The Dailies. September 16
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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3 thoughts on “The Dailies. September 16”
Inflected Verb Bases
So discovered that not all verb stem differences are simply an affix. They are actual inflection paradigms that I’ve yet to fully document.
avidanlanguedo means “a thousand years ago” and avidanlangueto means “a thousand years from now”. vi is the nonpresent affix that makes this past or future tense, da is the locative which supplies a when meaning, nla means years but only when incorporated, and the verb stem is actually anguedo, which means 1000. When I first came up with this expression though, I had angueto and I thought I’d just typoed it, but nope, that’s the future meaning, which makes these the parallel stems like baga: and baga:sha for “to love”.
Multiple Copulas
Then I got Ingda:shat ise: as a sentence today and what makes it important is a question I’ve had going a while: why does the copula sometimes come out as a pure verb root -s-, and sometimes it comes out as se:? In this case, the sentence literally means, “Lover of mine, they are.” or properly translated, “He’s my lover.” Take that versus Isi gancha:nta, which means “They’re beautiful” with technically a copula before a verb, which ostensibly shouldn’t require the additional copula, but can/does for reasons. But the first example sentence has a predicate noun and the second has a predicate adjective (in verb form), and I suspect that’s part of the reason it uses a different copula.
-n Nominalization
There are a couple of forms of nominalization and the -n nominalizer always seemed more animate/person based than the -t nominalizer which clearly grew out of the relative affix. I think that -n emerged from a personal affix, like English’s -body in somebody, nobody, etc.
I have Ogunn, the name of the major group of peoples who speak Kachan / Akachenti. There’s Saekunn, which is what they call another people group in the area I suspect used to be related to them. There’s aemene, which probably emerged from ae + mu: + n with mu: being a plural and ae- indicating the inclusive first person. Then I’ve got the Baganechi, a related people group that live by raiding in war bands called bagan. They call their individual members nechi, which is shortened as the affix doesn’t really stand alone and usually has a modifier in front and…
Begins with n and is followed immediately by an e. I knew that the -n nominalizer did not come from nenga, which means “one” despite it being a potentially likely candidate, but it does feel like it came from whatever nechi came from and that the word clearly means something like “body” or at least used to.
Summary
In short, I’m actually pretty happy with this progress. I’m finally beginning to fully grok the shape of a polysynthetic language and Akachenti is falling into shape around that.
Not much today, but I decided to look over my dictionary file, and I realized that ůṙf “adolescent” was inanimate gender. So, now it’s ůṙfse, a proper animate noun.
Then, I decided I needed to do colors, so, to start, I coined spuk for “color”. Then I looked over the common names for the Aspects (many of which are named for colors) and came up with a root for each:
I now have to decide if I want any more roots (“orange”, “pink”, “azure”, “indigo”, etc.) or if the rest of the color names should be derived from these/other nouns (like English “orange”). Not counting “silver”, this is 8 basic color roots, which seems a reasonable amount. (Also, I’m aware of the well-known (though somewhat disputed) research claiming that colors terms tend to come in a pattern. I’m ignoring it intentionally because the circumstances are not the same in Ailhaotnůṙ as on Earth. (The sky changes color frequently, for one.))
Colors are inanimate/common gender nouns, not abstract.
Oooh! These are lovely!