The Andrean Prophesy
My alternate history novel
Wealthgiver
features two constructed languages. One (Bessian) is for daily use and will not concern us here, but the other is Ancient Thracian, used ritual purposes such as giving prophesies. One such prophesy sets the story going in chapter three.
One reader was curious about how Ancient Thracian1 is pronounced. He also asked for asked for a more accurate, less rhyming, English translation.
First, The Prophesy of Andrei in the original Ancient Thracian:
Kōgaió ió
Pódes xénai. Dymó
Dóubous tous me
Iérous phlēsté.
Porostreiýn iáes 5
Ápaes tḗs rhódaes
Pephlón iēn tóus
Sélkanthas se strátous.
Xēthópeti pós iá,
Stas zýn Xēthópaniâ. 10
Zēltón ze gríssma tón
No êan désyme xinón.
Pleistorós êrgetar.
Sarḗ ton désaitar!
The lines are each seven syllables long, with a beat of pause between each line and the next (except line 5, which has eight syllables long and has no pause). For example, the first line is chanted “ko-o-ga-i-O i-O (pause).”
Long vowels (for example ē) are always chanted as two syllables. Diphthongs (for example ai) are usually two syllables as well, but sometimes they are a single syllable. See the difference between iáes (i-A-es) and Xēthópaniâ (“kse-THO-pan-ya”). A circumflex over a vowel indicates an on-glide, such as â (“ya”) or ê (“ye”), but there is no spelling to differentiate an off-glide from a diphthong. Xénai is pronounced “KSE-na-i) but désaitar is “DE-sai-tar.” The reader is expected to know the difference. Accented vowels are stressed.
X is pronounced “ks.” TH, KH, and PH might once have been pronounced as aspirates (tʰ, kʰ, pʰ) or as fricatives (θ, x, ɸ), but are today pronounced as normal unvoiced stops: t, k, p.
Now, the rhyming translation:
On Holy Mountain foreign Feet.
You make Sacred Depths with smoke replete.
Rivers ruddy stream around [5]
The armies tugging at her gown.
With Master at hand, the Mistress will stand. [10]
If gold and debt with welcome's met.
Comes the Wealthgiver. May you him give her!
And the literal translation:
On the Holy One
Foreign Feet. With smoke
The Sacred Depths
You fill.
Stream [5]
The red waters
Around her peplos
(which is) tugged at (by) armies.
With the Guest-master behind,
Stands the Guest-mistress. [10]
If gold and the foreign debt
Ever are welcomed.
Wealth-giver comes.
May (the) Maiden welcome him!
If this translation has tickled your curiosity, why not…Leave a comment…and ask your own question?
Read the story for free on Royal Road.
Or buy a subscription on substack or patreon and read ten chapters ahead.
1 This is a fictional reconstruction of the real but poorly-attested Thracian language.
One reader was curious about how Ancient Thracian1 is pronounced. He also asked for asked for a more accurate, less rhyming, English translation.
First, The Prophesy of Andrei in the original Ancient Thracian:
Kōgaió ió
Pódes xénai. Dymó
Dóubous tous me
Iérous phlēsté.
Porostreiýn iáes 5
Ápaes tḗs rhódaes
Pephlón iēn tóus
Sélkanthas se strátous.
Xēthópeti pós iá,
Stas zýn Xēthópaniâ. 10
Zēltón ze gríssma tón
No êan désyme xinón.
Pleistorós êrgetar.
Sarḗ ton désaitar!
The lines are each seven syllables long, with a beat of pause between each line and the next (except line 5, which has eight syllables long and has no pause). For example, the first line is chanted “ko-o-ga-i-O i-O (pause).”
Long vowels (for example ē) are always chanted as two syllables. Diphthongs (for example ai) are usually two syllables as well, but sometimes they are a single syllable. See the difference between iáes (i-A-es) and Xēthópaniâ (“kse-THO-pan-ya”). A circumflex over a vowel indicates an on-glide, such as â (“ya”) or ê (“ye”), but there is no spelling to differentiate an off-glide from a diphthong. Xénai is pronounced “KSE-na-i) but désaitar is “DE-sai-tar.” The reader is expected to know the difference. Accented vowels are stressed.
