This is awesome, Justin! You just inspired me to gush about appreciation for Barker’s brilliance.
There’s so much good to say about Tsolyáni and Barker’s design of it as a conlang. It’s a work of art. Barker was a serious linguist. We all know it was his profession, but he puts it all to use in this setting. Although his language is a work of fantasy, it blows Tolkien’s planned languages out of the water for verisimilitude. Barker had lots of field experience with many languages (as opposed to purely theoretical approaches, like many linguists), and far more breadth than Tolkien (who was no slouch!). It shows. His inspirations seem pretty clear. He wanted a complex phonology, with resonance with Balochi (and Arabic materials mediated by it), Sanskrit, and especially Nahuatl. The morphology is all agglutinative, reminiscent of Turkic, but with mostly prefixes instead of suffixes, or maybe a more inflected Malay, or even Georgian (but not as torturous). The complex linguistic marking of relative status of speaker-to-hearer is like that in classical Tibetan. I have zero doubt that Barker was familiar with all these systems, and his Tsolyáni grammar is like a celebration of the potentials known in real human speech. Notably, Barker clearly wanted to avoid inflectional-synthetic grammar in favor of something more transparent but ornate. I might say ornamented, like the image he has for the whole world he made. He wanted Tsolyáni grammar itself to tell us about an alien but human world. And it does. We have a picture of a complex, sophisticated society with entrenched customs, deliberately made extremely foreign to our world while staying human, and structured by social classes ranging from worthless scum to nearly divine honors.
The format of the grammar he wrote is exactly that of descriptive grammars he wrote for real languages, like this one. That is to say, it looks like grammars that professionals use, part of its charm and, if you are one of these professionals, it’s actually a giggle fest.
This is getting ahead of your “Let’s Read” order, @JustinH, but it’s worth quoting a later part of the EPT book now because it is connected with @Cigeus’ thread on peculiar settings, and the talk over there about genre, and these quotations pertain to Barker’s intentions for our first contact with his world.
Barker wrote:
At first glance it may appear very difficult to master all of the background material relating to Tékumel. The people, the flora, the fauna, the societies—all are new, and all are complex. Many have muttered about the relative unpronounceability of Tékumel’s many languages too, and not without reason. In defense, the author can only say that he ENJOYS societies which hare not simply reruns of the usual Graeco-Roman or Mediaeval fantasy mythos, but which present something really different: something akin to stepping off an airplane in Bhutan or Medina, rather than in familiar old London and Paris.
He is actively seeking to create the experience of visiting an alien but human society for his players. And then he adds this bit about genre.
This is consistent with the author’s contention that fantasy should sometimes go beyond our familiar Graeco-Roman-Mediaeval worlds and explore other quite different kinds of lands as well. After all, if there is any universally applicable conclusion to be drawn from a study of history it is this: the future is going to be quite different from the present. Man will organise himself into different types of societies, hold different values, worship different gods, utilise different technologies, and speak different tongues than he does today. (1987 edition, p. 98)
To me, this is an amazing statement for a game designer. Tékumel was specifically designed to break established fantasy genre conventions (already in '75!) to further an anthropological science-fiction argument mediated by played experience and wonder.
He didn’t try to make something easy. He could have. There’s a reason that Tékumel is an acquired taste. I can’t say I ever wanted to play in it, but I think it’s amazing all the same.