Excellent background ! A silly thought occurred to me; the Zun-Kulla are the living folk, so if there was a zombie outbreak, would they be the Xo-Kulla ?
Sort: Trending
I hadn't actually thought of a living dead situation, but yeah I think they would.
One idea I was thinking of was that they'd refer to themselves as Zun-Kulla (Zoon Koolah is an idea for pronunication, but I'm not sure yet)
But, they'd use Xo-Kulla to refer to bodies, as they kind of see bodies as nothing without the spirit. But, they also refer to lets say tree's as Zun-Tree, or Zun-animal, Zun-Flora, or vice versa. I'm going to think up works for what they call trees, plants and animals though, because as written above it sounds weird !LOLZ
I feel I should warn you that you're skirting the lip of a very, very dangerous rabbit hole 😁
Before you know it, you'll have started constructing a language for them. But because the early bits might be one-off single words and phrases, you'll then have to try to disentangle the inconsistencies by creating a grammar that works and has rules that avoid ret-cons.
The solution is to create at least the structure of a grammar first ! Looking at the way Tolkein and MAR Baker worked is a good idea, although both of them were professional linguists. Tsolyani, which was one of several languages Barker created for his Empire of the Petal Throne setting is an interesting mix of Urdu, Maya and half a dozen languages which came with not just grammar and vocabulary, but also it's own script (yeah I know... crazy for what was just a game).
So at a simpler level, I'd go with noun roots that are vaguely familiar (to make them easy to remember) and then stick to singular/plural endings. So Taru=Tree, ulla is an ending indicating plural, so a group of trees would be Zun-Tarulla. Oops, I just fell down that rabbit hole.....
And now you understand some of the twisted thought processes I go through when I put a world together 😁
This is such an in depth way of putting it all. Really amazing stuff here, and a lot to contemplate. I was working on some Doshan language, because I figured it would be better for them to have their own unique words for things, but decided not to go heavier into it because I know I'll be lifting a rock I'm not sure I can carry haha
Zun-Taru, and Zun-Tarulla are brilliant names for tree's. I think this could be a good way to create place names. Like, Xo-Taru, could be an old abandoned town, named for the dead tree in its centre.
In fact, having some words for location indicators, like Grove - Gura, Valley - Livu, then there would be numerous options for place names. Zun-Tarulla Guro, or Xo-Tarulla Livu.
Interesting stuff indeed.