions. Very, very complicated rules -- but rules.

There's a Hellish equivalent of the Academie Francaise that maintains the strict purity of the language. No neologism is acceptable as good Infernal until and unless it's approved by them. But every now and then they'll promulgate a rule change -- adverbs of motion now come before the verb, not after -- and everyone must start speaking this way at once. It's unclear if there's ever a reason for these changes, or if Asmodeus is just amusing himself.

Doug M.

[David knott 242]

For that inscription -- unless the carver of the inscription is Asmodeus himself, how can he be sure that his inscription will never be read by somebody of higher status than himself? Would somebody of higher status reading the inscription take offense and punish the inscriber, or would he just conclude that it was not addressed to him?

[Douglas Muir 406]

Words for relationships present particular problems for the translator. Infernal actually has several grammatical systems devoted to defining relationships. Unfortunately, their scope is very narrow. For example, there's a whole set of enclitics that help define your relationship to someone; instead of just saying "Bob", you can say "Bob-ul", "Bob-lah", "Bob-ek", and so forth. These enclitics add meaning: "Bob, who I hate", "Bob, who I fear", "Bob, who is my rival and who I am planning to kill", and so forth. There are a lot of these enclitics, but they pretty much all boil down to some variation on hatred, fear, contempt ("Bob, my slave"), malicious amusement ("Bob, that fool") or grudging respect ("Bob, my boss").

As for translating relationships the other way, let's consider... oh, "sex", "friendship", and "love".

You know how many languages have genders and declensions for nouns? (English doesn't, but German, Russian and Latin all do.) In human languages, gender and declension are often random -- like, in German, the knife is neuter, the fork is female, and the spoon is male. In Infernal, the declensions have meanings: there's a declension of violence that includes nouns of violence, a declension of treachery, a declension of deceit, etc. There are several words for sexual actions in Infernal, but they're all in the declensions of violence or deceit. The English word would translate as "nonviolent sex without trickery", and you'd need to use a prefix or an adverb to get that across.

"Friendship" is even worse. There's a transitive verb for "acting friendly towards someone", and you can use a suffix to turn it into a noun: "the act of behaving in a friendly manner". But it automatically takes the declension of treachery. "Friend" doesn't translate well either; the closest you can get is "comrade in arms" or "long-term ally", modified by the enclitic that indicates "who I don't (yet) have a reason to hate".

As for "love"... well, in Infernal, transitive verbs of action that take a person as the direct object can take two forms, active and passive. Here's an example. In English, you can say "Alice murdered Bob" (active) or "Bob was murdered by Alice" (passive). In Infernal, "was murdered by" is a single word. You switch from passive to active (attack/was attacked by, eat/was eaten by) by adding or removing a single syllable. So, the English sentence "I must go now to be beaten by my master"? In Infernal, that's just four words.

With me so far? Okay, there's also a prefix for verbs that indicates choice or volition. So you can say "I run" or "I eat", or you can add the prefix and say "I choose to run" or "I decide to eat".

Right, well: there's a verb that means "to degrade, abase, or humilate". Love, in Infernal, is the passive form of that verb with the prefix of volition. So, "I love Alice" would translate as "I have chosen to be abased, degraded or humiliated by Alice".

Doug M.

[Douglas Muir 406]

David knott 242 wrote:

For that inscription -- unless the carver of the inscription is Asmodeus himself, how can he be sure that his inscription will never be read by somebody of higher status than himself?

Well, in this particular case, it's a Way of the Wicked campaign, and the (evil) PCs are running through a short dungeon set up to test them by their (evil) boss. The boss, or one of his minions, put the inscription there, and presumably it'll be taken down after the PCs are done and the dungeon is turned to other uses.

That said, yes, written Infernal is more likely to use the status-neutral pronouns than spoken Infernal, since you never know who might end up reading.

Doug M.

[princeimrahil]

I just have to say: this is the best thread EVER.

Carry on.

[Drejk]

Great ideas.

I would, however, remove generic "can not" forcing the devils to use specific "is incapable of doing" or "is forbidden from doing" verbs.

[Jim.DiGriz]

And here I thought this thread was going to be about some of the posts we see on this forum.

[Scintillae]

Dotting!

[Irbis]

Jim.DiGriz wrote:

And here I thought this thread was going to be about some of the posts we see on this forum.

No. That would be Abyssal grammar!

[Orthos]

Quote:

Good spoken Infernal is staccato and rapidfire. You know the South African language with all the clicky sounds? Imagine that being barked by a senior Prussian officer in an SS uniform.

So using this.

[Douglas Muir 406]

The foregoing may have given the impression that Infernal is a very precise language that does not admit of ambiguity or nuance. Not quite. Individual words do indeed have very precise and clearly defined meanings. But Infernal grammar allows a skilled user to be very ambiguous indeed.

For instance: Infernal, like English, has a number of verbal moods -- the indicative, the subjunctive, and so forth. But infernal has a number of moods that English lacks; while English has just one imperative mood, Infernal has three, and it also has a mood of menace. Using the mood of menace can dramatically transform a statement. Consider the sentence "Come with us, Bob. The boss wants to have a little talk with you." If the verb wants is conjugated in the mood of menace, then Bob has every reason to be nervous about the upcoming interview.

However, the simple indicative and the mood of menace both take the same form when placed in the conditional. So if you want to be ambiguous about whether a statement is a threat or not -- i.e., you want Bob nervous, but not so nervous he bolts and runs -- you just say "Bob, if you have a moment, the boss would like a word." The if/would conditionality eliminates the distinction between the two moods, and Bob is left guessing.

