Reading Characters
Our first example of the language is a
colorful one, taken from a passage written in a letter by a city
dweller about his brother, a farmer. Literally, it translates as "He
prayed for the god of fulfillment to make people hungry. It was as if
he drowned fish." Such allusive and lyrical writing is often seen, as
well as more plain language. The way these sentences would be
understood (in the context of the rest of the passage) by a Harpelan
speaker is along the lines of "He waited too long for the price of the
crops to go up". I will not be able to explain how one sentence
becomes the other until much later, as the explanation involves
culture as much as grammar. Below I've listed the words from this
example, separated into characters. I encourage you to scan the
passage until you can find each of the words listed below.
This word means "pray", in the sense of
praying for something. It is a single character.
This word means "person"; in
the passage, it is read as "he". The same word is used to mean "she".
I want to point out that there are males and females among the
speakers of Harpelan, but I usually cannot tell which is which, and
the writing provides few clues. When in doubt, I say "he".
This word, made of two characters, means "fish".
These four characters are combined to make the verb "drown". The first character is a prefix meaning that the action has been going on for some time.
We've already translated "he", "drown", and "fish", so there isn't much left for this symbol to mean. The meaning of this grapheme will be discussed in a later section of the tutorial. For now, just know that this symbol is not a character or a word.
Radicals
Some characters are composed of a simpler character, plus another grapheme.