A Chosen Life is the first installment in the four-book Chosen Chronicles (follow affiliate links to purchase these titles), a YA hidden-world / urban fantasy series by author K. A. Parkinson. I met K. A. at the Salt Lake ComicCon (now rebranded as FanX) while she was promoting the release of the second edition, and as soon as I heard that her book featured a conlang, I had to have it!
Now, several years later, I find myself doing actual research on precisely that sort of book--so of course I have to include it in this blog series! And in a first for this series, K. A. herself was willing to answer some questions about the writing process.
Performatives aside, speech usually has little immediate and inherent impact on the state of the world, which limits the range of narrative devices that can be used to make an utterance's meaning Obvious. In the world of The Chosen Chronicles, however, the Hidden language is a magical language, whose utterances can produce immediate and objectively observable physical effects--thus, descriptions of the action in a scene are semantically connected with the spoken dialog, and either one can complement the other--or replace it, once the reader has been taught about the causal connection. And this fact is not overlooked!
The first bit of non-English we see in the book is this:
"LaUnahi." Her gut clenched when he called her that pet name, my little bird.
Which is a fairly straightforward example of non-diagetic narrative translation via apposition--prose subtitling. This word is never explicitly defined again, but it is used frequently enough that the meaning should remain fairly present in a reader's mind--if they care. And if they don't, it is sufficient to recognize the word as a nickname. Shortly thereafter, we get another case of apposition, and explicit definition:
Warmth started to flow through her fingertips as her Kuna, her gift, began to come to life. One of the side effects of being Kunamin, or one who has the gift of wielding fire, [...]
The placing of these two new word exposure in such close proximity turns out to be rather important, as the definition of a Kunamin as, essentially, a fire mage, gives the reader an immediate hint that "Kuna" does not mean "gift" in general, but rather is a specific type of gift. Additionally, it's nice to see right away evidence of morphological complexity (via the suffix <-min>), although it's a little disappointing that that is not really capitalized on--whatever morphological process is going on there, we don't see it duplicated elsewhere, so the reader can't really infer a meaning for it.
The next several exposures to Hidden phrases all follow a very formulaic pattern: Hidden phrase to start a sentence, immediately followed by a description of a physical effect. That makes it very easy for the reader to notice what is going and start making the relevant cause-and-effect connections, which are al of the meaning that matters. Occasionally, Hidden words are diagetically defined, and all of these phrases have literal meanings which are given in a glossary at the end of the book, for the most part those meanings are Irrelevant, and the functional meaning is made quite Obvious:
"To' konsh'la," she whispered and the desert sounds became almost deafening.
"Mig'nata," she whispered and felt strength surge to her arms.
"To' inreedo," she whispered, and the man's frame came into perfect focus through the darkness.
"Mig'nata!" Macy pushed every ounce of life force strength she had into her legs, increasing her speed.
"Mi'no ha!"
Two fireballs erupted from her palms.
In the next exposure, K. A. makes use of parallel structure to cement the association between cause and effect when using multiple magical phrases:
Macy took aim. "To' inreedo mig'nata!" The other side of the canyon came into clear focus and strength surged down her arms.
The ability to chain phrases like that and expect the causal relationships to be properly understood depends on the fact that at least one of these phrases has already had multiple previous exposures, thus Teaching the Reader what it means. Given that the association between "mig'nata" and strength should be established by now, the descriptions of the utterance's effects could've come in either order--but that would unnecessarily confusing, and maintaining the parallelism (aside from presumably reflecting the actual ordering of narrative events) allows for a stronger re-association of "to' inreedo" with enhanced vision.
The basic pattern is repeated several more times, as shown in these examples:
"Mi'no ha!" Huge balls of fire shot from her hands.
"Mi'no ha!" The words burst from his mouth as he threw the ball of heat.
"Radi'non!" He shouted, and a binding flash of light filled the air in front of him.
"Say the word tin'ruhl."
"Tin'ruhl!" As the word burst from his lips, a wall of dirt shot up the ground[.]
But further into the book, we start to see some additional variations on the pattern--as if K. A. finally trusts the reader to be comfortable with the idea of the Hidden language, and thus no longer in need of a comforting prose structure to contain it all the time. One word is diagetically taught to a character as its first exposure, thus also explicitly teaching it to the reader in a way that does not break the narrative flow:
"[...] Focus, ask your life force to heal her. [...] The word is lon'adras. [...]"
"Lon'adras." He whispered and the feeling of fire in his veins returned and surged toward his fingertips [...] he cringed as the broken bones shifted back into their proper place.
"Heal your hand. [...] Do you remember the word?"
"Lon'adras?"
"Yes! What do you feel?"
"Lon'adras," he whispered, and he felt the skin knitting itself back together beneath the bandage.
Note that in that second example, the details of the intended effect (rather than the immediate sensory experience) are separated from the magical phrase (by a bunch of additional narration here elided)--a trick which is licensed by the recent explicit explanation that this is the word for healing. By the final example, however, we've returned to the familiar pattern.
"Mig'nata" also gets some special treatment; it's literal meaning and description of its generic effect is give diagetically directly in the text:
"[...] When the need arises, say the word 'mig'nata'. It means 'the body', and it will tell your life force to increase your strength. [...]"
And then we get this pedagogical exchange:
"Mig'what?" He called to Bastian.
"Mig'nata."
"Mig'nata!" Strength surged through Tolen's body and he concentrated on pushing it to his legs.
