Fundamentals

High Woldian is a language of pictograms. Images taken from life are abstracted into symbols and combined to form a multitude of meanings.

Perhaps the two most important building blocks in the language are those for Place and Object:

Place	Object

These can be combined with simple directional arrows to create new words, for example:

Above	Below	Up	Down

Two Object symbols, when linked with a directional arrow, form the High Woldian symbol Change , indicating a movement from one object or state to another. By adding the Place symbol we can elicit new meanings:

New	Old

When used in this way the Place symbol acts as an indicator, signifying a point of relevence.

The Force symbol is probably the next most important when creating new words. This signifies an imperative, Must. We will see many applications of this symbol in later chapters.

Plurals are denoted by the component , and negatives by the component . Again, we will see examples of the application of these symbols in the chapters which follow.

One notable application, and an unusual one in High Woldian, is the way Order is changed to Disorder by the addition of the Negative symbol . These terms, which also represented Order and Chaos, System and Random to the High Woldians, become powerful components in their own right. Normally the negative symbol is not used to create new words, but is used in a grammatical fashion, for example He did not.

There are a number of other core words that regularly crop up in High Woldian, which should be mentioned at this point:

Big	Small	Start	End	Yes	No	If	But	Question

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