Graalen

Historically, the Andorians had spoken in the neighborhood of fifty distinct languages, typically clustered into nine interlocking language groups and divided into hundreds of dialects and variants. AS on most worlds the number of living languages became dramatically smaller as Andoria matured, advanced, and unified. The number of modern languages eventually hovered between eight and eleven and most every Andorian spoke at least a little of what most Federation citizens thought of the "Andorian language," Graalen.

What follows is an introduction focusing on a vocabulary of nouns and verbs.

The Raw Basics

Humans found Andorian very easy to learn - it had nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and a sentence structure that took very little getting used to for those versed in Standard. Because Andorian was a "consonantal root' language, and because the Andorians were very tradition-oriented, the language was remarkably consistent, and it was possible to extrapolate new words once you knew the basics. Here are the basics:

A consonantal root was a basic unit of meaning expressed in the form of a string of consonants. For example, the consonant sounds "ND" and "R", in that order, formed the root of words meaning "world", "planet", or (colloquially) "everything there is". The word 'andoria' literally meant '"The world"', while the word 'andor' means "planet" in a more general sense (Captain Kirk was born on "Earth Andor" -planet Earth). 'Indir' (pronounced "eendeer") was the Andorian word for what humans called terraforming-making worlds (a word never spoken cheerfully; the Andorians found the idea of terraforming distasteful). 'Ondara' was an Andorian term for music, but the literal meaning of the term was "what the world sounds like", which gave an insight into the sometimes-poetic nature of both the language and the Andorians. All of these words (and many others) had the ND-R consonants in common, forming the "core meaning" (root) of an entire family of words.

The added vowels tended to be consistent. The root for "communication" is GR-L. 'Agrol' meant "conversation" or "debate". 'Argola' means "consensus" or "gossip". 'Igril' ("eegreel") was a verb meaning "talk", and 'ograla' means "voice". Graalen was the native name for the Andorian language. The "en" sound at the end was a common suffix that denoted an ephemeral activity (in this case, talking). The written form of Graalen was properly known as Graalek, because the "ek" suffix denotes more physical, permanent activity.

As with any language, the details could vary. Andorians were fond of metaphor, and their language was highly idiomatic. Words like 'ondara' (above) were very common, and colloquial usage could be confusing. The phrase 'Ingrilan atlolla', for example, literally meant "speak to the clan leader". Colloquially, it was used to dismiss somebody that was complaining about something! When an Andorian said 'Igrilan Atlolla' to you, he didn't mean that you should literally go talk to a head of state. He meant that he wanted you to stop doing what he perceived as 'whining'. It was a phrase humans heard frequently from Andorians in a bad mood.

Dual Consonants

Many of the "core concepts" of Andorian were encapsulated in pairs of consonant sounds. There were many thousand identifiable pairs in the language, utlizing many distinct "consonants" (which included sounds that speakers of Standard would define as double and triple consonants, such as the syllable-dividing "ND" in 'Andoria'). Here was a brief sampling of pairs and the "core concepts" they typically represent. Note that there was a good deal of overlap, and more than one way to say just about anything; only a few very common roots are listed here.

CH-K: CH-LD: D-GR: D-

Names

Andorians had two names, their personal name (their 'ezatamor') followed by their 'keth' name (their 'ekathamor'). Many Andorians also enjoyed sporting descriptive epithets and nicknames. Andorian personal names were very often meaningful Fraalen words - but they were just as often words from older (even dead) Andorian languages, with no ties to the language described here. Some Andorian languages used completely different sets of sounds.

Sentences and Grammar

Andorian and Standard were very similar, grammatically. The most frustrating difference lied in Andorian's simplicity! The non-Andorian had to be very careful to pay attention to context. For example, Andorian had no articles - an Andorian did not say "a dagger" or "the dagger"; an Andorian simply said "dagger" (although some nouns carried a kind of "implied article" themselves - see above). Similarly, there was no verb corresponding to "is" or "are" in the present tense, and Andorians typically referred to themselves and each other by name (even the "third person" to refer to themselves) rather than using equivalents of "she" or "I". Apart from these and a few dozen other eccentricities, sentence structure was typically Standard.