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Lexember 09. 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.




Today, I made two new lexemes (well, I made a couple more but for some reason they don't feel submittable):
Which means that now I can create the long-form religious title of Ranataṙ, the Black Aspect (Well, I might yet change it to White), aka Aspect of Death, though "Ranataṙ" is actually more like "Aspect of Not". (nul would be "death"):
Ranataṙ isn't really comparable to the grim reaper, because ail ("it" just doesn't feel right here) is not responsible for actually bringing about death. (Actually, that's part of Rakofaṙ's symbolism, as the final stage of the cycle of life sůṙ represents. Rakofaṙ is the Red Aspect, the Fire of Life, and is considered "animate" rather than "divine" for the symbolism.) Instead, ail is the personification of the metaphysical rule "One cannot step back from the threshold", (one of the many proverbs and maxims I need to translate), in essence the force that pushes all living souls inexorably towards the next world.
This also allows me to demonstrate the "reduced" dative marker gů, used in forming complex noun-ed verbs that include non-object arguments, like this one. Case-marker reduction is done by turning the last vowel into ů: gu → gů (Also, I got confused about whether "Beyond" is the recipient (dative) or the location (locative) but based on prepositions (to vs on/in/at) dative definitely makes more sense.) Without a marker there, it would be "the beyond usherer" (that which ushers beyonds) which doesn't make sense.
In other news, I just realized that I can call myself a ren.vůmmaṙ.te.ï, "speech.build.er.person". What would "conlanger" look like in your languages?
Ooh, there's a great ring to ailgavvatif and to the religious title! Love your explanation also. It all feels culturally and linguistically coherent, if you get what I mean.
Hmm, well, in Beldreeni there's kaspi, 'builds', with kaspirío meaning 'builder, carpenter'. And himōra means 'language'. So - himōrakaspirío, I guess!
I don't have the words needed in Nahul yet, but in my old Indo-European conlang Averian, I could construct jagatekvain following the same logic, from jaga, 'tongue, language' + tekve, 'to build'.
I appreciate that you think it seems coherent; it's something I've been striving for beyond anything else really. I haven't been paying particularly much mind to how things are done in actual languages, so much as "how difficult would it be to learn this rule, given everything else in the language?" (Which is why I haven't figured out verbs yet, because I don't intuitively understand aspect and mode.)
himōrakaspirío and jagatekvain are nice. Is the J like /j/ or /dʒ/? Learning phonetics has damaged my ability to pronounce words in unfamiliar orthographies with any confidence.
That sounds like a sensible rule to use.
Aspect and mode can be so variable, within as well as across languages. They can certainly be a headache. I guess I've just figured that it's often so inconsistent anyway so I'll just make something up and hope it works out.;) But I can never withstand the lure of a subjunctive verb form... Unless I will with Nahul, I haven't gotten that far yet there.
It's like/j/! In Beldreeni the J letter stands for /dʒ/, as in English. But with Averian I was so wishy-washy - too caught up with aesthetics, I think - but I did determine that the /j/ sound at the start of a word was spelled with J, as in Swedish (however, inside or at the end of a word the same sound was spelled with Y or I - very inconsistent!) I'm striving to eliminate that kind of inconsistency this time around, and yet I find myself still not regular in spelling when it comes to using macrons or double consonants to indicate a long vowel...
Ìntůṙèstingli, ai hav faond ìt kwait izi tu lůṙn ànd cůnsìstèntli yuz fònètìk spèling.
Well, with ṙ anyway. I find I keep trying to use it in English words.
(The grave accent is for "lax" vowels, and is in my conscript but not used in Firen. It's meant for languages with more than 6+ṙ phonemic vowels, like English. Unfortunately there isn't a representation of phonemic long vowels or stress. And I don't know if I've said it before, but ṙ is actually also a diacritic in the conscript, not a letter. I'll post a picture of the conscript sometime.)
Lindhina has a pretty limited vocabulary so far, but I could make linamidh using the suffix I talked about above, though that might be closer to 'linguist'.
A closer attempt might be ziikelinphal, 'he/she/they who builds language(s)'.
Not really a word but a couple of suffixes:
-idh, which essentially is a translation of the English -er; it turns a verb into a noun meaning doer-of-verb.
mag - to eat
magidh - eater
and -amidh, which does a similar thing, but rather than indicating someone doing something right now, suggests that they do the thing for a living, or very frequently, or that it is a part of their identity.
