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.
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