X is pronounced “ks.” TH, KH, and PH might once have been pronounced as aspirates (tʰ, kʰ, pʰ) or as fricatives (θ, x, ɸ), but are today pronounced as normal unvoiced stops: t, k, p.
Now, the rhyming translation:
On Holy Mountain foreign Feet.
You make Sacred Depths with smoke replete.
Rivers ruddy stream around [5]
The armies tugging at her gown.
With Master at hand, the Mistress will stand. [10]
If gold and debt with welcome's met.
Comes the Wealthgiver. May you him give her!
And the literal translation:
On the Holy One
Foreign Feet. With smoke
The Sacred Depths
You fill.
Stream [5]
The red waters
Around her peplos
(which is) tugged at (by) armies.
With the Guest-master behind,
Stands the Guest-mistress. [10]
If gold and the foreign debt
Ever are welcomed.
Wealth-giver comes.
May (the) Maiden welcome him!
If this translation has tickled your curiosity, why not…Leave a comment…and ask your own question?
Read the story for free on Royal Road.
Or buy a subscription on substack or patreon and read ten chapters ahead.
1 This is a fictional reconstruction of the real but poorly-attested Thracian language.
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Okay! Let's talk about languages!Yes, we can't know exactly how a given word was pronounced before the era of sound recordings. However, there's more information on, for example, Ancient Greek, than you might at first guess. The Greeks sometimes wrote about their own language, especially comparing the way a word was pronounced in one dialect versus another.
Also, the words used in poetry have to rhyme and scan, which is how we know, for example, that Ancient Greek used morae rather than syllables and pitch accent rather than stress accent (like modern Japanese). Other languages, like Latin, borrowed Greek words, and spelled them in ways that reflected foreign sounds: and must have been pronounced different from native Latin and (that difference is that Greek theta, khi, and phi were aspirated stops, which Latin lacked).
A few more gaps can be filled in with comparative linguistics. The Proto-Indo-European language that Greek evolved from had "laryngeal" consonants (evidenced by Hittie <ḫ>) which in Ancient Greek are reflected in vowels attached to a "rough breathing" diacritic. From its description and comparison to related languages, (and the way Greek words were spelled in Latin) we can be confident that the "rough breathing" mark indicated an /h/ sound.
At this point I should pause for breath, and also say that my poem, although its spelling conventions make it look like Ancient Greek, is actually a language I invented. It's my attempt to reconstruct Ancient Thracian, a real language spoken north of Greece in classical antiquity, but very poorly attested. Only a handful of inscriptions have survived, and nobody is sure how to read them. My "reconstruction" of Thracian is almost entirely speculative.
I don't know much about Hebrew, but I looked up ayin on Wikipedia. They call the Darth Vader sound a "voiced pharyngeal fricative." And you can read some of the debate about how exactly it was pronounced in the Bronze Age. This debate will never be resolved, because the Bronze Age is a long time and people spoke Hebrew over a large area. There must have been different Hebrew dialects that pronounced ayin differently. However, you could make a case for some particular standard, say the way King Solomon spoke.I'd bet if you used a time machine, though, you'd find out your guesses were wrong :)
A good example is Hebrew and the letter (ayin) ע. No one really knows how this letter is pronounced. English speakers tend to treat it as a silent consonant that takes all of its sound from the vowel that follows it. People from other communities will give it a sound deep down the throat, expelling air out the center of the mouth... sort of like the sound that Darth Vader made when breathing. It's tough to do right, but I think that is more accurate than simply leaving it silent.
Michael Crichton in his book, Timeline, dealt with this problem of pronunciation by time traveling scholars who were trained in ancient languages, but had to adjust their pronunciation (and frankly, vocabulary) when confronted by people in 1357 who used several languages on a daily basis. I recall one character saying, "He speaks [Latin] like Cicero."
I think it is a problem that an author cannot completely resolve... unless the author has a time machine and listens carefully to how the people actually spoke.