If you’re reading this, you might have had me autograph a book for you and seen me write “Aeo leywa ai shea” inside. You might have squinted at it and walked away, thinking, Oooookay… she’s crazy.
Well, I am crazy, but I’m not batty enough to write complete gibberish inside my books. It’s only mostly gibberish! The meaning of the phrase is explained inside the book, but I’ll spill the beans for ya.
In the world of Alani, Aeo leywa ai shea is from the Ancient language. It’s a common phrase that Followers of the creator god, Aeo, use when saying goodbye. It means, “God be with you and protect you.”
This is such a fluent and creative phrase. It really speaks to me and both its ancient and translated form have that antiquated ring. Did you completely fabricate it or is it a tweak of an existing language? If you created it, I would love to know the workings behind your languages!
Well hey, thank ya! I kind of totally made it up. HA! But the words did have inspirations from real languages – mostly Latin and Spanish.
I wrote about the origins of the name ‘Aeo’ for the creator in this blog post: http://jamiesfoley.com/the-god-of-alani/
The verb conjugation ‘-a’ comes from the way Spanish conjugates its verbs, although ‘-a’ in Spanish is used in a different way.
The contraction for ‘and’ in the middle, ‘ai,’ was also inspired by the simple vowel used for the same word in Spanish, ‘y’ (pronounced like the ‘e’ in ‘me’).
As for ‘leywa,’ the verb ‘to be with,’ I wanted it to have a gentle and comforting feel, like I feel God’s presence is. And ‘shea’ has a strong feel for ‘protect,’ like the word ‘shield.’