The Dailies. February 11
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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5 thoughts on “The Dailies. February 11”
Got a bit of work done on my big grammar file today. I started formating my section for demonstrative pronouns. And finished, I guess? I don’t have anything else to say about them.
I’m happy to have found a word for my “far far away” demonstratives, even if it’s one I made up. I’m also thrilled to have found that the whole “plurals that are relative to the thing being counted” is a thing that actually happens in real languages! And to have found a better word for my third plural than “emphatic plural”, namely “greater plural”.
Finally, I’ve never quite liked my reflexive pronouns. Originally it was a prefix myːr– that was used to form it but I never took to it. I’ve skipped the m so now it’s just yːr- (which I’m only just now realizing sounds like the Swedish word for dizzy but hey, that’s cool). So, for ex. the first person singular would be yːrhme.
Fun to actually get some stuff done tonight!
This is awesome stuff!
Is it different than the proximal/media/distal 3-way? It’s been a while since I played with demonstratives.
I like your words.
It is different in the sense that from what I’ve mostly seen medial is “hearer-adjacent” and distal is distant from both hearer and speaker, generally.
I wanted a third type that wasn’t hearer-adjacent but rather sort of restricted in scope to things that are mythic/metaphoric/poetic/theoretical. That’s sort of why I decided it’s probably an older form of the regular distal. Seems to make more sense to me that ez originally just meant “that” which eventually changed into es, but the archaic pronunciation was retained as a sorta stylistic choice (like someone saying “yon” in English but maybe less extremely marked) and then eventually that was codeified somewhat into the mythic/theoretical/poetic sphere.
So it’s used for stuff like mythological/otherworldly places (for instance, yhwǣlam ez, “that ocean”, is a way to refer to death), for very distant countries or places, for things considered unlikely (like saying “on that day” about an event you believe will never happen). I imagine it’s used in tragic roamntic poetry a lot (“that far away lover/person who I haven’t met yet/who I’ve lost” etc).
Hope that makes some sense. It’s still a bit early here, not being entirely coherent yet. 😛
Thanks! 🙂
I did this a few days ago, but keep forgetting to post. For my Riftspace naming language, I added a suffix similar to -ese or -ian in Japanese or Russian: -esi, which also lenits a previously word-final voiceless fricative.
Canaf becomes Canavesi, Aves becomes Avezesi, and Ijeve becomes Ijevesi.
Cool!