Mri (fictional alien species)

The mri are a fictional alien species in the Faded Sun Trilogy of C. J. Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe. Their culture appears to be drawn upon those of the Apache, Berbers (especially Tuaregs), and Japanese samurai. Their name means simply "the people," and they refer to all other races as "tsi-mri," which literally means not people.

The mri are a tall and slender humanoid species. Their skin is golden in color and their hair is coarse and golden-brown, generally worn shoulder-length. Their eyes are yellow, with epicanthic folds and a functional nictitating membrane to protect them against wind-blown grit. Their ears are slightly pointed, with a tuft of hair at the tip resembling that of a lynx.

The mri are divided into a rigid structure of three castes: kel, sen, and kath. These are functional rather than hereditary castes, but each has a clearly defined role in their society, and the mri regard any change in those traditional functions as completely unacceptable.

The language of the mri appears to be agglutinative, with each element having a single function. The apostrophes that give mri words their distinctive appearance appear to represent a glottal stop when separating two vowels, for instance, in kel’e’en, "a woman of the kel". However, in other words they seem to merely mark the boundaries between morphemes. There are a few words in which the function of the apostrophe is unclear, and it has been suggested that those are purely decorative, to make the words look more alien.

A careful reader can assemble a fairly large vocabulary of nouns, and even conjecture additional forms. However, there is little in the way of verbs or grammatical structure, so the novels cannot be used as the basis of a working language, as opposed to the elvish languages of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth.

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