The Dailies. June 15
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?
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4 thoughts on “The Dailies. June 15”
Some interesting excavation today (actually the other day). I found that I actually had an old word for “all,” medum, and that I wanted it to precede nouns, the same way number adjectives do. I completely forgot about this when working on my last completed project, because I came up with “much/many,” and then figured I might as well make “all” and “few,” and have them all follow nouns (like normal adjectives)!
I haven’t needed “all” in my current project, but I have used “much/many.” Maybe both the “all”s can coexist and one’s just the older word? (This is what I do sometimes when I realize that I’ve double-created something important :p )
Sounds fun and interesting and ripe for older synonym!
This happens to me a lot! I often wind up saying it’s regional usage. But having an older word is great, too.
(For Beldreeni I made up separate words for ‘east’ and ‘west’ three different times because I kept forgetting I already had them, which is just waaay too absent-minded. Probably because the words for ‘north’ and ‘south’ came a lot earlier… But then I could repurpose the bonus words into other meanings, once I realised! Now I try to always check my vocabulary list first.)
It’s the 16th here but it’ll be the 17th before you put up the new post so I’ll just comment here. I did conlangy stuff today! yay! A few different things.
1) I rescued some words! I opened my file and was horrified to find I was missing words. Dunno how that happened but thankfully I found them among my Imzy comments. Yay for that.
2) I practiced glossing. Badly, probably. On my first idiom, which I posted on Imzy a while back. It is this:
yʍɛ:lam ez iʃe:wa
ocean-OBJ DIST hear-3sg.SUBJ
ocean that they hear
Literal meaning: They (s) hear that (far away) ocean
Idiomatic meaning: They (s) are dying
Something is wrong w that gloss, right? I know it is. I also don’t know what to call that demonstrative because I have like… one distal and one super-distal and this is the super-distal. lol.
3) The above made me reconsider my demonstratives because originally I said they’d be in front of the noun but I like then after more. BUT my proximal demonstrative is identical to my definite article so now I’m wondering if I should either move the article to before the noun (so that e:mam um is “this food” and um e:mam is “the food”) or if I should just make a new item for the article. I haven’t used the article much so far…
4) I also decided the above idiom can be shortened to:
iʃe:wa ez : they (s) hear that-far-away-thing, for lack of better translation.
That made me ponder about my word order. While it’s generally O(S)V, fronted verbs are attested in impersonal constructions such as weather expressions. However, this certainly isn’t impersonal, so I wonder if maybe demonstratives simply can’t come first in a sentence?
5) Finally, I’ve been pondering more about my romanization of /ɛ/. I use this sound quite extensively, so it feels sort of important that it “look right”. My problem is this… for me, the most natural rendering of /ɛ/ is <ä> (since Swedish is my native language). However, I want to mark long vowels (/ɛ/ is often long, I’ve noted). Ä with a macron looks hideous and hard to read, and ää… honestly, I just don’t like how that looks. lol, silly right? I am vaguely considering using <æ> instead in my romanization, because it would look less bad with a macron on top of and I think it’s less jarring to readers than just using <ɛ>. What do you guys think? Am I fretting too much over aesthetics rather than practicality by not just marking long vowels with double vowels?
Feels good to be back at this a bit!