Edit: (Original description) What conlanging work have you been doing recently?
I decided to clear up the mess which was the Proto-Nomadic lexicon and put it all into one file. Through using lots of derivations, it now has 344 content words and 37 grammatical particles or affixes. Some of the most interesting are:
*gdík-teí "banana" or "lover" as it is etymologically "that which is peeled/undressed"
*digdig-kíí "someone currently drunk" vs. giogdék-kíí "habitual drunkard"
*gákáakitég "frond of a fern-like leaf"
*gaoggaog-giketíí "pet name"
*gokééd-teí "dawn sky" or "teeth," literally "that which becomes yellow"
*gook-kíí "someone who works, a labourer" vs. *gook-tdi-kíí "someone who works on something, an artisan"
*goutiíke "small bones in the hands or feet"
*kdakdak-kíí "person who attracts birds by immitating bird-calls"
*kutdáok-tií "mortar and pestle"
*tdigóók-kíí "person who has been found stealing once" vs. *titííd-kíí "habitual criminal"
*tdúúkiíke "bush within other bushes"
*tiokad-teíddid "little item at the centre of a bundle or the bottom of a pile"
*taddék-kíígégekkitégetíí "child’s toy model of a puppy", literally "child's version of the young of the little version of the one who habitually does hunting"
Dragonese Numbers. Or rather, lack of.
No, that' s not right either. It's an Alphabetic numeral system that skips one specific consonant letter. AND it's over base-10
A dragon's claw has 4 fingers/talons/whatever you call it, but "B-ćó" (one-claw) is 20. B-ca (one-village) is 400. And I need some new, fitting names for 8000 and 160K (Am I nuts?)
This is the longest text in Tirina that I've translated in quite awhile. I'm pleased to discover I haven't lost all that much--aside from looking up usage of some prepositions and how, exactly, I translated certain relative clauses in the past, I didn't have to review much of the grammar/syntax. And I remembered quite a lot of words despite not having used them for a long time. (including a few near misses like soe 'when, because' for soa 'now', etc.)
And I finally wrote a succinct description of Tirina's relative clauses, which is nice!
I always wanted Lihmelinyan to have a "jussive mood" instead of using the subjunctive for this function as I often found this confusing in Latin, with too many ways to translate the subjunctive in independent clauses (in Lihmelinyan, the subjunctive mood in independent clauses is by default a potential subjunctive translated with "may" or "might"), but I never knew where I'd get the forms from using PIE as a source. I finally decided to borrow the 3rd person imperative forms (because what is a 3rd person imperative but a jussive) and expand them to the 1st person with an element -u. So we have:
1st. hastu (let me walk), hastamu (let us walk), 3rd. hastetu, (let him/her walk), hastantu (let them walk).
Ánka hástetu ek ze ušétu éli.
house-ALL walk-3.SG.JUSS and-not me see-3.SG.JUSS there
"Let him walk to the house and not see me there".
I like this. I didn't really know what else to do with the 3rd person imperatives and this works for a small mood that only appears in the present and in the 1st and 3rd persons.
Just finished my conlang recon relay entry, nearly 4 months after we started
On a slightly better note, that frees me up to 1) start working on my big world project 2) my older projects (Oiciprios, I've been missing you) or 3) make a second recon relay entry. I can't wait
(I'm still alive, life just keeps doing that getting-in-the-way thing.)
In preparation for putting together a proper sketch grammar of Alál, I made myself a reference sheet of all the little morphological things that I can't seem to commit to memory. It looks like this:
I've also finally gotten around to making a custom keyboard layout so I don't have to go hunting for a ḍ or ǐ every time I need to type one.
Aídrîrulzısk ẓıxìl.
í-da<rí>r-ùl-zı-s-k ẓxı<ì>l INV-look.for<3.4>-AFF-RECENT.PST-INCH-INV.NVOL lattice<AGT>
"Indeed, the lattice has just begun to be sought for." Things are beginning to be figured out, but there's still a ways to go yet.
Edit: Substituted a string instrument for a French interjection.
kiwikami wrote: ↑03 Feb 2020 19:31
(I'm still alive, life just keeps doing that getting-in-the-way thing.)