Infernal is full of these sorts of things; they're a feature, not a bug. So a fluent and intelligent speaker can find all kinds of ways to blur motivations, intentions, and facts.

Doug M.

[Cavian]

Keeping track of this as well since my players have had a few run ins with Contract Devils as of late and they're currently using a contractual injunction to keep one of them off their back... to say he doesn't like that is putting it mildly.

[Judy Bauer]

I was pondering whether evidentials (markers of whether you have direct evidence for a statement, or it's reported by others, or it's guessed to be true, etc., like in Cheyenne and Kalaallisut) might be a characteristic of Infernal. (In such languages, it is... not false, but ungrammatical—like using the wrong pronoun or tense—to say "It is said that X" when you actually know X to be a fact.)

But that flavor of kind of precision feels like honesty to me; it might be more LG than LE, since it leaves less room for ambiguity-as-traps. I can't decide!

[Jeff Erwin]

Judy Bauer wrote:

I was pondering whether evidentials (markers of whether you have direct evidence for a statement, or it's reported by others, or it's guessed to be true, etc., like in Cheyenne and Kalaallisut) might be a characteristic of Infernal. (In such languages, it is... not false, but ungrammatical—like using the wrong pronoun or tense—to say "It is said that X" when you actually know X to be a fact.)

But that flavor of kind of precision feels like honesty to me; it might be more LG than LE, since it leaves less room for ambiguity-as-traps. I can't decide!

Perhaps the marker would be (as kinda suggested by others) something that associates the statement with greater or lesser "authority." A bold-faced lie by Asmodeus would have the highest category of "authority," and an imp's simple report of facts would have a very low "authority." Sort of a linguistic letterhead or such.

Of course, by inserting such an implied authority, one could compel obedience falsely if the authority is improperly cited (i.e., fictive). One's own rank and power could be marked as to how it was granted and by whom. The question - does one dare check the citation?
I.e.: Jeff, para-lector of Vudrani quibblings, ab Quindovatus grudged, soul-assayed per Sersine, named Erinyes.

[|dvh|]

Douglas Muir 406 wrote:

You know the South African language with all the clicky sounds?

You're probably referring to !Kung, which is a pretty interesting language.

[Douglas Muir 406]

Infernal avoids evidentials as a grammatical tool. There are several words that serve as adverbial evidential markers; "I have it on the highest authority" is two words in Infernal, while "it is a truth generally known, that" is just one. These are, of course, regularly used to mislead or to outright lie.

Celestial, on the other hand, is quite strongly evidentiary. Vocabulary, grammar and usage all point towards clearly defining what is true. You can lie in Celestial, but you have to work a bit to say something misleading.

Many Infernals can speak Celestial, but they find it almost painfully unpleasant. A language with only one word for torture but dozens of words for fine gradations of "charity", "mercy" and "forgiveness"? A language with a Consensual Mood, entire tenses devoted to statements of optimism and joy, and a grammatical case for nouns of benevolence and kindness? A conversation in Celestial leaves most devils wanting a brain-rinse afterwards, or at least a couple of stiff drinks and a good round of minion-kicking.

Doug M.

[Tirisfal]

princeimrahil wrote:

I just have to say: this is the best thread EVER.

Carry on.

[Drejk]

Jeff Erwin wrote:

Perhaps the marker would be (as kinda suggested by others) something that associates the statement with greater or lesser "authority." A bold-faced lie by Asmodeus would have the highest category of "authority," and an imp's simple report of facts would have a very low "authority." Sort of a linguistic letterhead or such.

Of course, by inserting such an implied authority, one could compel obedience falsely if the authority is improperly cited (i.e., fictive). One's own rank and power could be marked as to how it was granted and by whom. The question - does one dare check the citation?
I.e.: Jeff, para-lector of Vudrani quibblings, ab Quindovatus grudged, soul-assayed per Sersine, named Erinyes.

Great idea - grammatical form dictated not the truthfulness or evidence but authority of the source.

I'd add a separate grammatical form for "it is widely known" on Material Plane, other planes, depending on how authoritative they are for devils and each of the nine circles of Hell. I think that Abyss/demons and Maelstrom/roteans would have the lowest authority possible while Lawful Neutral and Lawful Good planes and entities would be of moderate authority.

Hell circles' forms could overlap with forms based on infernal ranks (e.g. 1st circle - lemures, 2nd circle - imps...)

[Jeff Erwin]

Drejk wrote:

Jeff Erwin wrote:

Perhaps the marker would be (as kinda suggested by others) something that associates the statement with greater or lesser "authority." A bold-faced lie by Asmodeus would have the highest category of "authority," and an imp's simple report of facts would have a very low "authority." Sort of a linguistic letterhead or such.

Of course, by inserting such an implied authority, one could compel obedience falsely if the authority is improperly cited (i.e., fictive). One's own rank and power could be marked as to how it was granted and by whom. The question - does one dare check the citation?
I.e.: Jeff, para-lector of Vudrani quibblings, ab Quindovatus grudged, soul-assayed per Sersine, named Erinyes.

Great idea - grammatical form dictated not the truthfulness or evidence but authority of the source.

I'd add a separate grammatical form for "it is widely known" on Material Plane, other planes, depending on how authoritative they are for devils and each of the nine circles of Hell. I think that Abyss/demons and Maelstrom/roteans would have the lowest authority possible while Lawful Neutral and Lawful Good planes and entities would be of moderate authority.

Hell circles' forms could overlap with forms based on infernal ranks (e.g. 1st circle - lemures, 2nd circle - imps...)

It is known.