The Dailies. April 6
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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7 thoughts on “The Dailies. April 6”
Some Beldreeni morphemes!
-si; -sin These word endings are used for tacking onto the end of names of non-Beldreeni origin who don’t fit the Beldreeni phonology, usually by having the stress at the end of the name. These are the first gendered word endings I’ve encountered in the language: -si is feminine, -sin is masculine.
As an example, here are three names from Seishenë, the language of the Seishen people. All of these put the stress on the final syllable:
Tehao (lit. ‘sweet’) a girl’s name, ending in a diphtong
Tsedo (the name of a bird species) a boy’s name
Menet (lit. ‘refreshing breeze’) a unisex name
In Beldreeni these turn into:
Tehaosi (stress still on -hao, but now in its proper Beldreeni place)
Tsedosin
Menetsi
Menetsin
kalus (n) the name of a popular board-game which exists in a variety of sizes, shapes, and rule versions all over the continent. A loanword from Takleya, where it means ‘pebble’: the playing pieces are referred to as “pebbles” and were once literal pebbles.
vesilla (adj) ‘loose’; but I think only in the sense ‘not firmly fixed’; ‘with slack ties’. It doesn’t mean ‘completely unbound’ as “loose” can do in English. The word for that would be the negation yādzhezö, from yāzö, ‘bound’. I don’t know that the -ll- spelling has any significance. It could probably just as well be spelt vesila.
And I just came up with the two words below! I’m a bit suspicious because I thought I had words for these things already, but if so I’ve forgotten to insert them in my vocabulary list. If I change my mind then these words below might stand for something else but related.
fōze (n) star. Plural would be fōze-dao, but as with many other words often it’s fine to let the singular form stand for the plural meaning as well
āchen [a:t͡ʃɛn] (n) sky. I think it’s a complete coïncidence that the second syllable, -chen, is identical to the word meaning ‘earth, soil’ in Beldreeni. (Because I honestly wasn’t thinking about the resemblance! But I don’t want to change it just because of that, either. I’m sure poets and philosophers get a lot out of it.)
I love all of these, especially that there are specific ways to naturalize foreign words. Lovely! (That happens to me too with the “don’t I have a word for this already?”)
Yeah, I was happy to find this out! But I don’t know if they do it when it’s not names. I don’t think they bother when it comes to words with stress on the antepenultimate syllable, because those can actually occur with native Beldreeni words as well, for instance in compounds like this: [Two-Syllable Word]+[One-Syllable Word]. But word-final stress just Sounds Wrong to Beldreeni ears, at least when speaking Beldreeni.
[Edit: I wrote “penultimate” when I meant to say “antepenultimate”! Words on the penultimate stress is how Beldreeni usually rolls, in fact. And I figure foreign words with more than three syllables and word-initial stress probably just gets its main stress on that very penultimate syllable when imported into Beldreeni.)
Tried and true repair strategy! That actually makes sense to me. Lots of loanwords are invisible and others still stand out because they don’t quite fit.
We have a finalized phonology!
And vowels:
So there’s definitely the point that allophones exist and romanization isn’t final, and I’m still trying to figure out how best to type the difference between /æ/ and /ä/, both currently spelled <a> and then word final /ɛ/ vs. schwa, both currently spelled <e>. But still, I’m happy. I can make more names now.
Looking really good!
Thank you!