In preparation for putting together a proper sketch grammar of Alál, I made myself a reference sheet of all the little morphological things that I can't seem to commit to memory. It looks like this:
I've also finally gotten around to making a custom keyboard layout so I don't have to go hunting for a ḍ or ǐ every time I need to type one.
Ooh, that looks complex (it's interesting, though!)
Is "set membership" vs. "identity" the contrast for your copula? Like "Jim is a boy" vs. "Hi, I'm Jim"?
♂♥♂♀
Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels
My Kankonian-English dictionary: 92,000 words and counting
Creyeditor wrote: ↑03 Feb 2020 19:45This looks so cool
Thanks!
Khemehekis wrote: ↑04 Feb 2020 07:34Ooh, that looks complex (it's interesting, though!)
It's more disorganized than it is complicated, I think; things aren't really arranged on the sheet in a tremendously logical way, but it's a sort of quick reference for almost all of the nominal and verbal morphology, which Alál is rather heavy with, so there's... rather a lot.
Khemehekis wrote: ↑04 Feb 2020 07:34Is "set membership" vs. "identity" the contrast for your copula? Like "Jim is a boy" vs. "Hi, I'm Jim"?
It is!
...I have a distinct memory of being probably around 8 and distressed for a reason I couldn't quite describe upon watching The Empire Strikes Back for the first time. I understood that Vader was Luke's father, but refused to equate him to the person named Anakin Skywalker, and would argue with adults who tried to explain otherwise. Something about that one scene bothered me for years, and later I realized that it's because James Earl Jones stresses I, not am, in "I am your father". As a kid, I parsed that super strictly as "I (not the person you thought was your father) am your father", not "I am (the person you thought was) your father". It still slightly bothers me. (Though nowadays, re-watching it, I think he also very slightly stresses father, which helps.)
...So now all of my conlangs make a very clear morphologically- or syntactically- or lexically-marked distinction there. Ù/Á zıák utùuḳùuáh.
Edit: Substituted a string instrument for a French interjection.
kiwikami wrote: ↑04 Feb 2020 09:42
It's more disorganized than it is complicated, I think; things aren't really arranged on the sheet in a tremendously logical way, but it's a sort of quick reference for almost all of the nominal and verbal morphology, which Alál is rather heavy with, so there's... rather a lot.
Are you an INTP, by any chance? You certainly have the vibe of an INTP.
I'm an ENFP, and as a Perceiver am disorganized.
Khemehekis wrote: ↑04 Feb 2020 07:34Is "set membership" vs. "identity" the contrast for your copula? Like "Jim is a boy" vs. "Hi, I'm Jim"?
It is!
...I have a distinct memory of being probably around 8 and distressed for a reason I couldn't quite describe upon watching The Empire Strikes Back for the first time. I understood that Vader was Luke's father, but refused to equate him to the person named Anakin Skywalker, and would argue with adults who tried to explain otherwise. Something about that one scene bothered me for years, and later I realized that it's because James Earl Jones stresses I, not am, in "I am your father". As a kid, I parsed that super strictly as "I (not the person you thought was your father) am your father", not "I am (the person you thought was) your father". It still slightly bothers me. (Though nowadays, re-watching it, I think he also very slightly stresses father, which helps.)
...So now all of my conlangs make a very clear morphologically- or syntactically- or lexically-marked distinction there. Ù/Á zıák utùuḳùuáh.
Wow, that's a cool story behind your conlanging!
Some of the characteristics in my conlangs have their histories in experiences with real-world language use. For instance, once I was arguing with these anti-YR Pagans on a Pagan board about their use of the word "immature". I said "immature" was a negative word, and one of them said you could call a tadpole "an immature frog". I pointed out that the difference between tadpoles and adult frogs are strictly physiological, whereas the differences between different age groups in psychology and neurology were enough that to call a child or teen immature implied a negative value judgment about her/his behavior and psychology. One of my opponents then asked "Have you done an in-depth neurological study of the differences between tadpoles and frogs?", and then said, "The tadpole probably thinks it's a frog too". I thought, "But a tadpole is a frog, right? Isn't a puppy a dog?" Over the years, I noticed things like people saying a kitten was not a cat, and it occurred to me that animal words in English were polysemous, having meaning (a), the species as a whole, and meaning (b), the adult form of the species. Considering Kankonian already had words like karaph (dog in general) and an -i* suffix for the young of an animal, such as karaphi* (puppy), I decided to add an -okh suffix for specifically adult forms:
Karaphi* inen karaphokh. puppy become-PST adult_dog
The puppy became a[n adult] dog.
