KETH-PLAIN
The Campus Magnus Trade Pidgin · Mixed Speaker Community · Living Pidgin · No Writing System
There is a version of the centaur tongue that the eastern frontier traders use among themselves and with the Havarʼketh clans, and I want to be precise about its relationship to Havaʼketh proper: it is not Havaʼketh. It is what happens when a language that requires attunement to the plain meets a trading post that requires only that two parties agree on a price. The centaurs who use it in commerce are entirely capable of switching to full Havaʼketh the moment the transaction is complete. The traders who use it are often unaware that they have learned something that is not quite the language they think they have learned. I have used it myself at the frontier markets. It works. I record it here as a practical resource, with the caveat that a scholar who arrives at a centaur winter encampment speaking Keth-Plain and expecting to conduct nuanced diplomatic conversation will encounter a silence that is, in its way, informative.
Keth-Plain emerged over approximately three centuries at the eastern frontier trading posts, where Havarʼketh clan members conducting commercial exchange with Roman merchants needed a working register that neither party had to master fully to use. The result is a contact language built on Havaʼketh’s root-compound logic but stripped of the breath-stop system, the aspect markers, the pitch-register distinctions, and the cycle-based temporal reference that give full Havaʼketh its character. What remains is the skeleton: compound roots joined by hyphens rather than the glottal stop, Latin vocabulary for objects and quantities that Havaʼketh has no words for, and a simplified subject-verb-object order that neither Latin speakers nor centaurs find natural but that both can use without training.
It is a functional language. I want to be clear about this: Keth-Plain works, in the specific context it was built for. A trader who speaks it can establish price, describe goods, invoke guest-right, set a meeting time, and end an exchange in terms both parties understand. What it cannot do is discuss the meaning of a grazing rights agreement, conduct a diplomatic negotiation, or carry anything that the Havaʼketh consider worth saying carefully. The Havarʼketh elders who use Keth-Plain at the trading posts use it with the deliberate consciousness of a person who has shifted into a register that limits what can be said. They know what they are not saying. The traders they are speaking with often do not.
Sentence Structure
Keth-Plain replaces the glottal breath-stop with a hyphen in written transcription and with a simple pause in speech — briefer than the full Havaʼketh stop, lacking the resonant carry. Word order is subject-verb-object, not the Havaʼketh subject-object-verb: this was the most significant structural concession the centaur speakers made, and Arrak told me it was made deliberately because placing the verb last made Roman traders nervous. He said this without particular expression.
Verbs in Keth-Plain carry no aspect markers. Tense is expressed by Latin-derived time words bolted to the front of the statement: past-run, now-keth, next-tav. This produces sentences that Havaʼketh speakers describe as ‘flat’ — the absence of -eth and -run removes the sense of whether an action belongs to a completed or continuing circuit, which in commercial contexts is frequently the most important thing to know. Traders using Keth-Plain to confirm delivery terms should be aware that ‘now-keth deliver’ and ‘past-keth deliver’ are all the temporal precision available.
Numbers are Latin-derived throughout — Havaʼketh has quantity words but not a counting system in the Roman sense, and commercial exchange required Roman numerals to function. Unit measures are likewise Latin. The vocabulary for goods is mixed: Havaʼketh terms for centaur-produced goods (hides, worked bone, grassland grain), Latin terms for Roman goods (metalwork, pottery, olive oil), and halfling trade-register terms for maritime goods and banking instruments.
Dictionary
Keth-vel? — ‘Where are you going?’ / ‘What is your business?’ — the standard opening of a market encounter
Tavʼgood — ‘Fair season / fair dealing’ — agreement on a price or arrangement
Velʼrun! — identical to full Havaʼketh; guest-right invocation carries full weight even in the pidgin
Ketʼno / Ketʼyes — blunt negation and affirmation; functional but considered abrupt by centaur speakers
Hava-price? — ‘What is the plain-price?’ i.e. the fair rate as the centaur sets it
Run-done — transaction completed; circuit closed; we are finished here
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