DTYvK Productions' Pandoran to English Dictionary 3rd Edition V3.1 With the words, "Ubarano to opa bete, re iolo to tasan" in Chapter 27 of When We Meet Again, the language of Pandoran was born. From its humble beginnings of one lone sentence of seven different words, it has expanded more than seventy times over into the product you see today on these pages. Pandoran exists as a means to further deepen my characters, by showing the reader what they are actually saying, not translated into English. Often I do this so that a quote is made memorable, but also, since I wish for my characters to have depth but not to offend readers, I use Pandoran to hide their crude language. While the latter of these two uses may be somewhat comedic, the main purpose of the use of Pandoran remains so as to colour aspects of Fa'Dieli life and give an identity to things that I have used which are part of or related to the Seiken Densetsu series. The language itself is inspired by a myriad of sources: the words themselves are inspired by the beautiful Maori language of New Zealand, the sentence structure can find its roots in Japanese and the Romantic Languages, some of its mannerisms and its word-building are inspired by German, and the accent is akin to the melodic Afrikaans. Around the time of Twilighter Council's beginnings in late 2001, it became apparent to me that I needed a permanent record of my language ("was the word 'gete' or 'bete'?"). The First Edition of the dictionary was a simple Notepad text file where I wrote down words as I created them; it was also here where the language was straightjacketed into its alphabet. Once the text file became too unwieldy, the Second Edition was born in Word, where I could tabulate the words. This allowed me to create words from words, and thus the language's vocabulary grew exponentially. It was late into the Second Edition's life when I created the Pandoran script. With the beginnings of DTYvK Productions and the use of this script around the website, the Dictionary needed to be published so that these words could be read. However, the logic that I used within the Second Edition was my own logic, so the Dictionary was still oriented towards my needs rather than the needs of others. Enter the Third Edition in January 2005, starting with 423 words. The word groupings of the Second Edition were broken up and each word was given its own entry, with hyperlinks to the various parts of the word. The large gap that existed in the use of "is" and the use of pronouns was closed. The grammar rules have also started to be cemented. However, with the number of words reaching the magical 500, the dictionary file became far too big for its boots. A major update occured one year later, with the file broken up into individual files per letter; the smaller files also allowed for the words to be written in Pandoran script. Over the course of the Third Edition, more words will be added and the grammar rules will be made more firm, seeking to close more gaps in the language and reaching out into areas previously untouched. The sheer explosion in the number of words is partly thanks to needing one particular word, and then tracing the etymology of the words of our own language, a factor critical to Pandoran word construction, and then translating all the words along the way. For example, the word "please" can be traced back to "plea" and then to the Latin word for "decide", which then has its own etymology back to the Latin word for "cut", and that can be etymologically related to an old Icelandic word meaning "knife"! All of these words are then derived from a translated word for the root, and with a little bit of lateral thinking, it is added to and derived from other already-established Pandoran words to create new words. Thus the Dictionary expands and becomes the product below. How to Use the Dictionary and Updates READ THIS FIRST! Pandoran to English Dictionary A B C D E G H I K L M N O P R S T U V # The main part of this site. Language Notes Contains the Alphabet, Grammar Rules, Writing Rules, Sentence Structure; all the stuff to make Pandoran work. Quotes and Names Sentences, abbreviations, organisations, people and places that have appeared in my stories, along with some notes of interest about them. Library [Main Page] [Library] [Music] [Art] [Journal] [Updates] [Links] [Contact]