Greadian
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The site is pretty stub yet but I will be adding more stuff as often as I can!
Please, comment, give advices, analyse, anything. But please, do it in the forum so everything would be in the same place easily readable both for me and everyone else. The link is here: Forum for Greadian
A language doesn't belong to anyone. It is a gift that humankind has. This is also the reason why I am writing most of this in third person singular. I don't want to highlight that the honour of the existence of this language belongs to me.
Contents |
What is Greadian?
Greadian is a constructed language developed by Ilya Blashkin, invented since 1999. It was invented before anything else existed, but within time there were invented an own place, culture, and people. A language can't be a language without a history, culture and people so it is all needed to make a language "alive".
The word "Greadian" doesn't make any sense in Greadian. Its name in Greadian is "gralíki", which in the language means "the sacred language". The word "grail" (in greadian i grála) means literally "hidden and hallowed". It has nothing with the well known legend about the holy Grail to do.
Real life history
From the early years of his life he had had "frames" of the Greadian language in his head. He had with his best friends a constructed world and they were inventing simple languages for people living in the worlds. In 1999 Ilya was involved with church and was taught to read old liturgical languages like Old Church Slavonic and Koinee Greek among the other modern day’s languages. The old languages apparently inspirited him to start translating liturgical texts to the language he had in his mind. First the language was a big mess but he didn't give up. Ilya decided to let the language develop in its own time without trying to build it considerably into the most logic way.
Within next years the language developed and became closer to the form it has today. It became more agglutinative, regular and started to sound really good. Greadian is developing more and more all the time so it is still under construction. Most of grammatical details exist and are working perfectly, but some need revising and even reconsidering, but as said, it is developing in its own time.
The name Greadian has an interesting story. In the beginning Ilya called it simply Melkenian (for no reason why). One day he was watching Monty Python with a friend of him and there was the part telling about the pilgrim of the Holy Grail and the friend suggested it could be called Grailian - a language for the people that are secretly hiding the holy chalice. He didn't have a better idea for the name so he started to call it Grailian...until he had to tell about the language to someone else. You know, it is really confusing when people talk about such a well known thing as Grail. He changed it to Greadian and it works perfectly for him and other people. In the Greadian the name of the language is still remaining as "Grailian", though.
Nowadays his language is well developed enough to be spreaden and taught. He is also translating various texts (liturgical texts, prosa, poetry...) into Greadian in order to have a lot of reading material. Using a language through reading, writing and speaking it, is always the best way to learn it.
About Greadian as a language
In here I am going to introduce you the Medieval Greadian as it is the one that is used mostly in literature that Ilya writes and its grammar is the most interesting.
Greadian has a lot in common with archaic languages like Latin, Greek and Proto-Slavonic. There are also a few loans from Germanic languages. Mainly, only the Greek loans can be recognized without proper discovery. The grammar itself is quite individual with some few things being in common with Old Greek (meaning Koinee Greek and Ancient Greek) and Latin.
Greadian isn't just a one certain kind language. It has many variations, it has spoken and literal language, more poetical and more humorous variation, dialects... it has even somewhat of an etymology, and much more.
As mentioned above, I am introducing you (completely) the Medieval Greadian, which was the most interesting. But Greadian has also Old Greadian and Modern Greadian. I will introduce them briefly as well To give you some chronological range, see the following:
- Old Greadian was used in between of 2nd century AD till 8th century AD.
- Medieval Greadian is used since 8th centudy AD and it was revised in the middle of 15th century AD.
- Modern Greadian is the modern days' spoken language. It has developed well since the 17th century AD.
The grammar is far from easy, but it's also quite logical and when the idea is understood, it can bring a lot of pleasure to the speaker hence a huge amount of detailing expressions.
Writing systems
First Greadian was written with Polytonic Greek, but the orthography is very complicated as Greadian has much more phonemes. In the Middle Age they started experimenting with Cyrillic, which became the official alphabet since 1876 AD. They also experimented with Devanāgarī, Arabian and Latin alphabets but they don't work as well as Cyrillic.
It would also be interesting to create an own alphabet. But for learning such a difficult language as Greadian is, it would not be a good idea to do a completely new alphabet.
Syntax and structure
- Greadian is considered (by Ilya) to be an Indo-European language. He is however not sure about more exact classification yet.
- The structure is nominative-accusative.
- Morphology is highly agglutinative.
- The word order is officially free but still, it is mostly following SOV, with an exception of the active voice which prefers SVO.
Word classes
The word classes are classified a bit differently because of the importance of many of them, but it is mainly following the common structure. There are ten word classes in Greadian:
- Nouns
- Adjectives
- Numerals
- Pronouns
- Prepositions
- Articles
- Affixes
- Adverbs
- Verbs
- Particles
The links to the grammar
1. Introduction topics
- Cyrillic alphabet, pronunciation and orthography
- Numeric System
- Date, time and other standards
- Greek alphabet
- Latin alphabet
- Phonology
2. Word classes
3. Grammatical topics
4. Samples
5. About other versions of the Greadian language
