Upon writing Seikai no Monshou, Mr Morioka did something more than write a novel; he created a language, too. As the protagonists of the novel live in a society whose culture as well as biological basis is different from those for the human world, he thought it appropriate to give them a new language. Yes, a new language, NOT a few new words!

Introducing a new language into a novel whilist writing in another may sound very complicated. However, he did it very well by taking advantage of written Japanese. As some of you may know, written Japanese often uses furigana, which are small hiragana or katakana next to kanji. They were originally used to tell the readers how to pronounce the kanji (pronunciation of a kanji word is not necessarily uniquely defined in Japanese). This is still their main function today. Many authors in recent years, however, have taken advantage of this system and used them to link two (sometimes unrelated) words. Mr Morioka has made the most of it in the novel.

Let's take the word "Flyer trainee"; Lamhirh's rank in the Space Navy (Laburec) at the beginning of the novel. In the original novel, it looks like;

(NB: In the real book, the furigana is even smaller than this in comparison to the kanji. I made it bigger to make it readable on the screen.)

The kanji part can be read as shoushi-shuugisei. This word is an invention of Mr Morioka's and you would not find such a word in Japanese dictionaries. Thanks to the intrinsic meanings of kanji, however, a Japanese reader could roughly guess its correct meaning as "a trainee learning to be a flying personnel". Mr Morioka, however, tells him to read the word as benee rodairu through the furigana above the kanji. This is an Abh word and has no meaning whatsoever in Japanese. So the reader knows what the word means and how it is pronounced in the Abh language at the same time.

Although the novel only reveals this much, Mr Morioka's imagination extends even further; a new language should have a new alphabet. Yes, the word should be spelled in its original alphabet as

If one transcribes it with the Western alphabet, it becomes

bénaic lodaïrr

The Abh were created by a nationalistic minority group of Japanese who tried to exclude all foreign influence on their culture. Because the Japanese language developed under the strong influence of other languages (e.g. Chinese) from its early days, they had to recreate a new language from ancient Japanese to achieve their purpose. Obviously this process was too artificial; how can you fit the language of 2000 years ago into the modern life? Inevitably the new language was rather complicated and strained.

Such was the first language that the Abh were given. Inevitably the language changed quickly soon after they left Earth. As one can guess, a language used in a small closed society drifts away from its original form very fast. The drift was accelerated further by the fact that the Abh didn't have an alphabet. The creators of the Abh did not want them, mere slaves, to develop their own culture and thought that giving an alphabet (a written language) would only encourage it. Later, when they declared their independence, the Abh created their own alphabet.

Anyway the deviation was so large the current Abh language hardly bears any resemblance to Japanese. Let's take the Clan name of the Imperial Family, Ablïarsec, pronounced roughly [abliar]. This was originally the name of the star where the Abh decided to settle down and was taken from a Japanese Goddess of the Sun, Amaterasu. As you can see, it is very hard to find a link between the two words unless you are told how.

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