Hej everyone,

It’s been a while since the previous post and I deemed it time to write a bit more about Vastayan, a language that hasn't seen a great deal of progress yet. We will focus on Xayah’s voicelines in this post, to see what we can learn from them.

One quick thing before we dive in: For those wishing to learn Ionian, you can take your first steps now! We’ve written two chapters of the book Colloquial Ionian, which can be found here if you’re interested in speaking your first words of Ionian.

Now, Vastayan voicelines. There are five lines in the game at the moment of writing. A Rioter on the forums has given us the translation of one of them, so let's start there.

vi-om       tann  v’ah
wild-magic  here  is 
’There is wild magic here’

This sentence does not tell us a great deal. It doesn’t show us any case markings, though the nominative case (subject of the sentence) is often unmarked regardless, so we cannot conclude that there is no case in Vastayan. The only thing worth noting is that v’ah translates to ‘is’ in a more literal sense. You could also translate the sentence as ‘There exists wild magic here’. We know this because using the verb ‘to be’ as a method to connect two part of the sentences Vastayan just leaves it out, as in this example:

baa     Xayah
1SG     Xayah 
‘I am Xayah’

Xayah and Rakan use two voicelines in a conversation, which is apparently a funny one, since they burst into laughing after saying them.

Rakan says:

vi-om       kaash
wild-magic  dangerous 
’Wild magic is dangerous’

To which Xayah replies:

baa-si   sourma   bei
1SG-FUT  steal    1SG-DAT 
‘I will steal it for myself’

This one is a bit tougher to figure out. We know that soura is the Vastayan word for gather. But that doesn't give us the meaning of sourma. Luckily, Vastayan has a sister language that we can look towards. The Ionian verb system uses a verb and a particle. For example, the verb saa sitē ‘to find’ is composed of the action saa ‘see’ and site ‘first.’ Vastayan verbs were also constructed in a similar way some centuries ago, but they seem to have split into separate verbs and particles. A Vastayan verb does not require such a particle in every utterance anymore. It’s very likely that sourma ‘gather’ was once something like suura maa. Maa shares a root with the Ionian particle na, which means 'out'. This leads us to the conclusion that sourma may mean ‘gather out.’ Now that’s a bit of a vague concept, and will require some further work, but one possible modern translation could be ‘steal’, which is what I’ve used now since it made sense in the conversation. Just remember that it's not set in stone. As for kaash and bei, those took a bit longer.

The hard part is that after Xayah and Rakan say these things to each other, they laugh out loud. This made it very hard to think of words that would fit here. The solution was brought to me by the lovely folks over at our Discord server. We asked the question: what is something that makes Vastaya laugh? The answer was found quickly: humans. What if they are imitating humans? Humans saying that magic is dangerous and that they can greedily ‘steal’ it is something that humans would do lore-wise and something that Vastaya would find absurd enough to laugh about. The voicelines could be Xayah and Rakan imitating humans, then laughing about it.

This theory gains some more ground when we look at bei. The nominative (subject) form of I is baa. It’s plausible that the dative form (a case that we have previously decided should be present in Vastayan and roughly* translates to 'for me' in this case) is bei. As for kaash, that’s just a guess that fitted for now. More on that another time.

baa-si   komoh    uteha
1SG-FUT  1PL-ACC  save 
'I will save us’

This quote gives the first hint of case. Ko means ‘we’ (from Ionian kko). Since it’s in the object position it’s possible that komoh is the accusative form of ko, leading to the translation ‘I will save us.’

As for soulalesh, something that Xayah shouts during battle, I have no clue. We have no information about any of the sounds in there but I’d love to hear your suggestions and/or predictions regarding the possible meaning.

That’s all for now. These voicelines are sadly not as insightful as Karma’s voicelines, but it’s as good a place as any to further the project. I still hope that you enjoyed reading it ^^

Cheers,

Nanna

EDIT: u/02745 pointed out that I was missing one voiceline, namely om upo satt. I'll get back to that when I figure it out.