Introduction

Dapnant (properly called Dapna'nt sitsath, speech of the city) is a language reportedly born from the contact of human and non-human races at the dawn of humanity. This web page reports on some of the linguistic facts about Dapnant, drawn from the classic account of Randolph Carter at the turn of the century. We shall pass over the issue of the validity of this information, as Carter's credibility, always suspect, is at particularly low ebb. The implications he offers as to the origins of the language, even though they are not stated outright, and his admitted sources of information (aided by a process of dedicated dream-research) are fantastic in the extreme. We will concentrate here on presenting the information in a more modern uniform format, and not address the issues of validity of the data. The language and texts we do having sufficient interest in themselves. What matter if, as many suspect, the whole matter is an imposture?

According to Carter, the language was spoken for a very long time in the land of Valusia (Vælushk). The Valusian serpent-people had obtained some protohumans (at an age well before conventional archaeology credits human existence) from the Elder Ones in Antarctica, in exchange for some assistance in the management of the shoggoth population. The Valusians accelerated the development of their new servants to make them more useful, and then served as their new gods for several millennia. The Valusians, however, became involved in a complex and protracted civil war that involved silent, concerted, individual-by-individual conflict, by stealth, poison and indirection, until finally the humans were left on their own, without their gods, and to some extent without a purpose. The language described here is past the midpoint of development from the preferred structures used by the Valusians themselves, towards those of a more typical human language. The sacred texts of the Valusians themselves may never have been fully comprehended by a human mind; in any event the small surviving quotes from older texts are extremely difficult of interpretation.

By the historical period this sketch documents, cultural drift was starting to break the stasis which prevailed after the last of the Valusians died. The disruption of the traditions of centuries led to the creation of new literary forms (the first love story in millenia of Valusian literature!) and new social configurations. Those interested in pre-human cultural survivals may also find some of the surviving fragments of the older religious material illuminating, especially as pertains to the worship of Yik (father Yig).

This document is a brief bare-bones sketch of the fundamental grammatical processes of the language. There is a description of the phonology and my current transcription practices. The grammatical portion of this description is organized by the major open stem classes of dapnant: Nominals and Verbs. Essentially all roots fall into one of these two classes, plus a number of grammatical particles whose function is explained in the discussion of syntax. Dapnant also has a highly productive derivational morphology that will eventually receive separate treatment.

Eventually this web site will hopefully grow to include some of the extant texts. Also in waiting are descriptions (and images) of the three writing systems used to write Dapnant. The original one is a semi-syllabic system like those used by the Indic languages, the second is a cursive alphabetical script like that of Arabic, and the third is a simple alphabetic script. The last script is written from right to left, unlike the other two. As the Egyptians were reluctant to abandon hieroglyphics even after they had developed a different system, so the human users would not abandon the "God-writing" for the newer scripts, though in later times, once the grammar had changed significantly, texts were annotated with glosses and comments in the new scripts and contemporary grammar.

This Scattered Tongues site belongs to David Durand.
Next Page | Skip It | Next 5 | Prev | Random
Want to join? Stop by HQ, then!

$Id: intro.html,v 1.5 1997/08/26 14:42:45 David Exp $