The Language
When I was in school, I was lucky enough to learn some foreign languages (though I don’t think I appreciated it much at the time – especially when I had a vocabulary test). My husband is a linguist and both of us love to play with language. Searching out roots for the words I used in The Amethyst Road allowed me to have even more fun: I got to pick the brains of my friends in all their native languages: Hungarian, Hebrew, Persian, Romanian, Russian, Korean, etc. Here are a few terms and where they came from:
Ma’hane: This is derived from a Romany term mahrime, which means taboo, outcast or forbidden. I’ve twisted it a bit, to include a taste of a French word haine, meaning hate.
Gorgio: To my knowledge, this is a British traveller’s word which refers to everyone who is not a gypsy.
Jalla: A friend told me a similar word in Arabic, meaning beautiful or lovely – an endearment – which, in my ear, became Jalla. I thought it would be a wonderful generic reference to a young girl. Notice how hurt Serena is when Nico Brassi pointedly doesn’t use this term for her! (Jal is my imagined male version of the same term).
Kereskedo: Orsi, a lovely Hungarian student of mine, provided this term for Serena’s tribe – literally merchant in Hungarian.
Mount Avo: Avo is grandmother in Portuguese. I liked the idea of Serena finding Anchara on Grandmother Mountain.
See what else you can find!
(Thanks to: Yonah Karp, Mihaela Giurca, Orsi Nance, Bill Barry, Nader Nazemi, Wendy Asplin, Tim Teigan, and, of course, Richard Moore.)