♂♥♂♀
Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels
My Kankonian-English dictionary: 92,000 words and counting
Khemehekis wrote: ↑04 Feb 2020 10:03Are you an INTP, by any chance? You certainly have the vibe of an INTP.
I'm an ENFP, and as a Perceiver am disorganized.
Either INTP or INTJ, or so the online quizzes tell me. They seem to sway towards the latter, but I'm not really certain. Every single source seems to cite different differences between the two.
As for organization, well, I need to be organized in most aspects of my life, but that organizational strategy doesn't always look especially... organized... from the outside.
Spoiler:
There's a method/aesthetic/mnemonic device of slotting things into "correct" places that is ranked higher to me in importance than the actual internal structure of those slots; thus the reference sheet, where everything is in neatly-scaled rectangles but their contents aren't arranged according to any particular logical schema. The different grays of the table labels are visual cues to help me distinguish the sections at a glance, so there's no "labels are this color" rule and thus it looks almost random. My books are all first in order of height, then color, then perhaps eventually topic; I remember where they are by remembering what they look like, not what they're about. Sure, that windowsill seems cluttered, but if you looked a bit closer you'd notice that not only are all of its contents warm-colored but that individual objects are placed no more than one and no less than one-half inch apart, and rectangular things are evenly spaced throughout, and what do you mean I should probably keep that box of tea with my other boxes of tea, it's mint and therefore completely different... hardcover physics books go in the bathroom, white space on the walls is anathema so they're papered with old Scientific American offprints bordered individually with electrical tape in order to form a pleasing grid pattern, and somehow my old conlanging notebook is utterly exempt from all of this and remains a cluttered mess. Though I do seem to remember where everything is written. So perhaps there is a method to the madness.
Some of the characteristics in my conlangs have their histories in experiences with real-world language use ... I decided to add an -okh suffix for specifically adult forms:
Oh, that's neat! I like seeing how real-world quirks and ambiguities inform conlanging choices. (And the adult-animal-form suffix is an excellent idea... which I may have to borrow in the future.)
Edit: Substituted a string instrument for a French interjection.
Khemehekis wrote: ↑04 Feb 2020 10:03Are you an INTP, by any chance? You certainly have the vibe of an INTP.
I'm an ENFP, and as a Perceiver am disorganized.
Either INTP or INTJ, or so the online quizzes tell me. They seem to sway towards the latter, but I'm not really certain. Every single source seems to cite different differences between the two.
As for organization, well, I need to be organized in most aspects of my life, but that organizational strategy doesn't always look especially... organized... from the outside.
[Clip spoiler]
Yeah, they say messy people know where everything is . . .
Some of the characteristics in my conlangs have their histories in experiences with real-world language use ... I decided to add an -okh suffix for specifically adult forms:
Oh, that's neat! I like seeing how real-world quirks and ambiguities inform conlanging choices.
Here's another one: As a child, I read Green Eggs and Ham with my mother. I didn't understand why Dr. Seuss wrote of "green eggs and ham" instead of "green eggs and green ham". My mother said, "Well, when two things are the same color, you don't have to say it twice. You can say, 'Put on your red pants and shirt'." But it didn't make sense to me.
When I created Kankonian, I added the particle osh:
Is os heyess kehas kran mui trahi osh. 1s NEG like-PRS egg-PL green and ham OSH
I do not like green eggs and [green] ham.
If you go to http://khemehekis.angelfire.com/basic.htm and use the find option for "osh", you can find some more details on the proper use of this determiner in Kankonian.
(And the adult-animal-form suffix is an excellent idea... which I may have to borrow in the future.)
I'd be honored! I love it when other conlangers borrow my ideas! Not too long ago, someone said they'd borrow Kankonian's use of the verb shta (to measure) to indicate age: "Tom measures 17 years".
