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.
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