Jump to content
 
  • entries
    42
  • comments
    102
  • views
    67,928

Sudrian Language


Corbs

4,190 views

It was once said of Tolkein that he ended up writing the Lord of the Rings as a by-product of creating the Elvish language.
Whilst not quite as expansive as Middle-Earth (or even Westeros), I think Wilbert and George Awdry had a lot of fun creating the world of Sodor.
The elusive book 'THE ISLAND OF SODOR; Its people, history and railways' is all about building the world that the stories inhabit, with its own colourful history.
My modelling is my own take on this world, I've changed some details, but I share the belief that everything in this world should have a reason to be there.
To this extremely nerdy end, for the last 4 years I've been building up a 'master document', a sprawling spreadsheet of info, made-up history and justification, using TIOS as the base and building my own world on top of it.
This document is constantly changing and evolving, but I thought I'd post about it for a change.

 

One of the sheets is an attempt to decipher the Sudric language. The Rev. Awdry provides a few translations for place names etc. in his guide, which was a good starting point.
I thought it would be interesting to compare it to Manx (the real-life neighbouring island), then English, then Gaelic (Irish and Scottish) and Latin. I also tried translating a few words and phrases for which I had no Sudric counterpart, to see what it came out with.

 

I've uploaded a screenshot of this here. I found it quite interesting to see the routes of the words (in fact I'm currently reading a book called The Etymoligicon) and thought it may be of interest to others.
blogentry-898-0-09633100-1506986478_thumb.jpg

  • Like 4

6 Comments


Recommended Comments

  • RMweb Premium

Thats a fun idea corbs, its interesting to see where railway modelling takes people. 

Link to comment
  • RMweb Gold

Excellent.

 

However, I might wait until I can get the DVD for £3 in Tesco, but I'll then watch it avidly with a large pizza and some beer.

Link to comment
  • RMweb Premium

Skarloey and Rheneas are based on Talyllyn and Dolgoch, so it's reasonable to try the idea that they are Sudrian equivalents of the Welsh names. Since Talyllyn apparently means 'end of the lake lake' and Sudrian 'loey' is identified with 'loch'. the element 'skar' might be somehow related to 'end'. However, 'Dolgoch' means 'red meadow' so seems unrelated to 'Rheneas'.

Link to comment
  • RMweb Gold

Skarloey and Rheneas are based on Talyllyn and Dolgoch, so it's reasonable to try the idea that they are Sudrian equivalents of the Welsh names. Since Talyllyn apparently means 'end of the lake lake' and Sudrian 'loey' is identified with 'loch'. the element 'skar' might be somehow related to 'end'. However, 'Dolgoch' means 'red meadow' so seems unrelated to 'Rheneas'.

 

Thankfully the Reverend Awdry provided a rough translation as 'Lake in the woods' and 'Divided waterfall' (which is almost the ramse as the Manx and Gaelic) respectively.

  • Agree 1
Link to comment

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...