♂♥♂♀
Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels
My Kankonian-English dictionary: 92,000 words and counting
Híí has - despite my violent protestations - gained the grapheme y for a marginally phonemic /j/ and a much more pervasive [j]. This means that Híí now has delightful sequences like mmy nny rry wwy mm’y nn’y rr’y ww’y.
I should probably rename the language in light of this. Perhaps sth like Quenya?
DesEsseintes wrote: ↑08 Feb 2020 12:12
Híí has - despite my violent protestations - gained the grapheme y for a marginally phonemic /j/ and a much more pervasive [j]. This means that Híí now has delightful sequences like mmy nny rry wwy mm’y nn’y rr’y ww’y.
I should probably rename the language in light of this. Perhaps sth like Quenya?
More like Cthulhu wgah’nagl!
(Actually, a conlang based on R'lyehian would be awesome.)
Today, I re-emerged from the void. Aszev very kindly recovered this account for me as it had all but been lost to time. Spent some time lurking and having a massive nostalgia trip seeing all the usernames I recognised, and this evening I laid out a phonology and some phonotactics for the first bit of conlanging I've done in probably a couple of years now.
I've come up with a conscript - for a conlang that I've not even worked out yet. And most modern computers should display it properly. Huh? The language is "Colchidic Greek", a Hellenic language spoken in Georgia for which I already have a phoneme inventory, and the script consists of the Greek alphabet augmented with Georgian letters (Asomtavruli for capitals, Mkhredruli for lower case) for those phonemes that don't have Greek letters (affricates and postalveolar sibilants; the ejectives are spelled π τ κ, according to their etymology). For instance, the name of the language is spelled Κολჩιძιჭι /k'oltʃidzitʃ'i/.
Ejectives? Does that mean your language has *four* stop series, or did you drop the aspirates as in modern Greek?
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Me ... I havent done much conlanging for the last four months. But yesterday I decided to revive an idea that I started last fall and didnt really explore. 99 percent of Poswa's verbs belong to a single conjugation which is complex but always regular (though verbs can stem-change, i consider this part of the stem, not the verb). The other 1% are the "U-verbs", a category that mostly expresses idiomatic concepts. I am still not sure that the U-verbs will even make it into the final draft of Poswa, because they seem to not quite fit with the rest of the language. But because they use different suffixes, they can exist side by side for now and not lead me to worry that I might have to eliminate non-U words that depend on them later if I decide it was a bad idea all along.
U verbs are like ordinary verbs except that they have two extra morphemes stuck in the middle between the root and the inflection. The first can be of any form, but must indicate either an inalienable object or an alienable one that is kept very close and not likely to change ownership. The second morpheme is static and for Im just calling it the U morpheme, as it has no semantic function other than to mark the verb out as a U verb. It always ends in /-b/ in its verb forms, but can nominalize to /-u/. Diachronically it is a conjugated form of the instrumental suffix, so U verbs historically mean "to use one's ____", but the meanings have shifted dramatically in some cases.
fobiebi "I ate out", alongside fobi "I ate". Here, the embedded morpheme is /-dž-/ "money". Thus Poswa could be said to have grammaticalized the distinction of whether an action costs money or not. bumpibebi "I found you online", where /-mp-/ means "hip" and shifted meaning to cellphone and then to online environments generally. A literal parsing of the verb would be "I found you with my hips". The ordinary verb corresponding to this would be bifebi "I found you", because this one is a stem-changing verb.
My intention is that the speakers would come to think of U verbs as atomic roots, rather than thinking of /bu-mp/ as "find, online", and so on. This is helped by the fact that the dynamic infixes are polysemic, and, for example, the same /mp/ can also mean "by use of a slave", which I would extend in modernized Poswa to any action that was performed by someone else on the speaker's behalf. The stem changes also help; not every speaker would make the connection between /bif-/ "find" and /bump-/ "find online" because there is no general process of converting /if/ to /u/ before a suffix beginning with a labial; it's limited to verbs of this one particular conjugation. Thus the Poswobs just think of a single root /bump-/ even as they know that many words for actions involving the Internet happen to be U verbs whose roots end in /-mp-/.
Pivunuševibe tiufas, mapa pivumūečip taimiibi.
I pointed you to the stars, and all you saw were the tips of my fingers. (Play)