The Quick Brown Fox

It has been a shamefully long time since I last updated, and I can't claim entirely truthfully that I've been too busy to attend to this blog. I have been busy, sure, but I have had plenty of time in which I could have written languagey things. I've just been having trouble getting up the urge.

But now I've managed to get it up. The urge, I mean. I just needed to find a topic to centre this post on, and I think I've come up with a doozy: pangrams.

For those of you who don't know (and I had to Google the word myself), a pangram is a phrase which contains every single letter of the alphabet. A well-known English pangram is the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Why shouldn't Voraki have a pangram or two of its own?

(I like stuff like this, because it gives me a ready-made challenge to stimulate me when I'm faced with language block. Shame it took me a month to get around to doing anything about it.)

Just to make this more fun, let's translate the "quick brown fox" pangram wholesale into Voraki. It fits the society, after all. They have foxes, which tend to be brown in the summer. They have dogs by the dozen, and it's not unlikely that one or two of them are lazy.

Tangental reminiscence alert: when we learnt about pangrams in primary school (or about the letters of the alphabet; that option is more likely, now I come to think about it) my teacher wrote it as "jumped". In her version, the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. This blatant and discriminatory exclusion of the letter S annoyed me no end, partly because no-one else noticed, but mostly because I wasn't brave enough to point it out to her. (I was one of those annoyingly nit-picky children who could be found loudly singing the correct lyrics to the assembly hymns, thank you very much, and feeling slightly superior to the masses of students and teachers who seemed determined to sing the final verse as though it didn't have a lyrical twist in the middle.)

I digress.

Before we can start maing pangrams, we should jot down the letters which are going to be in our alphabet. I'll use the ones we've worked out so far, and add one or two whose absence would be pointless to explain away, such as P.

Let's go, then. Arranged roughly by sound:

Hard consonants:
D (dog)
T (teapot)
K (gun or cut; pretty much interchangable)
P (purcussion; can also sometimes sound like ball)

Vowels:
O (orange)
EH (hen)
U (pudding)
EI (mine)
OH (both)
A (ant)

Soft consonants:
N (normal)
M (mook)
S (snake)
L (able)
J (yellow)
G (a gutteral h, sort of like clearing one's throat)
CHA (cha)
H (helen)
R (rush)
TH (a normal th sound, but sharper and harder, with more emphasis on the t)

Okay then!

Let's make us some sentence structure. We already have a few of the rules for this down, such as the French-style noun-before-adjective structure.

[The] [fox] [quick] [and] [brown], [this was] [jumping] [above] [the] [dog] [lazy].

Remember, folks, we want every single letter of the fledgeling Voraki alphabet to be represented in this simple phrase. Yep, even the S.

We have a few of the words already:

Thu [fox] [quick] [and] [brown], ak [jumping] [above] thu [dog] [lazy].

Not a bad start: we've already bagged ourselves th, u, a and k.

I'll confess this to you right now: what follows is going to be a lot of crap and making things up off the top of my head. The only rules are that the words have to be pronouncable, and they have to use up between them every letter of our invented alphabet. Let's begin the pulling out of letters from our virtual scrabble bag with dogot, or fox - a word which, yes, has a lot to do with the fact that foxes are canine. It's a meta joke, though, since dog in English obviously isn't going to be dog in Voraki. In fact, dog can go right ahead and be gos, which looks like "goose" and is pronounced like a cockney "horse". Man, and I haven't even gotten into the cryptozoology of this setting yet.

(There be dragons, although they might not live in Vora itself.)

What we have now:

Thu dogot [quick] [and] [brown], ak [jumping] [above] thu gos [lazy].

We still need to use up a few letters here, folks. Heck, let's render and as cha, so that we only have nine to go: EH, R, N, EI, M, L, OH, J and H.

Adjective time!

Quick! This can be jo, a snappy word which uses up that pesky J!

Brown! How about heisa, a veritable alphabet soup of a word?

Lazy! I vote for nehlcha, which has a lovely glutinous sound to it!

Now we just need to make jumping and above out of M, R and OH, plus extras. We have quite a lot of leeway here, so let's make them sound really good. I really want jumping to be chajator, just because I like the sound of it, so let's turn jumping into mohs to mop up those last couple of letters. Don't be upset about getting chosen last, little guys. It's really nothing personal.

So, gang. Repeat after me.

Thu dogot jo cha heisa, ak chajator mohs thu gos nehlcha.

Magic.

Next time: I'm tired of these crazy Latin characters. Let's make us some runes!