Osör Ružeon

From Almeopedia

Šm Osör Ružeon [o ˈsœr ru ˈʒɛ on] was a Verdurian linguist, the first to reconstruct Proto-Eastern.

Early life

Ružeon was born in Taslelë, the rich suburb to the north of Verduria city, in 3371; his father was a culso (fleet commander) in the Verdurian navy. He was given a thorough education, receiving his suméria at the University of Verduria where he learned both Caďinor and Cuêzi.

He immediately joined the Navy, participating in missions and escorting merchants to Kebri, Xurno, Skouras, and Karímia, and rose to the rank of siřo (lieutenant); his commanders described him as bold and intelligent, but unwilling to follow orders he disagreed with. He secured an appointment to serve as a secretary to the Verdurian governor of Téllinor, which he fulfilled for four years, and because he was happily immune to the diseases of the interior, he was called upon to serve on both diplomatic and military missions. He once led a commando mission to penetrate the palace of the king of Bhrum, who was keeping two Verdurian traders for ransom; he brought them both safely back, as well as a Bhrumese girl named Kyadže (said to be a princess) with whom he lived for the remainder of his time in Téllinor. His first published work was a 32-page lexicon of Bhrumese.

He returned to Verduria full of trading schemes, attempting at first to rival the coffeehouses with a drink based on kyodoi (cloves), and then with clove-flavored coffee; next he tried to grow nüstrava or nutgrass, but found that Verdurians didn’t like the taste. Finally he helped organize a colony (to be named Cerrežne) in Vipodoȟ, north of Téllinor, which failed because he hadn't realized that neither Verdurian nor Téllinorese crops would thrive in the tropical zone. The money he gained from these schemes was threatened by a lawsuit brought by the survivors of Cerrežne, but this became moot when he invested and lost his fortune in a scheme to reach Téllinor by passing through the Zone of Fire.

For some years he was a writer, producing a fairly good overview of Téllinor, an unreliable exposition of the structure of the Revaudo state in Xurno based almost entirely on other travelers’ accounts, and his greatest success: Saza brumei (Bhrumese princess), a highly elaborated account of his rescue of the Verdurian traders and Kyadže (glossing over the fact that he abandoned her in Téllinor and later married a Verdurian woman).

Academic career

In 3419, at the age of 48, he returned to the University for his scrifteca, focussing at first on philosophy (kestora). One of his early publications was Soî Lebî Kestî, a categorization of all knowledge which also served as the basis for a constructed universal language - the Řon Lebië Kestië.

Throughout his career he had accumulated grammars and linguistic information as he could find them. He soon joined those scholars who were investigating the relationship (long denied) between Caďinor and Axunašin. One of his early contributions was, based on a grammar of Obenzayet, to force recognition that the Naviu languages were related as well. For some time he was convinced that Kebreni and even Bhrumese were members of the family too, but soon realized that this could only be maintained by severely distorting the data. Realizing this, he became a fierce critic of other scholars’ similarly fanciful distortions. Řo lukano soi loži, he decreed— don’t bend the words.

The first language

As he debated with his colleagues, it became clear that what he was advocating, for the first time on Almea, was the regularity of sound change. The idea was at first hotly rejected, but his critics were rendered speechless by his published demonstration (in Soî ülî řonî coašulî, 3432) that almost the entire Caďinor and Cuêzi vocabulary could be related by regular changes.

In this work he normally treated the Caďinor word as original— e.g. comparing dêt / dect (‘ten’), he assumed, reasonably enough, that dect was the older form, which Cuêzi had simplified. There were other cases where the Cuêzi word seemed more primitive— e.g. oxos / oĥ ‘gold’; here he said that the peržanise log, the original word, was oĥos— the first reconstruction of a more ancient form. Similarly, for yilini / glinis ‘long’ he reconstructed gilinis.

The next step was to add Axunašin and Obenzayet to the comparison. He published a brief lexical comparison in 3434, containing just fifty words and no reconstruction; further work proved to be quite difficult even though he now had half a dozen students working with him. Sources on Axunašin were incomplete and contradictory, and the only two members of the team who could read modern Xurnese struggled mightily with the ancient language. Not least because its phonetics weren't well understood: the writing system was a syllabary, but how to interpret the syllable glyphs was by no means clear, inasmuch as the modern readings were distorted by sound change. (Obenzayet was easier: there was no question of using anything but the modern language.)

Once a wordlist existed, a new question arose: which language was closest to the original? For instance, the words for ‘deer’ were ferêde / veredes / šeirvi / häraziz. Which language retained the original first consonant— if any of them did? How could one know? Perhaps inevitably, Ružeon tended to assume that Caďinor and Cuêzi were the most conservative languages. This was not a hard assumption to make in relation to Axunašin, which had changed in dramatic and idiosyncratic ways; Obenzayet proved to be more of a challenge. For instance, sāi / sai / zoi / sałi ‘(I) am’ raised the rather unpleasant notion that the Naviu barbarians had retained a sound that Caďinor and Cuêzi had lost.

Ružeon finally published Sarise, iy soî ülî řonî er baraďi zaë (Eastern, or, the ancient languages and their brothers) in 3442, as a very preliminary study. It included the full Caďinor/Cuêzi wordlist from the earlier work, all the cognates the team could find, the sound changes recognized so far, and brief grammatical sketches of Axunašin and Obenzayet. A great number of puzzles remained; but the publication generated a good deal of excitement, and useful collaboration with scholars in Žésifo and Avéla.

He died in 3450, but his work was carried on by his team, under the leadership of his student Estanesa Sarileya. It culminated in the publication of Dekaši Perëi Řonei (Discovery of the First Language) in 3473.