Mando'a to English guide

I had some requests for more the language of Mandalore. Enjoy.





Mando'a sentence structure was very similar to Galactic Basic: that is, subject-verb-object. There were a few points of difference, though. Mando'a was intended primarily as a spoken language, and rules were put in place to make it easily pronounceable.

Plural Most words in their plural form looked the same, but ended in an e. If the singular noun ended in a vowel, the plural then ended in se. There were exceptions, however, like Gett'se.

The plural diminutive form of ad was Ad'ike because the diminutive was Ad'ika. One would drop the a and put an e there instead.

Word merging in Mando'a: Many words in Mando'a were merged out of two or more other words, but the translations were usually only one word. Literally, those merged words had a normal, sensible meaning. A good example was dar'jetii which, literally translated, was \"no longer a Jedi\", but which was actually used to mean \"Sith.\" There were no stated rules about word merging, but it remained an important aspect of Mando'a.

An apostrophe was used in words to indicate that two had been put together, as in compound nouns. When a compound word is difficult to say, the speaker would elide; Mando'a was primarily a spoken language, so ease of pronunciation was paramount. Instead of saying vore entye, for example, the phrase became Vor'entye, which was transformed into Vor'e.

Excluded letters: The letters x, z, and f were not in Mando'a, although a sound similar to that of f presented itself with vh, and z is represented as s.

Clitics: In Mando'a, clitics were freestanding and preceded other words in a sentence. For example, tion was the interrogative clitic, so Karen, tion mhi hibira Mando'a iviin'yc? means: Karen, are we learning Mando'a quickly?

Articles: The words \"the\" and \"a/an\" weren't used much in Mando'a, except for emphasis. There were a few Mando'a words for \"the,\" the main one being te, and \"a/an\" translated to \"eyn\".

Conjugations: There were two forms of most verbs: the infinitives, which ended in r, and everything else, which do not use the r. For example, one wouldn't have said Ni vorer, but Ni vore. When using auxiliaries like ven or liser, the auxiliary was conjugated and then followed by the infinitive of the full verb. An example would be: \"Gar lise jorhaa'ir.\" (\"You can speak.\")

Adjectives from nouns: To turn a noun into an adjective, the suffixes -la (lah) and -yc (sh) could be added, either of which could have been chosen depending on ease of pronunciation. A popular example of this was Di'kut. Di'kut itself meant, essentially, idiot. But to turn it into an adjective, the -la suffix was added, resulting in Di'kutla. The suffix -la was used merely because it merged more easily with Di'kut than would -yc; such remained the case under all similar circumstances.

Superlatives and comparatives: Comparatives and superlatives tended to be constructed from adjectives with the suffix -shy'a for the comparative (e.g. dralshy'a: brighter, stronger) or -ne for the superlative (e.g. jatne: best).