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Lexember 22. 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.




I've been really trying to hammer out a verbal paradigm, but aspect is bewildering and for some reason I can't understand what mood even does (also all the examples with any detail seem to be indo-european and Firen is not at all indo-european). So, why not make a word for "abstruse"?
Thus, I present kessi: "arcane, abstruse, impermeable". "Impermeable" was the original meaning, but the metaphorical extension has overtaken (though not supplanted) it. Derived from kes "smooth and hard" (as glass or a stone) through the instrumentive-commitative case "kes-di" via lenition and rebracketing. (You use the instrumentive to construct at least some types of predicate adjectives, solving my problem from yesterday with gittutif.) Despite being an abstract quality, kessi is in the inanimate gender, reflecting its history.
I can also say
vaiza kaoä čas kessi-di
"these books are impenetrable"
(I like this much more than using the locative for this sort of thing.)
Of course, not all of my resources are books, but that's a minor issue. Also, I had no idea when I made a copula that predicates would provide such utility. I guess that the copula being a verb in English gave me the wrong impression.
Very nice! How is this copula different from English's in versatility/part of speech? You haveth me curious.
It's a particle, rather than a verb like in English. So it doesn't encode TAM or agreement or anything else verbs normally do. I think that to express past predications (those which are no longer true) I'll use a full verb form.
It's less versatile than it is in English because it doesn't have TAM, but simple predications are still quite useful.
Ah, indeed so! Thanks for the extra details. I love seeing into your process.
I love the etymology/world-building process! (And the sample line in the other comment is a great one!)
One question: you say that kessi is in the inanimate gender. Do adjectives have inherent genders in Firen? And can you not use kessi to describe a person?
Adjectives have genders because adjectives are nouns in Firen. Most of the ones that you wouldn't use on their own (which is roughly comparable to "adjective") end up in the "divine/abstract" gender, because they refer to things that have no physical existence, but a few are inanimate nouns. (Very few "adjective" roots are in the animate gender, though, that one is mostly reserved for actual [living] "things".)
You can use nouns in any gender as modifiers, and in that context they (except sůṙ and ail) generally lose their gender. (sůṙ and ail are often included near the beginning of noun phrases to emphasize that a noun is in a particular gender, such as in stůllaoäilvollitif "the Change of Ways" or ailistif "Quintessential Spirit", where the emphasis on the abstract/divine nature (which makes up over two thirds of the word's length) is translated as "quintessential".)
Adjectives-as-verbs seems to be a more common paradigm in general, but since this is an agglutinating language it seemed more apt to use adjectives-as-nouns. Actually, a few other things are nouns that wouldn't be in other languages, such as skan (which is used to construct "X and Y" NPs) which I've glossed as "union" in my notes for exactly that reason. (skan is not used for conjunction, it only serves to be the head of combining NPs for inflection purposes. It has no inherent gender, reflecting its grammatical status.)
And kessi can be used for a person just fine, though it would be a bit metaphorical. It would probably either mean "stubborn/unyielding" or "unreadable" in that context.
A few words today, though I'm still interrogating a few vowel markers to make sure everything's holding up right:
no:ste • [ no:s.te ] • to be familial to, to be brother to. Connotes a social or biological relationship.
nuiste • [ nui̯s.te ] • to be sister to, to claim as family. Connotes a social or biological relationship.
duis • [ dui̯s ] • pleasure, delight in
ingda:sh • [ iŋ.da:ʃ ] • lover, someone's romantic and physical companion in a committed relationship
Language: Akachenti
Very nice familial words! Would you know how to say "I am X:s brother" or "I have a brother"?
I'm their brother.
Oh, wow! I could actually do that!
ETA: and I keep wanting to stress the last syllable, but that would not work at all. Ugh.
ETA2: I just realized that's assuming proximity of the sibling in question. For nonproximity:
Because I have not figured out that pronoun yet.
Very cool!
