The Dailies. April 14
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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8 thoughts on “The Dailies. April 14”
Beldreeni:
tehāka (n) exile, banishment, expulsion; (v) exile, banish, expel. Unusually for Beldreeni, both a noun and a verb. Possibly an old loanword from somewhere.
tehākö (n) an exiled/banished/expelled person.
By far the most serious forms of exile are tamatehākö, being banished/exiled from one’s citystate, and hogatehākö, being banished/exiled from one’s clan.
Hogatehāka, clan banishment, is officially for life, though sometimes the clan leadership may relent.
For tamatehāka, some citystates only have lifetime exiles, too, but it’s more common to combine those with time-limit exiles. The minimum time of exile can be a full planetary year (=10 Earth years); or the time from the verdict to the next Autumnal Equinox, or the next New Year (which means a minimum of 5 years and 7.5 years, respectively). So it’s still a considerable time. Usually the judgment of exile only happens for serious crimes, but sometimes it can be doled out for politically motivated reasons.
Less serious is the elokutehāka. An eloku is a town of between ca 5000 to ca 20000 inhabitants, almost always subordinated to a citystate and part of that territory. For that reason an eloku court doesn’t have the authority to hand out sentences of lifetime exiles. Instead they use shorter period. The minimum time of banishment is four months, and the maximum time is often the same as the minimum time of exile for a tamatehāka. A typical target of such sentences are travelling merchants who are found to be dishonest in their dealings, together with fines. “Go away and clean up your act and don’t come here for your trade again until that’s done”, basically.
(There are two or three formally independent eloku who don’t belong to any citystate but also aren’t citystates themselves. Even they don’t sentence people to lifetime sentences, though.)
If someone is banished from one citystate, they can try living in another (although the police and authorities might not be that fine with letting exiled criminals stay, especially within the city walls). Of course, if they then are found to commit a new crime, they are likely to get banished from that state, too. And a tamatehākö is not allowed to be anywhere within the citystate’s borders. They’re accorded two weeks or similar to get to the next border on foot, after that they could be killed.
tehājokö means ‘exiled from everywhere’, with the infix -jo- which expresses wholeness. This is about citystates rather than clans. Since there are 13 citystates across the width of a continent, someone described as tehājokö probably hasn’t been literally exiled from them both, but with a bunch of real banishment sentences it’s not realistic for these exiles to expect that more far-off citystates will let them in. They will probably turn bandits, if they survive long enough to. Another word for such a person is tadzhemon, literally ‘non-urban’, but meaning ‘a person who has no place in any city’. This word isn’t new but I felt it was relevant in the context. So is the word for bandit, taranya. (A loanword from the language Sasharak, where it’s taranía: Sasharak, which is related to Beldreeni, uses –ía as a person-ending where Beldreeni uses -ío.)
Very cool. I like that -jo- infix! Do you have any other examples of words that use it?
I thought I had a bunch, but now I can only find this one:
hajosa everything (from hasa, ‘thing’)
You can use it for temporary coinages as with all infixes:
akajospi ki in the whole building (akaspi, ‘building’)
alājote ki in the whole school (alāte, ‘school’)
tol-jo the whole day (tol,’day’)
lijora the whole night (lira, ‘night’)
tajoma the whole city
etc.
But the morpheme can also be used as a prefix jo- , which is unusual. Normally infix turn into suffixes after monosyllabic words, but are not used as prefixes.
jo’ast always
jogar everyone
jogres everywhere
joha everything
Wholeness can also be expressed with the adjective saski, which unlike all other Beldreeni adjectives I know of so far is placed in front of the noun it complements.
Saski chen-ni-wa na, Scrooge min du anmolor wai.
Scrooge is the richest man in the whole world.
Oh, I love that it’s productive! That’s such a great thing for lingustic creativity.
Love!
Nice! Thanks for the detailed narrative on the subject; it has given me food for thought for my world as well!
I love how much this place welcomes worldbuilding along with the conlanging! It’s very fun to hear about everyone’s worlds.
I love all of this and all the worldbuilding notes and how they started and are different from each other and just love every bit of your words! Especially how they interact.