So you'd have skeridh sek mezag 'the writer of this letter', but skeramidh zii an, 'he is a writer'.
Nice! I love it. :D
Morphemes of the day! Suffixes are important, and also cool, I am all in favour of this.
That's a very neat distinction to make, and so easily!
Thank you! I love affixes and tend to use them all over the place everywhere.
I was originally kind of thinking of -amidh as sort of like the -ist in oboeist or artist, except it's probably going to end up being used much more widely/frequently.
My word from today is zee, [ze:] a noun in Nahul.
This means something like 'joy, pleasure, happiness, a state of wellbeing'. It belongs to Class III of nouns. It's used in several expressions. Pakhá zeen koth, literally 'I took joy in (something; I don't know the word for 'something' yet)', is more used than its literal English translation but as in English still has a fairly formal ring.
There is a very common verb derived from this noun plus the verb watá, 'I received/I got (something)':
zeenatá
meaning: 'I liked (something)'.
Sample sentences: Zeenató ankhit choreló.
'The woman liked her house.'
Ni-chago zeenatar khesotates.
'The girls liked our city'.
Pakhai zeen koth el-mamiin.
'(formal) I like flowers.' (Lit. ‘I take joy in flowers.’)
Thiarr zeenatai anchat.
'I really like tea.'
Wanoi anech inek zeen.
'Tea gives me joy/pleasure.' (Also more formal.)
Stress on the last syllable of every word. This is a VSO language, by the way (my first one.)
ETA: Forgot to say that I'm transcribing Nahul slightly differently than Beldreeni. /ch/ in my Beldreeni words stands for [tʃ], as in English, but in Nahul it stands for [ʃ], as in French.
Oooh, I love it.
Wanoi anech inek zeen. I could get that in calligraphy and put it on my wall. (I love tea. :D )
Me, too! :D At first I actually wrote it as "great pleasure": Wanoi anech inek harakeen zeen.
(The /ee/ stands for a long [e:], not [i:].)
Good to know! I auto-pronounce each vowel separately, almost like eyen. I like the long sound there. Very pretty.
I just found my note about how to make yes/no questions, which I'd temporarily forgotten when I turned my attention back to Beldreeni for a while.
So now I can also say,
Mien zeenatei anchat? 'Do you like tea?' and, Mien dorei pakh anchat? 'Do you want (some) tea?', although that last one probably needs some fiddling, it's very bare and direct now.
Oooh!
9th Khangaþyagon word kulesti: chalk downland
I love the sound of that!
That sounds so poetical and atmospheric. Where is the stress?
shdah • [ ʃdaʎ̥˔ ] • information gathered from informants or primary sources
noun
Language: Akachenti
What a greatly useful word to have!
So the /d/ is still voiced despite coming right after an unvoiced affricate?
Yes, unless the syllable ends up stressed. Then it devoices a bit. Of course, then it's also implosive.
I think it's a fricative?
ETA: It's also more likely to devoice when it starts a word, but it often doesn't, in which case, the sh and the d end up in different syllables.
Sorry, I got the words mixed up!
But I would have thought a monosyllabic content word like this would often wind up stressed in speech? Not so?
No, because stress in this dialect falls on the object marking vowel. In another dialect of Kachan, they've moved almost entirely to vowel mutation and regularized stress.
Additionally, most monosyllabic content words get used in "constructions," which means that more syllables show up and change the overall prosody of the word in regular use.
I'm trying to be good and do some back conlanging, so this one came from my starter vocabulary in the form of this snippet of a conversation:
Ishdah [ iʃ ɗɑʎ̥˔ ] was a statement of where the information came from that they were discussing, an important distinction in these two characters' daily lives. The second said, "No, [word I have not deciphered here, used as a correction]."
This language uses qualitative stress, meaning the implosivation and vowel retraction signals stress without any need for vowel reduction elsewhere or additional volume. Also the syllable boundary protects the /d/ from regularly devoicing, and the suprasegmental nature of devoicing stops when stressed also helps preserve a need to keep the voicing when unstressed.
Ah, now I see it! This makes sense.
Yay! I'm not actually good at making sense. :D