Data File Updated: Saturday, August 03, 2024

Introduction | Grammar | Lexicon | Numerals | Names

The Trade Language is the interstellar language of communication between the various races of the Outsider galaxy.  It has been the formal language of trade and diplomacy among the spacefaring races for thousands of years in the current era, but it is much older even than this. It is a leftover from an ancient era preceding the current one, when the last great empire (the Soia) was in control of the local region. Trade includes many proper names (especially for places) that date back to the Soia era. Trade Language exists in many different dialects, as regional versions have drifted over the millennia. The version taught by the Orgus to humans is substantially different in pronunciation than that used by the Loroi, and lacks many of the archaic references that permeate the Loroi dialect.

Without a native language of their own, the Loroi use a customized dialect of Trade for their own needs; Loroi Trade is the official language of the races of the Loroi Union. The Umiak can't speak Trade directly; they lack the fleshy mouthparts to form the sounds, and must use mechanical translators. For writing, the Loroi use the following character set (which is written right to left):

Sentences are terminated by a three-dot equivalent of a period. An example of Trade text, written right to left, is as follows:

Words with double-consonants (such as in bailla, "explode", or tiie, "throw") can either be represented by two of the same character, or by a single character with an inverted carat over it (as in the second and sixth words from the right in the example above). A box-shaped character is sometimes used as a separator, similar to the English colon (":").

Pronunciation

In the Loroi dialect of Trade, the characters are pronounced as follows:

R - r as in "rain" D - d as in "dye"
A - ɑː as in "swat" T - t as in "tick"
L - l as in "lick" E - ɛ as in "bed"
O - oʊ as in "robe" G - g as in "girl"
Z - z as in "zebra" I - iː as in "teen"
P - p as in "pot" N - n as in "nod"
M - m as in "moon" B - b as in "bite"
SH - ʃ as in "shy" S - s as in "sack"


Grammar

This page lists some basic grammatical rules, including sentence structure and verb conjugation.

Lexicon

A partial lexicon of Loroi Trade words can be found here.

Numeral System

Loroi Trade uses letters as numerals. A brief overview of the numeric system is here.

Loroi Trade is an original, invented language, created for Outsider. The lexicon was assembled with the aid of tools available at LangMaker.com.