The Dailies. September 23

The Dailies. September 23

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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One thought on “The Dailies. September 23

  1. finally did some conlanging yesterday. First time in… two weeks? Three? About dang time, anyway! Between being too busy to do my Thursday evening writing/conlanging-stream and there not being any challenges here on the commune I’ve just been forgetting about and deprioritizing it. So it feels great to have at least poked at it again.

    Anyway, I started on another translation of a character description from the prompt generator on Seventh Sanctum. The prompt is this:

    This man reminds you of a raging river. He has narrow gray eyes that are like two pools of mercury. He is bald, but used to have thick, straight, slate-gray hair. He has a wide-chested build. His skin is cream-colored. He has thick eyebrows and small feet. His wardrobe is revealing and elegant, with a mostly orange color scheme.

    I only started on the very simplest parts, and only finished one sentence:

    Semar nišut jiaju ne njehi adadu yhwā.

    thick brows-of eyes and small feet 3p.sg.have.

    He has thick eyebrows and small feet.

    I decided that eyebrows is plural in both parts of the compound (brows of eyes) because, well, they’re (generally speaking) two brows and two eyes. Pretty straight-forward but good to know all the same!

    After this sentence, I tried 3 times to start on another sentence and ran into problems! XD With the line about skin, I realized I don’t know if this conculture have dairy animals which affects what word they’d use for the color. Non-linguistic decision but still needs making before I can translate.

    Then I tried to translate the line with wide-chested in it and realized I don’t know how to construct a double adjective like that. I could just say “he has a wide chest” which is easy enough, but I want to try to make a more complex version. So far I’ve just used plain adjectives in a “Adj Noun” construction and I’m not sure how I want this to work. At first I was thinking of making a “X of Y” compound, as in “wide of chest” but of course that would work if I wanted to say “he is wide of chest” but not if I want it to be an adjective to “build”. So I’m not sure how to do it… needs more pondering for sure. I don’t know why, but just copying the structure of “wide-chested” doesn’t feel like the right solution for me.

    Then finally I tried the line about his hair, which of course I could not do because I don’t have a word for bald and I’m not sure if I want to translate it word-by-word or if I want to actually (finally) coin a negation and say “he doesn’t have hair”.  I did coin the word oha though, meaning but or although.

    Yay progress!

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