The Dailies. September 28
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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11 thoughts on “The Dailies. September 28”
The short answer is paradigms are terrible beasts and I just outlined one. And just for transitive verbs, not even ditransitive, which is a thing, you know. Also, if the optative is wishing a good thing, and the imprecative is wishing a bad thing (blessing and cursing basically), then how would you word the English version of the difference between an optative “I hope I love myself” vs. an imprecative “I X I love myself”?
I mean, I would probably just say “I wish I love myself” and let the context say that that’s a bad thing. Otherwise maybed “I condem me to love myself”? lol
LOL Yeah, that’s what I kinda wanted to do myself.
I conlanged on stream today, yay! I translated a whole sentence!
The original: He has narrow gray eyes that are like two pools of mercury.
The translation:
Šeo ridīpa jiaju yhwā fe tū ipan kem apaætama njadinu.
Narrow ash-y eyes 3p.sg-have and they are-like two silver pools.
As you can see I changed the structure some, because I don’t know the syntax of a subordinate clause yet and didn’t have the energy to figure it out tonight.
Some new vocab was generated in the process.
Šeo = narrow
Ridi = ash. I decided that “gray” would just be “ashy” (inspired by Arabic) and also invented the suffix -ipa which is roughly equivalent to -y or -ish. It is probably related to the copula ipan (to be like sthg), or rather that’s where I derived it from for now and I’m trying to decide if I think that relation is silly or not. Opinions? I also decided the final /i/ lengthens in this word; we’ll see about other final vowels.
Njadin = pool, puddle, small body of liquid. I wonder a bit if I’m overusing the nj-prefix for things that are dimunitive in some way… I like it for now but we’ll see.
Apaætama = silver (because I don’t think my conculture knows mercury).
I had another word in my list of generated words that don’t have meanings yet, somsenja. For some reason I really like those two words together and they conjure the image of two mythical serpents or something, one silver and one gold. I really like that imagery but I am not sure if it fits this culture (or even if the words themselves do, really) so I’ll think on it a bit and if I decide big mythical snakes aren’t something they’d be into, I’ll move the words over to some other conculture.
I like it! I especially like that you made the suffix for -y/ish. I hadn’t thought about it until reading this. Thanks for the inspiration!
I particularly enjoy your thoughts on somsenja. I immediately thought of the auryn.
Lol it was a bit of a copout because I didn’t wanna figure out how to say “x-colored” since I don’t know how to do compounds like that yet. But I figure it’ll still be useful!
I love your words here and the gramar’s nice. When you think about how big a language is, I doubt you’ve overused the prefix because there are so many other words than the ones you’ve got that are as yet undiscovered.
That’s true! I just have to make sure I invent some words for small things that don’t have it, too.
And thanks!
So I decided to add sentence generation capability to my Firen word generator, which has been fun. Firen has a much simpler phrasal grammar than English, as I said before, but on the other hand, all the complexity is in the verbs.
In any case, one of the things it generated was:
“peace is lended”, which sounds… sinister.
(I hope that the table worked.)
The word/sentence generator file for Firen is now 821 lines long, and it would be longer still if I were to get around to adding the entire lexicon to it.
The most important features I need to encode in the grammar are transitivity and mood. Transitivity isn’t too complicated, I just need to categorize the verbs more. Moods are part of the clause grammar though and making them work will be a significant source of complexity.
I’ll keep working on this and maybe I’ll report back with more later.
“Peace is lended” sounds like the sombre advice of a jaded courtier to a young king/queen, hah.
You continue to amaze me! This looks kinda awesome.