First glimpse:
This set of
lessons are to provide the reader with a fundamental core understanding of the
ancient language known as Proto-Drem which is the mother tongue of a varied
number of languages found today on the Dremish continent. Then the speakers of
the language were scattered clans ranging across large territories and numbered
approximately 2000 to 3000 people. The Dremish clans with scholars finding old
mines, abandoned villages, old trade routes, roads and monuments, were able to
speak a lot about their culture, mindset and importantly, their language.
The region
as we know it was covered in large thick forests, large swamps and large grassy
plains where glaciers and large ice fields had once stood just a few thousand
years before. Large herds of game lumbered over the large grassy plains and
thru the large deep forests, especially the thick rainforests along the coasts.
In these areas lay the Dremish tribes, scattered clans living in small
semi-nomadic villages as they followed the herds along their migration routes.
These people traded with other cultures to the south and the east which later
on became the Anorian and Alorian
civilizations. The Dremish tribes due to their large territories stayed fairly
isolated and thus kept their language generally the same for centuries with
little change. But as it changed over the millennia, the language changed and
became the languages we know today.
Why a
lesson course for a language that hasn’t been spoken in roughly 6000 years? For
people to know what the “mother-tongue” was of the region, and for people of
all stripes to share in their history of back then. Due to the needs of
presenting a historically important language such as Proto-Drem … the lesson
course is presented with these things in mind.
Each of the
twelve lessons contains:
Plentiful
exercises to help you learn understand and understand deeper truths about the
language.
The vocabulary
lists all the words used in the lessons, and contains both English/Proto-Drem
and Proto-Drem/English sections.
One big key
about learning a language is to have fun and enjoy what you’re doing. Like any
language, one thing is to use it.
When you’re
finished with these lessons, there is always the reference grammar as a guide
to help in those “sticky situations” that always seems to arrive. The
Proto-Drem/English dictionary is also a good way to increase knowledge of words
and concepts that were common and used by the tribes so long ago. The old Myths
and stories, folk tales and legends all got their start in those days, as we
also see a picture of the culture and see in ways just how similar they were to
us today. Scholars have created dictionaries, and the old wordlists are
generally now just dusty old tomes, yet due to technology today, the whole
region is once again becoming aware of the “old ways” and so our ancestors
would feel proud at knowing that they are not forgotten.
-- Kevin
Urbanczyk
1 XXX – The mother and
child gather berries
Sentence order, Articles, Questions
and negation, Possessive pronouns, Noun Classes, a-/abo-
2 XXX -The hungry
child
Personal Pronouns, Locatives I, Verb
Tenses, Verb Moods,
3 XXX – The Shamans
quiet friend
Interjections, Conjunctions I,
Plurals, Numbers I, Serial Verbs I, Attributive Verbs I
4 XXX – Shaman and the
young boy
Past Tenses & Modals,
Conjunctions, Interjections
5 XXX –Beseeching the
spirits
Attributive verbs II, Subject and
Object Complements, Causatives
6 XXX –The Hunt
Auxiliary Verbs, Aspect markers,
Comparatives, Locatives
7 XXX – The feast
Compound words, Passive Voice, Stative
verbs
8 XXX –the flint
trader
Non-Past Tenses, Formal Speech
styles
9 XXX –The Ancestors
demand.
Questions II. Imperative Modal,
Conditional modal (The great “if”)
10 XXX –the myth
really is true?
Intransitives, Word formation
11 XXX –the miners’
day
Vowel Harmony
12 XXX –Slash and Burn
Tones
Glossary