On the Brink of the Edge
Center for Al Amarjan Culture
Glugspeak
A Peace Force Officer's Guide to the Glug Language
by Ed Heil, uncorrected (at-sign) yahoo (dot) com
My fellow officers,
As you know, the 'Glugs' are a freakish bunch of deformed arse-holes
who have a mythology about being an ancient tribe of 'original humans'
while all the rest of us are degenerate mutants. There are a lot
of them here on Al Amarja, and while you can tell the surly bastards by
their skull-ridges, they often grow hair over the ridges or wear hats.
And besides that, thanks to the generous kindness of Her Exaltedness Monique
D'Aubainne, Historic Liberator and Current Shepherdess of AlAmarja,
it is not actually illegal to be a Glug, easy as that might make
our job.
It is illegal, however, to speak the Glug language. So it's a
considerable advantage to a Peace Force officer to know a bit of Glug.
You can recognize when somebody is speaking it, and administer a service-revolver
full of justice, and on slow days, you can babble a bit of it and try to
provoke the freaks into speaking some of it back.
And for those of you rookies who're wondering if we can get in
trouble for speaking Glug, get real, kids. We're the Peace Force.
We're here to enforce the law, not obey it.
The Basics: Sounds
The sounds of glug are really easy. Most of them occur in English (which
of course, by the clever foresight of Her Exaltedness Monique D'Aubainne,
Historic Liberator and Current Shepherdess of AlAmarja, is the national
language of our island). The only ones that don't are "hn" and "hl," which
you can fake by pronouncing them as they're spelled. It's not exactly
how the Glugs do it, but it's close. Also, in English we don't use clusters
of sounds like "bn" and "zn" and "tl" at the beginnings of syllables, but
if you just pronounce it the way it's spelled it works.
Basically, a Glug syllable starts with:
b, d, g, z, l, n, bl, dl, gl, zl, bn, dn, gn zn, p, t, k, s, hl,
hn, phl, thl, khl, shl*, phn, thn, khn, shn*, or no consonant at all.
*watch these: shl means "s" as in "send" and then the breathy "hl",
not "sh" as in "shoot" and then "l"! Same with "shn" - that's "s"
as then "hn" not "sh" and then "n"! Yeah, it's confusing, but that's
the way the dictionaries are written so that's the way to learn it.
I would have just written it "sl" and "sn."
Then it has a vowel:
u or i (as in bug, or big). Yep, that's right, there's
only two vowels, and they are "uh" and "ih." Sounds butt ugly to
my ears, but it makes it nice and easy to recognize. If you hear
somebody talking and all their vowels are "uh" and "ih," they're either
a Glug or a pile of Burger from the American Midwest, and either is an
excuse to dust 'em.
Then it can optionally have a final consonant:
b, d, g, z, p, t, k, s, l, n.
That's it. If you don't get it, don't worry, just skip ahead to
the vocabulary and memorize some words and phrases.
The Basics: Grammar
1. Simple Sentences, The Adjective Problem
Luckily, like English, Glug has a subject-verb-indirect object-direct object
order. Like Spanish and Italian, it has an article-noun-adjective
order. (If you don't know what subjects and adjectives and all that
are, then screw you, I'm not gonna take you through grade school again.
Get an education so you can hold your head up proud as a Peace Officer.
And until then, skip ahead and learn some words and phrases, or get aholda
me and get a copy of my Peace Officers Guide to Glug tape so you can recognize
it.)
Unfortunately, unlike English, Glug has no word for "is," so when you
talk in Glug you sound like a moron. You can't say "this beer is
piss-poor," you say "this beer piss-poor!" (Li dluz tikug-idzi-nis,
if you're curious. Li=this dluz=beer tikug=unpleasant
idzi=like
nis=piss.)
All the adjectives are really verbs. If you want to make them
back into adjectives you have to use them in a relative clause. I
is the universal relative clause maker; it means who, whom, which, or that.
