Hej Everyone! Long time no see! Ever since the release of Woodkid's 'Ashes and Blood' from the second Arcane season, some folks over at r/Runeterran have been looking over those Shuriman lines that are featured in the song. It's called a 'prayer to Jan'ahrem', which is potentially Janna's Shuriman name. Since I personally think conlangs in fictional media are a lot more fun if they make grammatical sense, I and some friends at our discord had a crack at turning those few lines into functioning Shuriman! It also raises the question whether this is modern Shuriman or, perhaps more likely, an archaic version of ancient Shuriman only in use in expressions or prayers.

DISCLAIMER: This is by no means an 'official' grammar overview, it's just a fanmade way of making sense of the Runeterran conlangs. We try to do this in such a way that everything works alongisde our previous work on languages such as Ionian, Freljordian and Shuriman.

Now, in 'Ashes and Blood' the following lines are constantly repeated (spelling taken from Woodkid's Instagram):

Bey'fet ihru ga, Ahuni lek'cho
Bey'un habbab, Ahuni lek'cho
Suhbi al naa yih
Suhbi al naa yih

The translation we are given is as follows:

Beyond these walls, the storm's fury grows
Over land and sea, the storm's fury grows
But I have nothing to fear!
For the blue bird is with me

Now we quickly run into problems when trying to translate it. In essence, we have five unique phrases in the English translation (because 'the storm's fury grows' is repeated), while the Shuriman prayer only features four unique phrases (both Ahuni lek'cho and Suhbi al naa yih are repeated). So, what gives? I'll take you through the prayer phrase by phrase to show you how we interpreted it.

Let's start with one of the repeated phrases suhbi al naa yih. If we are to follow the order of the English translation, these two lines would mean 'But I have nothing to fear, for the blue bird is with me.' Now that's a bit much to fit into just four small words, but there is a way that it may make sense. Take a look at the glossing below:

suhbi al   naa  yih
bird  blue is.3 thus
'The blue bird exists, and thus. . .'

Since it is a prayer that has been repeated for decades, if not centuries, it is not unlikely that the prayer has been shortened over time. In this sentence, yih functions as a conjunction at the end of the sentence, implying that there is more meaning that has been omitted. 'The blue bird is with me, and thus (I am safe/have nothing to fear)'. Especially with common phrases like this, it makes sense that you can get the idea across with just half of the phrase and end it there.

As for the question why the adjective 'blue' follows 'bird' instead of preceding it, since sister language Ionian has the order Noun-Adjective as well, we thought it'd be nice to mirror that in Shuriman.

Let us look at the first two lines now. The easiest to interpret is the repeating phrase ahuni lek'cho. Now it is still a little tricky, because the ' accent is most likely a genitive form, indicating possession. This would imply that lek'cho translates to 'storm's fury', which gives us the verb ahuni as grows, where the -i suffix marks third person. If we follow the previous train of thought in regards to word order stemming from ancient Ionian, we expect the verb to come after the noun, while here it comes before. One possible explanation is that by moving it to the front it adds urgency or highlights the action, something that also occurs in our version of Ionian. A more literal translation would thus be, 'It Grows! The Storm's fury.'

ahun-i lek'cho
grow-3 fury-GEN-storm
'it grows! the storm's fury'

Now for the two preceding phrases. the words bey'fet and bey'un jump out due to the repetition of bey. We interpret these two words as a combination of two parts, just like with the genitive of lek'cho. In 'beyond these walls', the singing highlights an area expanding outwards beyond the horizon, while in 'over land and sea', there is more emphasis in the storm growing above the sea (making travel dangerous). We read this as fet highlighting a direction, while un highlights a location. These are then attached to bey 'over' with the genitive particle ' (pronounced as a glottal stop, think wa'er instead of water, though it is often dropped).

The last cute detail we extracted from this is the word habbab. The translation speaks of 'land and sea' while the original phrase has only one word. This, however, makes perfect sense if you think of Shurima. Deserts are often called 'sand seas', and it is not unthinkable that Shuriman does not differentiate between 'water sea' and 'sand sea'. We thus took this as habbab meaning 'sea' in a broad sense like that, and the English translation specifies 'land and sea' only because it's such a specific Shuriman word.

If we take these two lines in their entirety we get the following (DIR refers to the direction highlighted, and the PL stands for plural):

bey'fet       ihr-u   ga       ahun-i lek'cho
over-GEN-DIR  wall-PL these.PL grow-3 fury-GEN-storm
'beyond these walls, it grows! the storm's fury'

bey’un        habbab ahun-i lek'cho
over-GEN-LOC  sea    grow-3 fury-GEN-storm
'over the sea, it grows! the storm's fury'

Now if we take all this information, we can rewrite the translation to more faithfully transcribe the original Shuriman (at the cost of a good flow in English).

Beyond these walls, it grows! the storm's fury
Over the sea, it grows! the storm's fury
The blue bird is with me, and thus (I have nothing to fear)
The blue bird is with me, and thus (I have nothing to fear)

Hopefully you've enjoyed reading our thoughts and are able to appreciate the Shuriman chanting even more now!

This is alll from us for now, we had a lot of fun diving back into some Runeterran languages, and we'll probably do some more digging into the origin of this over at r/runeterran. But for now, I hope you'll all have a wonderful weekend. Feel free to ask whatever question or theorycraft! We'd love to hear your thoughts.

x Nanna and the Runeterran Language Team