Parseltongue: And how to speak it

Chapter 8: Basic Parseltongue Sentences And Ra-words (roughly: colours)

Now that you know some pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs, you are ready to form a few sentences!

Normally, you would need a verb to form a sentence - and we haven't covered verbs yet. However, the verb "to be" is often implied in Parseltongue - so if that is the only verb your sentence would need in English, you would not need a verb in Parseltongue! Here are a few examples:

-"Why is this wet?" is glossed as "This wet why?" and therefore translates into Parseltongue as "Tasi asuna vuʃ?"
-"How quickly is that?" is glossed as "That quickly how?" or "Fasi ʃine baʃ?"

A few words about Tasi vs Fasi: while there are no hard and fast rules, you would normally use tasi (meaning "this") for something right in front of you - or something you are talking about. By contrast, fasi (meaning "that") would often refer to something further away: either due to distance or because it's not the current subject of discussion.

The Parseltongue word for "colour" is slehara. Note that it ends in
"-ra". Similarly, even though they are adjectives, the basic Parseltongue colour words also end in "-ra" (which makes them the most common exception to the "adjectives normally end in -na" rule); as such, Parseltongue speakers will often refer to colour-words as "ra-words". Just as with ​Kestnaʃ , though, slehara itself is considered a noun and not a ra-word. Some basic colour words can be found to your right!
Colour - Slehara

Red - Ara
Orange - Sora
Yellow - Bira
Green - Tira
Blue - Vera
Purple - Pura
Black - Kura
White - Ʃira
Brown - Gara