Back to Nahul, and continuing the same theme as on Dec 20:
halan [ha'lan], 'the realm of spirits'. Noun class II, object form halanat, genitive halanet
From halá [ha'lɑ:], 'spirit, supernatural , noun class I.
Another word derived from halá is halawan [hala'wan], a compound with wani, 'gift', where the final -i has fallen off the nominative form (but resurfaces in the accusative, halawaniin). Noun class III. This word means 'dream'.
Also! menethan [mene'tʰan], 'civilisation, society, the realm of humans, the human world'. Noun class II.
From meneth [me'netʰ] 'structure, order', which in turn comes from me- 'together, co-' and neth- 'pick'.
Sample line (just one, my vocabulary and syntax isn't advanced enough for more):
Da halawaniin, nannach pha menethanat ko halanat.
'In dreams [lit: With dream], we go/walk from the human realm to the spirit realm.'
Oh, I like this very much. I do like little vowels that disappear and reappear in irregular forms, too! Love all of these.
Do you have a lot of compound words? Do you have others with me- or neth-?
No, very few so far! But I did get me- from a back formation of menu, 'book'. I'd already determined that nu is a page in a book (or maybe both sides of a page), and at first I was going to have me- mean 'collection'. But then I forgot about that, came up with another word for 'collection', and liked that better. So now I had to figure out what me- meant!
The neth- root (nethá, 'I picked', lo-neth, 'to pick') is brand new! But I have just used meneth to make the adjective menethin, 'orderly'.
Thank you! I haven't been too good about that kind of thing in Nahul before, nor even Beldreeni really. But I realised it fit here. It also explains why halawan is of noun class III despite ending with a consonant - because it used to end with a vowel.
Well, I like the ones you got! Is it more the meaning of to choose, to select, to pluck or take hold of, or another meaning for neth. I was assuming the first but just remembered it's a little more ambiguous in English without context.
I really, really like menethin. It's pleasing and sensible at once.
Always a first time to master a new skill! I think you're well on your way and I love how things like that create these irregular words. I remember when I built out Tatan was the first time I realized that natural irregularities popped up when rules clashed.
Avari has tons of irregularities, but to be honest many of them came about because I was a mite too concerned with "But it's got to sound good, it has to be easy to say, and it can't be too long!" I've dialed way way back on that. Especially on the 'too long' bit. I think I had a complex from learning English and thinking good always equals short...
I did that with Vas'hehr a lot, though I simply codified the rules by which they made things sound good. Like there are a lot of interfixes called blenders whenever someone finds a consonant cluster too difficult, and that was honestly in free distribution before things starting narrowing to preferred spelling/pronunciation, but you'd get competing words with the more sonorous usually winning eventually.
Which is a sideways way of saying, do what you like, just make it work afterward!
Primarily the meanings 'pluck' and 'take hold of'. I was mostly thinking of Swedish "plocka", which doesn't carry the 'select' meaning as strongly as English 'pick' does. Although there's still an inherent choosiness about the action, isn't there?
That makes sense, then you just add more phonematic rules to the morphological ones.
I really like the cultural connotations of everyone together taking hold and that being structure, order, and civilization. There's a nice grounding concept there!
Yup, yup, yup!
Ah, I may have been misleading! I think the me- in this instance has to do more with gathering what you pick and making a structure from that, if you see what I mean? One person can do it. But it's likely a very old word that can be parsed in more than one way!
Bit of a tangent: The Swedish word läsa, 'to read', goes back to a Germanic root that once meant 'pick', apparently. You picked things off the ground or off an object, and that way you could gather knowledge - so when the speakers came into contact with a literate culture, that's the metaphor they went for. Possibly. I dunno, that has just always struck with me...
Oooh! Well, I like that too! it's interesting the connotations built into language that so much of civilization forgets. I really like that.
Also, I like tangents. I was determined to do better about asking after the most intriguing features instead of making you do all the work of drawing us out!
22nd Khangaþyagon word
tarvos: (adj) solid, firm, reliable
(n) foundations, axiom
That word sounds solid. Well done.