Posted by Mark Rosenfelder (64.16.210.2) on November 01, 2000 at 17:31:23:
In Reply to: suggestion posted by Mike Felder on October 26, 2000 at 00:41:09:
: Hey, I think a neat add-on to Virtual Verduria would be an "external history" of Almea. A history of what you've went through over the years to develop Almea, the languages, the maps, the religious systems, etc., etc. I know this would probably take you a while, but I still think it would be a neat add-on. You could also give tisp to others on world-building. Just a suggestion. :
Hmm. Maybe I'll write it in installments here.
The Secret History of Verduria
I'd invented fantasy lands and languages before... Flora and the flaids go back to a story I wrote in fifth grade... but Verduria itself dates to my first year in college, when I lived next door to a D&Der.
He'd been working on a dungeon; I started supplying the wilderness. I created a map, and started making up names for geographical terms... e.g. mazhtana 'city', säte 'hall'.
The dungeon was Erruk, which you can see on the Verduria-province map. We played throughout college; the group explored the province a bit, went out west to Pérecaln (which you can see, barely, in the upper left corner of the map on drill4.htm), and took a year-long voyage north, past the Zone of Fire, to K'aitan, where one of the players had inherited a duchy. (I have detailed maps from that, but so far you can only see the place on drill1.htm; it's on the island to the right of the word Bekkai.)
During all this time I was elaborating Verdurian and making preliminary wordlists for Cadhinor, Cuêzi, Barakhinei, and Ismaîn. That didn't affect the players much, except that they all had to have Verdurian names.
If all this sounds unutterably geeky, I should note that I got my first girlfriend by inviting her to play in the group. :)
Some Verdurian words are invented from scratch (e.g. mazhtana or elir 'life'); others I stole mostly from French and Russian. This was even more evident in the earliest versions of the language. It was also rather harder to pronounce, since I tended to take the Russian consonant clusters and palatals unmodified.
I didn't consciously base the grammar on anything, but it's heavily influenced by French (articles, preverbal object pronouns, similar verbal inflections), with the major addition of cases (largely based on Esperanto, German, Latin, and Russian).
More later. Wait till you see the wall map. :)