While reading through the passages of this book, one might feel that their knowledge of the Shokrafian language is lacking. In order to circumvent the language gap between human readers and this alien text, the following document will introduce to reader to some basic language concepts in Modern-Standard-Shokrafian.
Stones
The building blocks of the language. Stones are 3-dimensional in shape, which might be hard to wrap one’s head around when used to our 2-dimensional writing system. Stones act as words in Shokrafian, but are closer in concept to Chinese Kanji in the sense that they are constructed of smaller internal symbols.
The 5 world foundations
The Shokrafian language divides the world into 5 distinct categories, each stone has to fall into one of these categories:
- Actions - all that describes the movement of the world.
- Sentients - all that posses consciousness (be it knowingly or unknowingly).
- Objects - all non-sentient solids.
- Concepts - all that helps describe all other foundations.
- Deities - all that are beyond the limits of other world foundations.
Stone forms
Forms allow the addition/expansion of meaning for stones. This allows keeping a relatively manageable collection of stones while allowing the language to evolve and change over time.
Regular stone form
The base stone form. This form is most common and used to refer to the stone’s common modern meaning.
Temporal (stone) form
A form of passive time for objects. The meaning of the object is inferred by the periodic context. For example, the word Markam (often translated to Spheres) has a general meaning of floating, circular objects. But during early periods this word was reserved only to stars. Over time the word became more “inclusive”, starting with planets and going all the way down to the size of floating heads.
Cold/dark form
A hypothetical form that refers to a meaning of a stone assuming a context in which Farfa does not exist. This form has been banned in the Shokrafian empire and it is not taught in schools. The form has been preserved in some communities and is featured in some old editions of most Farfaist scripture. The Shokrafian authorities are conducting major efforts to confiscate all texts featuring this form.
Haga
The base grammatic unit in Shokrafian. A combination of Stones, similar in concept to a sentence in human languages. Hagas have structures that are derived from the order and form of the stones. Every Haga has a structure and a time context, not all structures and time contexts work together. For example, an archaic structure and a modern period context might sound weird to a native speaker.
Time/Periodic context
The temporal context of a Haga, there are many contexts, some deal with abstract time (past, future, present, etc… [each of the abstract time contexts has a prophetic version - prophetic-future, prophetic-past, etc…]). Some contexts deal with specific time periods in Shokrafian history and mythology (The creation, the age of giants, age of prophets, age of holes, etc…), others deal with general times that are common (time of war, time of a season, times of peace, a holiday, etc…).
It is usually discouraged to create new periodic contexts due to the existing amount, but the modular nature of the language allows speakers to do so as a form of slang or non-formal language.
The time context is based on the forms of the stones and their order in the Haga (the structure).
Haga-structures
The structure of a Haga. A specific ordering of stones, based on their foundation type and the amount of each type in the Haga. Haga structures are grammatic in nature, some more common structures include: description, quote, basic-causality, basic-question, indirect-question.
Haga clusters
It is common to formulate more complex ideas as a set of Hagas in a well known order of structures, this phenomena is known as Haga clusters.