A community for conlangs and conlangers
Lexember 06. Share Your Word for the Day!
It's that time of year when conlangers challenge ourselves to create one new word a day. Feel free to share and link to your words in this and the following Lexember posts. :D Additional etymologcial or explanatory notes encouraged.




Augh, I keep missing days! I'm going to be lazy today because I don't have much time to work things out.
Cile - to eat
Kangana - dessert
Apa chilekr kangana gele seltec - They ate dessert before dinner.
Translating that sentence into the corrupted languages:
Missaknal - Atta cil kaŋa ke seltash kura
Fael Mo Tuk - Sum ap cai le kan gaen sel le cheel kuel keen
Sofik (the trouble child)- Aber chileko kekan key nunes
Cal Rea - Senat cale ke kangyen gael sadag
Two words that go so very well together!!! I keep being really impressed by how systematically different the four corrupted languages are. It reads as very convincing and plausible.
I'm glad! Figuring out just how close or different the words should sound is a lot harder than I thought it would be.
So as to express my frustration with the Christmas decorations all over my house, I've invented a word for glitter:
Natives almost certainly have no need for such a word (except maybe to describe the waste products of gemcutting) since they have a pre-industrial society. (Although maybe they could conjure some shine-grit up with magic? It might have some use to a clever mage or alchemist.) Still, I enjoyed making it, simple as it is.
Nouns in the inanimate gender have no suffix, by the way. But if there were, say, a beast made of glitter coming to eat your friends, you might shout zarttesůṙčudsavůṙrosuse! go jot! ("Warring-living-glitter-beast! (You) run!") at them to warn them. (I'm just including the 2s-informal pronoun for the imperative here because I haven't decided when exactly pronouns can be dropped yet, if at all.) Which gives me a chance to demonstrate that -se is the animate (but non-"person") suffix, and also I already had jot /dʒot/ (run) in my lexicon. sůṙ is "life", rosu (which is finally overtaking the older version, sůro) is "beast". Also I don't have verb conjugation yet so I'm just using the lemma, though in such a dire situation I'm not sure anyone would care about such trivial particulars as sentence structure.
Honestly, I'd call Christmas glitter warring-living-glitter-beast! I'm still finding glitter from seasons past that never fully vacuumed off of chairs!
Here's to such a creative way to exercise your frustration! I love it. :D
I wasn't sure whether zartte "war-er" or naäla "unpeaceful" better expressed "wants to eat you", but I had to decide one way or the other. But now that you've read this comment you know both.
I like both of those words, but there's something delightful about the contrast of a word full of sonorous liquids meaning unpeaceful.
I didn't even think of that. That's what you get with derivational morphology, apparently.
Also, I only just realized that I should really have used the plural "goä". I guess that's one way to lose friends.
This is glorious!!!
Lindhina's starting to come together a bit more now I think, and today's word is: kul, meaning plant, and related kukulo, meaning grass.
agna-dhen mag kukulo gi-ye: the sheep ate my grass
I love that! It's a nice word and I like how the root got extended for grass.
Is kukulo formed by reduplication or something else? I love reduplication - it's so versatile!
Also curious whether -dhen is for plural or definiteness or maybe something else. The mixing in with European forms works well, I think!
It's actually way more boring than reduplication (I also love reduplication, but haven't used it so far with this one) - kulo means green, so it's essentially a squished-together version of 'green plant'.
-dhen is a clitic (if that's the right word? I am so out of practice with all this) attached to the noun to indicate past tense. I'm not sure if I'm sticking with it or not, but it's what I'm using right now.
Oooh. That's so cool, putting a past-tense clitic on the noun! I've never done anything like that.
Sekhi - (n.) meat (pl. -eni) Language - Lortho
Oh, nice!
How is the /kh/ pronounced here? /just curious
6th Khangaþyagon word kerun: (v) barter goods kerunont: bartering goods.
Very nice. I do like that –ont ending.
Another useful-looking economy word! So this is bartering of goods, while the other one was to barter with services...
A preposition: no, which in Nahul language means 'on', but only as a movement/direction: I put the book on the table. When used for an object (or person) that's already on something, as in I saw the book on the table, you use non instead.
There's also a couple of derived words: nono means 'up on' and notho 'down on', again only when used as a direction. For a resting state, you use nondo for the former and nontho for the latter. Stress on the last syllable.
(I'm a little unused to the terminology in English to clarify the distinction, as opposed to in Swedish where I do know the grammatical terms - though chiefly in order to talk about German noun cases...)
allative vs. locative? I don't know. I think English does it with prepositions, but it's still just a case.
Maybe... Finnish does it much more systematically than German with its cases, I know that. In Nahul it's also only done with prepositions. All nouns get the oblique or "general object" suffix after a preposition, regardless of which type.
Well, yes. The locative case, or its equivalent, in English would be "on the table" or "in the table" (iirc, those might be two separate ones). It's a phrase. In a more fusional language, it would be marked on the noun itself. But they serve the same function.
Yes, but in English (and also Swedish) you use the same words regardless of whether you mean "on" as a direction or as a pre-existing state. In Nahul you change the preposition, in Finnish you use different case endings. In German you also mark the case on the noun, as in Finnish, though with articles rather than suffixes.
Yes. It's not abnormal for multiple cases to have the same forms or for it not to be marked on the object itself. Just which ones differs by languages, who distinguishes what.
I guess I'm confused. I see these languages using different tools to reach the same end.
Edit: per Wikipedia, English does not distinguish the allative and locative cases and uses locative for both, but I was right that those are the two cases.
Technically, though we do have an allative preposition; we just don't use it much, onto. They're basically merging.
Oh yes! "Onto" works.
Good to have terms for it!
I love the 'up on'/'down on' distinction! And the sounds of nono/notho.
Glad you like it! :D
valus • /va lus/ • the way things are
definite noun
Language: Akachenti
Such a short yet expressive and confident word! It looks very decisive. So this noun is always definite - there's no way it could have an indefinite form?
Oh, it has one! I just don't think it's valu, which tells me between that and n|akos that there's something going on morphologically aside from just the –s.
For example, to turn shonga into a verb form, you change the o to u. At least some verb forms. (It's complicated.) So there's something about the definite vs. indefinite that I haven't figured out yet and I've only met words so far in one form or the other, excepting a:gi.