New comic.
The Other Side #349: Cut It OutOne month is certainly better than eighteen, so I don't feel too broken up about the wait between this comic and the last.
A lot of the aidenians talking to each other may look like gibberish, but believe it or not they are actually speaking a complete, functional language with two dialects. It was drafted by Monarch on the Bob and George forums about six years ago, and I've been slowly expanding on the vocabulary as needed. The grammar is [tornado fang]ing weird compared to English, but I'm told it might make more sense to someone who's fluent in Japanese. Let's have a lesson!
First the basics: Sentence structure is always "subject, object, verb." In a basic English sentence--say, "she throws the ball"--it's usually subject (she), verb (throws), object (the ball). This isn't TOO different on the surface, but it gets really twisted when you go into compound sentences. For instance, Panel 4 of this comic has one soldier telling X and Teiros to stop, which would simply be "zakrenzrrr, nrmnri." But she also says "and don't challenge us," which means this sentence has two subjects (X and Teiros, and the soldiers), two verbs (stop, and don't), and an object (challenge). How does that break down?
First off, compound sentences like this always have a complete subject/object/verb grouping paired together by a conjunction, so the sentence in that panel would literally translate to "outsiders stop and us challenge do not." In addition to this though, their vocabulary uses a lot of suffixes for context, tenses, and stuff like that. The word for "stop" is "nrmnri," which is actually just the word for "go" ("nrm") with the suffix "-nri," which is used to modify a verb to mean "DO NOT (verb)." Another example is the word for "outsiders;" the singular form of "outsider" would be "zakrense," and the plural would normally add the suffix "-zrn" to make it "zakrenzrn," but aidenians differentiate inanimate objects, animals, and people when they pluralize something--and the soldier uses the suffix "-zrrr," which specifically refers to inanimate objects to make the word "zakrenzrrr," or "outsider-things."
Trying to translate English into aidenian can be a real brain bender, but while there is an informal dialect that flows more like English (and must sound like speaking in the linguistic equivalent of shorthand slang), I have a lot of fun puzzling out the grammar when I need to string longer sentences together.