(Those of you whose brains just got fried by the intellectuality of all
this can, as always, just head down to the words and phrases section in
shame. OK, moving on for the rest of you.) So while "This beer is
piss-poor" is Li dluz tikug-idzi-nis, if you want to talk about
"piss-poor beer" you take the word for "piss-poor" (tikug-idzi-nis),
which literally means "is nasty as piss," and you add the word i
which means "which", so you get, Li dluz i-tikug-idzi-nis, which
means "this beer, which is nasty as piss."
2. Plurals
You thought that the lack of "is" sounded stupid, wait till you get a load
of this one. To make a noun plural, you repeat it. So that
while "human" is glug (remember, they think that they're
the humans and we're the mutants... to keep things clear, you might
wanna memorize glug as just meaning "glug,", and memorize their
word for "mutant" or "freak" -- hnun -- as meaning "human.")
Where was I? Oh, while glug means "human," if you want to
say "humans," you have to repeat it -- glug glug. Yep, that's the
word for "Glugs" in Glug. Glug glug. And they think
we're
freaks?
3. Numbers
The numbers in Glug are nouns, not adjectives like they are in English.
So you can't say "eight beers," you say "eight of beer." Tupi ki dluz.
Eight=tupi, of=ki, beer=dluz.
4. Articles
Glug has no definite or indefinite articles -- that is, there's no word
for "a" or "the" in Glug. There is a word li which means "this,"
but it's not used as commonly as "the" is. If you go around using
li
all the time the way you'd use "the" in English, you're just gonna tip
yourself off as a poser, and they're not gonna talk back to you, and then
you've wasted a lot of time that coulda been spent at the donut shop or
at Sad Mary's Bar and Girl.
5. Commands
Remember how you repeat a noun to make a plural? You repeat a verb
to make a command. So "gimme a beer" in Glug is pug-pug gi dluz!
(Just like in English, you can omit the subject from a command.) Pug=give,
gi=I/me,
dluz=our
old friend "beer."
6. Questions
To make a yes or no question, you either just use a rising intonation in
the sentence like in English ("You got a raise?") or you add the question
words li dlu? at the end of the sentence. (Li=this, dlu=not)
To ask a "what, where, when" kind of question, you use the questioning
noun su, which means "what." Nu phnul su? "You said what?"
or "What did you say?" Notice that you don't normally put su in
the beginning of the sentence like you do with "what" in English. Doing
so marks you as speaking Glug with an English accent -- but luckily English
accents are kind of common among Al Amarjan Glugs, so it isn't absolutely
guaranteed to blow your cover. It's just sloppy.
Just like English "what," Glug su can be used as a noun or as
a determiner. It's like li, "this," that way. You can
say Nu phnul su? (what did you say?) or Nu sud su dluz? (what
beer do you drink?)
7. Tense
Most of the time, Glug doesn't bother to specify tense for its sentences.
For example, Gi glug means "I am a Glug," "I was a Glug," or "I
will be a Glug." If you really need to specify tense, you can use the particles
lus
(past), mim (present) or lilis (future), which come after
the verb: Gi glug lus, gi glug mim, gi glug lilis. (I was a Glug,
I am a Glug, I will be a Glug.)
Dictionary and Phrasebook
blub sage
dlu not
dluz beer
dudu and
dul present/current
gi I/me
glis light
glug human
hnun freak, mutant
lim wing
i that/who/which/whom
idzi like
ki of
knik dagger
knik ki niz copper dagger
li this
lilis future (adv)
lus past (adv)
mim present (adv)
nis piss
niz copper
nu you
phnul say
pug give
snig see
sud drink
thlud island
tikug unpleasant
tu person
tupi eight
tupi ki blub i znul eight evil sages
tuz in front of
u deity
ulimziuk winged bull god
ziuk bull
zninu manifest
znul evil
zuk stupid
zut ruler