The Dailies. April 21
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. April 21”
More from Nahul!
kheren and khereyá are two different Nahul versions of the word krenja, from the Werlan language perhaps. They signify a kind of storehouse that’s open for the public primarily in a Winter town or city. Usually there’s one kheren/khereyá for every mesau (see yesterday’s post – a mesau is typically 15-20 households). The locals go there and can get some things for free (rationed per household, and paid for by taxes); they can also buy some other things on credit to be paid at intervals, often at the end of the month. For those purchases they need to have a backer, some person of importance. Sometimes it’s even the backer who pays the storehouse for the monthly purchases and the backer and the individual household have a contract between them. The kheren/khereyá also offers other products that are sold in the regular way for cash; finally it’s a place of borrowing for the local community, of stuff like tools, simple furniture, etc. And often at least some books. In the city centre there are more specialised storehouses.
kinach-kheren is such a specialised storehouse dealing with stationery and books, kinach meaning ‘paper’. (Often parchment can be had as well, but that’s much pricier of course.) Like the udathekh and meheg (printing shop and scriptorium) that I mentioned yesterday, these places tend to have books for sale as well as notebooks. And like the local kheren, you can also borrow books from there, with a larger assortment than in the former. Still wouldn’t say there’s a real library culture, however.
aisané means a place for printing or copying by hand that only focuses on what’s considered minor stuff, like local records of trade and mundane events, or small pieces of fiction that are seen as harmless. For this reason they don’t need a license/permit for printing, as the bigger places do. The word has an interesting historical origin, formed from the diminutive prefix ai- and the old loanword sané – see below.
The Gauri word sanve (stressed on the first syllable), which was rendered as sané or sanef in Nahul, signified a kind of place that flourished between ca 220 and 140 Earth years ago (~22 and 14 planetary Years) on the South-West Continent. It was a house built close to or in junction with a scriptorium or an early printing place: they developed out of the reception areas for wealthy customers of those places, but then turned into their own thing. People could go there and get something to eat and drink, read new copies of books and other writings and discuss them, offer corrections on early drafts, sit all day and copy texts by hand for their own use (popular among young students) etc. These places became more and more popular and spread to all the Winter cities and many of the towns.
For a long time the Learned Ones as well as city rulers tolerated them and often frequented them themselves. But eventually they were denounced as hotbeds of dissent and “unruly behaviour”, and Learned Ones now claimed that the basic idea of the sanve was in fact tainted by heretical thought from the origin. To make a long story short (especially since I don’t know the full story yet!), after some bitter fights about it, objections were squashed and all the sanve were shut down, their buildings either torn down or rebuilt for new purposes. Ever since the authorities have been nervous about places combining reading material with food or drink, believing it encourages not just foodstains on the books but unwise proliferation of too many ideas, some of which will be Wrong, in their views.
I want a sanve! Honestly, I LOVE the worldbuilding here. I’d read tons of stories about the sanve crowd and their unwise proliferation of too many ideas.
Thanks awfully, that’s so kind to say! I do think the sanve sound pretty appealing, myself. I kind of wanted them to still exist, but it didn’t quite seem to fit, unfortunately.
I figure it would fluctuate a lot between different times how intolerant vs tolerant the intellectual climate on the South-West Continent would be. As well as between different places, no doubt. The dominant thought-system iwase-ta-hene and the Learned Ones that are experts in it has room for lots of different interpretations on various issues, but sometimes it’s the more narrowminded ones that hold sway.
Glad to see there’s so much activity around here! I’ve been busy offsite documenting stuff, so haven’t made a lot of new words, but just started brainstorming some potential phonemes for a side project. Don’t know if I really want to split my attentions, but maybe something deliberately small-scale…?
Recent coinage: mauwū: to exacerbate. Not sure if I want to do a weird word-order rule yet.
Ooooh! I like!