Portal:Constructed languages/Language of the month/November 2009

Baronh is an artificial language created by Japanese science fiction author Morioka Hiroyuki and used in Crest of the Stars and Banner of the Stars. The name Baronh means "language of the Abh".

The Baronh language is derived from the ancient Japanese language, spoken until the beginning of the ninth century and recorded in Kojiki, Man'yōshū and other ancient documents. It is not precisely the ancient language itself, but a reconstructed one which is named Takamagahara language after the mythological heaven in Kojiki. In Crest of the Stars, Japanese revolutionists seeking to remove foreign influence from the Japanese language created their own "purified" version, which removed borrowed words and expressions and revived ancient ones. It was these revolutionists who established the colony that created the Abh, giving them their language. After the Abh were freed from slavery, their language quickly, in a few generations, changed into the form seen in Morioka's works of fiction. Having not been allowed to write as slaves, the Abh previously had no writing system, and that is the biggest reason why this change proceeded so swiftly. In order to write Baronh, an alphabet called Ath, which means "letter", was created, based to some extent on the Japanese kana scripts. Find out more...