Calormene Corpus

C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia have been among my favorite books since elementary school, both for the storytelling and for the meaningful symbolism. In the summer of 2008, I geeked out and read through The Horse and His Boy while making a list of every word in the fictional Calormene language. There turned out to be thirty-four in that book. In the summer of 2016, I finally finished rereading the rest of the series with my kids, and I believe the only other book that had Calormene words was The Last Battle, which led to me adding six more words at the end of this list, for a total of forty known Calormene words.

A list like this is called a corpus and is used by linguists to perform analyses, such as deriving phonotactic rules (the patterns of how sounds can be combined into words within a given language). I thought this list might be fun to use in one of my fictional language workshops to explain a notation system participants can use when coming up with rules for their own languages.

Orthographic     Phonetic (presumed)
Calormen __
Arsheesh __
Shasta __
Tarkaan __
Tisroc __
Anradin __
Tashbaan __
Calormenes __
Aravis __
Tarkheena __
Calormene __
Kidrash __
Rishti __
Ilsombreh __
Ardeeb __
Tash __
Calavar __
Ahoshta __
Azaroth __
Zardeenah __
Azim Balda __
Zulindreh* __
Alimash __
Teebeth __
Mezreel __
Lasaraleen __
Rabadash __
Axartha __
Ilkeen __
Corradin __
Tormunt __
Azrooh __
Chlamash __
Ilgamuth __
Pugrahan __
Rishda __
Emeth __
Harpa __
Tehishbaan __
Lagour __
* The same word is spelled differently later in the novel: Zalindreh.

An analysis is made more difficult by the fact that we only have the words as represented in conventional English spelling, but assuming that I’m using the intended pronunciation, we can draw a few conclusions.