Which all leads up to my absolute favorite line in the whole book:
"Mig'nata!" She threw the razor-sharp discs as hard as she could.
Exactly once, a Hidden word is used without a definition or an accompanying description of its effect. K. A. is expecting that, at this point, the reader will have had enough exposure to and explanation of this particular word that they will just know it. Hey, someone actually tried (and pulled off, apparently, since the editor let this through!) to Teach the Reader a bit of a conlang! That is the kind of higher-level planning in secondary language usage that I want to see more of!
Finally, we get two sentences in Hidden in this book; and I'm not sure if it's coincidental, but the magical sentences are also the only magical utterances which do not have an obvious immediate physical effect to describe, which leads to a different (but still obviously stylized, even with only two examples) prose structure strategy for communicating their meaning:
"Unastrah ... Con ... Diadras." [...]
"What did you just do?" [...]
"I told the Dark it is not welcome here."
"Minradak Siadrus," she sobbed [...]. The Night Demons who headed toward them screeched and turned away.
"What did you do?" [...]
"I made this spot burial ground. Night Demons can't enter sacred places."
So, if the effect isn't visible--get another character to ask about it, and then provide , if not an actual translation, a diagetic explanation of its meaning. Note that this "get a character to ask about" it trick is actually a quite widely applied literary technique, not just for teaching languages, and explains why so many protagonists are ignorant newcomers to the story setting!
So, now you've seen what I can extract from the text, but what does K. A. have to say about her own work?
How much of the Hidden language exists, regardless of whether it is shown in the book or not?
There is definitely more than showed up in the books, but I had no desire to take it to the level of Tolkien’s Elvish language, lol. I spent a lot of time researching different languages and messing with blends of a few. I preferred Native American, my most common reference being Lakota Sioux as there tended to be more online access to dictionaries and use references.
This is a very important point! In the past when I have been asked how much of a language one needs to create, my answer has been "as much as you need to tell the story". And while the general principle that the author needs to know more than is explicitly placed in the story, in order to ensure consistency in what is in the story, also applies to languages, it is also nevertheless true that it is far too easy to fall prey to Worldbuilder's Disease. Tolkien created his languages first, and wrote a story to contain them; if you want to do the same, by all means, go for it--but if you want to write a book, duplicating his depth is not necessary!
How did you envision it being used in early drafts, and how does that differ from what ended up in the published book?
In early drafts I had a lot more of the language included, but in beta groups the same feedback kept coming in—that too much bogged down the reading and it lacked the beauty and power of using just a few words or sentences here and there. I also had to remember my intended audience—YA—and the fact that it is an instant gratification world because of movies. YA books generally have to be faster paced and deliver imagery to the mind more quickly.
This helps to highlight something I hadn't really considered before--yes, medium affects the techniques that will be most effective in integrating a secondary language into your story, but so does genre. Certain audiences will be more receptive to secondary languages, and to different techniques for presenting them, than others. Definitely something I'll start paying more attention to!
Did you consciously think about how to make usages of the Hidden language comprehensible / accessible to the reader? If so, what techniques did you employ?
I did—even more so after it went to an editor, lol. My biggest concern in the beginning was flow and readability. I knew from my own experiences reading another language that I would tend to skip over something my mind couldn’t quickly decipher or make sense of phonetically. My process involved looking through several dictionaries for how to say one word, then I would adjust the spelling to be more phonetic—always imagining the cool cadences of a Native American speaking it as I did so (I can’t tell you how many times I have read and watched Dances with Wolves—I can still say several lines of Sioux from the movie, lol). When I placed them into sentences I would do the same process again to test the flow of the combined words. I hoped this would allow the language to feel more fluid in the reader's mind.
Recall from this previous post that "lack of flow" was in fact at least one reader's complaint about the conlang content in A Memory Called Empire, so this is definitely a valid concern. What flows well for one person may not necessarily flow well for another, but there is absolutely something to be said for designing a language, or at least its orthography, with its probable impact on the reader in mind--if you want it to feel natural, and you're writing for an Anglophone audience, go ahead and make all possible use of your intuitions for readable English spelling! If the whole point is to make it alien and jarring--then throw English conventions out the window, but be aware that it takes a whole other set of skills to sell the reader on that!
What was your editor's response to the language? Did they communicate specific reasons for including or removing usages of the Hidden language?
They definitely removed a lot and had me cut down quite a bit. Mostly for the same reasons my beta readers mentioned. They were concerned about readers getting bored or frustrated. Even my dictionary and Hidden facts were cut down pretty extensively from my original drafts.
This saddens me, but it is in line with what I have come to expect from semi-formal surveys of other writers and readers. Having discussed these concerns with some other members of the Language Creation Society, there is something of a consensus in that population that concerns about reader frustration (especially in the fantasy super-genre) are overblown, and the result of the few who get upset also being loud about it--but, well, we conlangers are not exactly neutral parties to give an opinion on this subject! Nevertheless, as I have mentioned before, I am hopeful that books like A Memory Called Empire may start to change both readers' and editors' minds in this regard.
And finally:
Have you had any feedback from fans about the Hidden language? If so, is it mostly positive or negative?
Mostly positive. Those who know me joked about how they never knew my mind worked like that, lol. I had several reviews say that while some of the words were hard to say aloud, they liked the flow and the fact that I included a dictionary at the end of the books to help them remember what the words meant.
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