A community for conlangs and conlangers
The Dailies. January 19
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?




I'm very much late today, but I wanted to ask a small question that I don't feel deserves a post: is there a realis mood in any language used for expressing facts one wished were not the case? In English, there are some grammaticalized adverbs used for that purpose (and which one is used depends on dialect and register much more than semantics). It seems relatively obvious to go from starting an English sentence with "unfortunately" and "regrettably" and the like to a verb form.
This is more intellectual than my previous comment on cases, because I don't plan on adding such a mood to Firen at the moment, but I may if I feel a want of it.
That probably falls under mirativity. It'd be uncommon but nevertheless plausible. I haven't noticed it specifically.
All these distinctions sometimes seem pretty arbitrary to me, but I guess I can see it being mirativity rather than mood. (I've largely defined mirativity as evidentiality to myself, which is somewhat limited in cases like this.)
I see evidentiality and mirativity as a component of mood, not its own thing.
I must look this up - the term is new to me.
As noted in the other post, today I've been thinking about words/phrases for greeting and leavetaking.
Isast gewaanon is a formal greeting suitable for the formal register. Literally it means 'worthy moment', implying it's meeting the other person that makes the moment worthy. Gewaanon is a new word, I had to come up with that one, too. The single gewaanon or gewannos, 'worth', can probably also be used as a greeting, but in the neutral and familiar register.
Duspe is a greeting phrase with a regional difference: in the east it's viewed as very colloquial, maybe even a little jokey, only suitable for the familiar style. In the west, however, it's quite unmarked in the neutral as well as the familiar style. It's originally a loanword from the language Takleya, where it was doúsippe,
but I don't know its real meaning. ETA: Actually, I just remembered it; it means 'servant', meaning you declare yourself the other person's servant to be polite. /ETAHowever! There is a kind of joke behind it being taken up so widely by Beldreeni speakers, namely that the first element sounds like dus, Beldreeni for 'left'. The Beldreeni word for right is sōr, which recalls the first element of sospi below (although sōr has nothing to do with the origin of sospi, whatever that is). Plus of course just the fact that it sounds so similar to the unrelated sospi likely helped with its spread among Beldreeni.
Sospi, then, is a word meaning 'goodbye' which is very widespread in the familiar and neutral style in all the regions. It might even be acceptable in the formal style.
Daamana, however, is more commonly used as a phrase of farewell in the formal register. Lit. 'good road'. The stress is on the penultimate syllable as usual - the "daa" spelling is mostly because it's a compound and daa has a long [a:] sound on its own.
Sakaradde is also used when saying 'goodbye' in the familiar and the neutral style. Saka- means 'together', 'co', 'each other', and radde is the future form for 'see' in the neutral and familiar style. So "we'll see each other again", roughly - or "See you!" The equivalent phrase for the formal register is Hama sakaraddi.
This is all so wonderful! I love the cultural notes, the meanings, the loanwords. So awesome. And they all sound nice and usable as well.
These are awesome!
I haven't really done anything yet today, it was a long day. Might do a tiny bit before bed, we'll see. Kinda wanna get an early sleep though.
I did get a random flash of inspiration when @killerbee13 suggested food as next week's topic, though. Namely: the word /ɲamam/ or /ɲemnem/ or something like that to mean "to nibble", with the /ɲ/ being a sort of diminitive prefix that could be added to nouns and verbs (and even names) to make a "small and cute" version of it. And thus, the word being a dimunitive form of something like /amam/ /emnem/ or something similar for "to eat".
That's a great idea!
Thank you!
Fun! Food is always great. Though I'll probably avoid visiting the subject in Akachenti just yet, I have other languages I can do for the theme.
What kind of language uses "to eat" as one of the major helping verbs? :throws hands up in despair:
That sounds interesting. How does that work?
To eat also means to consume and can be used as a verbal emphasis or intensifier or just adding the concept of consumption. Nevertheless, I'm still surprised at how often it appears.
Cool!
Language: Akachenti
ihleb • [ i.sǃʱˡɛp̚ ] • bones, the skeletal system; the architectural structure of a building — noun
ahlenti • [ a.sǃʱˡɛn.ti ] • to support with actual resources — verb. Connotes having the means for effective support
ihleh • [ i.sǃʱˡɛʎ̥˔ ] • obsolete. the wooden support frame of a weaving device — noun
So I figured out that this -eb ending seems to be an actual derivational suffix, formerly productive and no longer so, and dug a tiny bit into a lexical root found in the process.
Language: Tatan
Took a break from numbers to revisit phonology, which is slightly better analyzed than my original work on the language (due to more knowledge on my part, though I'm still not 100% on that little block of sibilants in the middle), but still has the glaring omission (from a realism perspective) of the voiced bilabial stop. And I can't add it. It doesn't belong and I may be reacquainting myself with Tatan, but there's no way I can include it now as my sense of the language sound is apparently still strong.
Have an improbably tiny phonemic inventory. My second conlang. At least I definitely didn't make a relex.
And as for roots added/defined due to numbers work:
/aa/ turns into a dipthong when it happens to double due to morphological rules, but other vowels remain in hiatus and do not become diphthongs. /ai/ and /ei/ are treated like regular vowels and do not form tripthongs with other letters, nor do they occur due to their component vowels appearing in sequence.
Love the Akachenti words and their meaning, the way it comes together! And good discovery of a no-longer-productive suffix (those are always so cool to me for some reason). I like the sound of -eb.
And good work on Tatar phonology!
It's one of my favorite things to, finding the artifacts of linguistic history. :sighs in happiness:
Thanks! Tatan definitely shows as one of my less naturalistic languages, so I'm glad it hangs together at all! And as fun as phonemes are, I kind of hate trying to analyze them because I always come up with two or more possible analyses for all my nonstandard phonemes.
Lots of progress as usual. Lol, I had a "oh god, am I having a stroke"-moment because somehow I assumed the whole second-to-top row of the table was words in English, and tried really heard to understand what nreat was.
Thanks! I don't feel as if I'm making tons of progress. I keep seeing all the road ahead rather.
:laughs: Sorry about that on the first row! I should add a column for pronunciation but I just wanted to dump on top of ancient spreadsheet number 3 (that also separates c from q as literally no other paperwork I have on the language does :headdesk: ; sometimes I don't have any idea why I did something once upon a time and just have to make an executive decision to ignore it).