A community for conlangs and conlangers
The Dailies. April 13
Did you work on your language today? Create any new rules of grammar or syntax? New progress on a script? New words in your lexicon?
On the other hand, do any excavating or reading or enjoying stuff you've already created? Do you have any favorites to share?
How did you conlang today?




Three new Nahul words:
ibalo 'courier, letter carrier' Loanword. There's town originally founded as a courier hub called Ibalas.
motethen 'policeman' (roughly) Also a loanword, and the original form was moteten
phuem While I already knew this as an ordinal number meaning 'ninth', I've now decided this is also the Nahul name for a time unit that I've been calling a "nonad". It's a ninth of the year. The people of the South-West Continent divide the year into 108 months, so a ninth comprises 12 months. (I was a bit disappointed to realise that as it's the same as for our years, but it's what seems to work the best for their obsession with the number three. It should be noted that their months are 33-35 days, so a nonad or phuem is still quite a bit longer than an Earth year.)
Three phuem make up a third of the year, 36 months. The first third of the year is called Growing or Waxing, the second Zenith, the third Waning. I don't have Nahul words for these yet.
Does ibalo come from Ibalas or vice versa? :)
Vice versa! The word existed before the town did. But I have no clue yet which language it's from.
Cool!
Oooh! Nice. I especially love the correlation between the town and courier name.
Today I was able to alphabetize my language in ConWorkShop. I had to figure out how to do it, but once I did it became quite an easy task. Anyhow, for today's conlanging experience, I decided to just work on my declensions and my new romanization method to see if it works the way I intend it. Here are a couple sample sentences to see if my method pulls through for the reader (you):
bilarik-hin nid-haratime noimalen I built my house with wood
t-hamiandin d-harak-hime lip-horennidan I will climb the mountain to its summit
I definitely think it's easier to read this way. Of course, knowing from before that you have a lot of aspirated consonants, now I'm sitting here wondering which ones those are because I can't recall if certain ones were always aspirated in your language or not, hah. Obviously I'm hard to please :P Then again that's sort of the thing with transcription vs romanization i think; different uses for different contexts.
I tried to show the aspirated consonants by hyphenating them.
Ooooh, ok! I read that as some kind of pause or mini glottal stop. Will try to recall for future.
Ah! Good to know. I thought they were morpheme divisions at first. Very clever actually.
I really love these words, especially noima. I just love the sound of it!
I wonder, which one would you see yourself pronouncing with better accuracy?
The letters dʰ and kʰ:
I think the first. Because with dh and kh I'd default to those IPA phonemes you listed and with the last I'd expect some kinda coarticulation (maybe?).
Awesome thank you!
First, a word:
vaseshi • catastrophic fire, lit. water-eater — noun
Basically, I took a look at my water words because they are the ones I'm least satisfied with and wondered why I was so stuck on viriiset meaning burning when that's a derivation off of water and why would it be a derivation off of water, and that's when I figured out that culturally, controlled fire and fire that burned fields or removed water or "life" from the land (there's a lot of desert out there) had different roots and different names.
Of course, that also means there's a life metaphor to build throughout water expressions.
Very cool development!
Thanks!
Brilliant!
Thanks! The ways we conlangers save our darlings...
Killing your darlings is way overrated! Striving to save them is where the creativity is at. (Sometimes at least.)
I wholly agree. :D
Today I had the bright idea to conjugate the second of only 2 verbs I have, so far, in hopes of seeing if it revealed additional allophony of /h/ which I already knew turns into /ɣ/ before long vowels. I had, however, forgotten that all my verbal conjugations begin with /w/. So... I guess I figured out that it does not become /ɣ/ before /w/, and that was it. lol!
Here is the table, for funsies:
I had been meaning to do more stuff today but I'm a bit ill and have some other stuff higher on the to-do list so I think it'll have to wait.
Very fun! And that in itself is a good rule to know. Feel better!
Thanks.
Man, looking at it now I feel like 3-4 phonemes as a suffix to each verb is -long-. Maybe it needs revising somehow... Oh well, it is what it is for now, once I have some longer verbs we'll see.
Well, it's not too long and it gives them space to reduce later if you ever want to evolve it a bit.
You should see some of the American languages' affixes! And those typically agglutinate.
I have heard things about those, haha! I might do some research on them to calm myself on the topic.
You can also look at the agglutination of Hungarian, which is one of the languages I used to help develop Lortho.
I'll do that, thanks!