The Dailies. April 13

The Dailies. April 13

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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9 thoughts on “The Dailies. April 13

  1. I have a bunch of new Beldreeni words connected to low and/or precarious social status. Note that all of these words are applicable to people of other ethnicities as well, not just the Beldreeni. In the multiethnic winter cities, it’s often relevant to keep track of what’s happening in other people’s clans, even when you don’t speak the same mother tongue.

    I was going to include words for exile/banishment/expulsion as well, but this got too long and I want to think about some of them a bit more, so that’s for later.

    nasēka (n) and (adj); a pejorative, classist term for someone of low status within their clan and the surrounding society; or implying that your behaviour is like that (loutish, boorish, not knowing the right etiquette). “You’re e ne’er-do-well who won’t amount to anything, and your parents were the same way”, basically. It’s considered a pretty insulting term, not normally used in formal speech. However, it’s only used for those who are still full clan members with all the rights that brings. -When I came up with this I’d forgotten that nasek means ‘back’ (not in the anatomical sense). But it makes semantic sense to me that nasēka could be derived from that, so I’m keeping it.

    min vesilla (n) lit. ‘loose person’; used for people who are not considered full members of any clan but who also don’t stand completely outside the clans (as a banished outcast would be). They have loose affiliations with one or sometimes two clans, being under the patronage of one without fully being of it. People in this category often can’t trace their ancestors back far, but might ultimately come from clans that were destroyed and scattered; maybe the descendants of slaves from back in the days before slavery was abolished. The explicitly plural version is min-dao vesilla, but often the singular is used in its stead. It’s a colloquial term, not seen as too offensive – but you probably shouldn’t call someone like that to their face if you’re striving to be polite to them.

    muntu (v) throw, throw away. Perfect participle: muntö .

    muntösaitö (n) lit. ‘thrown(away)-picked(up)’, from the perfect participles of muntu (see above) and saitu ‘pick, pick up’. A colloquial term for someone who’s been banished from one clan but adopted into another. More likely to happen for a high-status person than a low-status one. The second-in-command of the defence forces of the city of Meren is such a person.

    koto vötö (n) ‘foundling’. Lit. ‘found child’, from koto ‘child’, and vötö, the perfect participle of , ‘find’. This term is normally used just for children born and abandoned in summertime, the expected time to have children. Sometimes people clarify by saying mandekoto vötö, ‘found summer child’. (“Sweet summer child” would be “mandekoto feonelle“, by the way.) This is because…

    vurikoto (n) ‘winter child’. Those rare but unfortunate children conceived and born in wintertime are pretty much expected to be abandoned, so a living one would be assumed to be a foundling by default. (They might also be openly handed over to priests to raise, but it comes down to much the same thing. The biological parents are rarely heard from again. This happens even when the parents are married, by the way.) Thus just the term vurikoto is enough. These people are regarded with much fear and superstition, so the term itself is quite loaded, and not used as a common insult all that often: it carries the power of shock.

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    1. Your worldbuilding is always so awesome! I like the nuance of not having to say summer foundling cuz kids are born in summer, obvs. It’s that sort of thing that real languages do all the time (the assumption that specification is redundant in most circumstances) but that conlang are often bad at.

  2. I haven’t done much new with my naming language the last couple days except actually apply the romanization and wonder how readable it really is.

    Also created a discord to poke at and see if it could be a nice chatroom for us. Not sure I’m sold on it yet.

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