The Dailies. May 8
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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6 thoughts on “The Dailies. May 8”
One of the very first verbal roots I came up with for Nahul was madd-, as in lo-madd, ‘to know’, maddá, ‘I knew’, maddai, ‘I know’, and so forth. (The doubled /d/ is mostly aesthetic.)
I went on to add my then brand new causative suffix -on to make lo-maddon, ‘to teach’ (maddoná, maddonai, etc.) I also wanted a derivation meaning ‘to learn’, and decided that the prefix a- would cause that: amaddá, ‘I learned’, lamadd, ‘to learn’, elamad, ‘student, pupil’. And there the matter rested.
However, I never went on to do anything else with that a- prefix. Now I’ve thought back to that derivation and started to question it. How should amadd- be parsed, in the end? As “come to know”? Wouldn’t that make a- a kind of inchoative? But I’ve already gone on to make the inchoative suffix -em, as seen in atemá, ‘I fell asleep’ (from athá, ‘I slept’), and ratamemá, ‘I grew angry’ (from ratam, ‘angry’).
I’ve decided now that the -em suffix is what you use for adjectives and for some verbal roots to create an inchoative meaning, while a- is used for nominatives and some other verbal roots to the same end.
I’ve put this to some use now, too, but I’ll make a separate comment for it, in case this is getting a bit over-wordy! Later.
Oooh, fun! Considering “come to know”, there’s something to be said for two different etymologies leading to a similar meaning in different contexts.
So, a follow-up, still on Nahul.
saf (n) light; Class II noun, object form savat, nominative plural phi-saf
delu (adj) light: like with French lumière and clair, noun and adjective are from entirely different roots
lo-savon (v) to light sthg, to set sthg alight, to lighten (sthg) up; savoná miat, ‘I lit something’
lo-savem (v) to grow lighter (i.e. less dark, not less heavy!); savemó; it grew lighter
asaf (n) understanding
lasaf (v) to understand; asavá, ‘I understood’. As in English, can be both transitive and intransitive. Imperative: Masaf (ni)! Negative imperative: Masadef (ni)! Perf. participle: renasaf. Perf. participle plural: rena’asaf. Negative infinitive: lasadef (‘to not understand’). Passive past tense, 1sg: Asavelá.
asavon (v) to enlighten someone about something; to inform someone
Masaf inek ni! Understand me!
Asavedai inan ho-jirón. I don’t understand this. (lit. ‘this thing’)
Asavedai, ao dorai lasaf! I don’t understand, but I want to understand!
Asavekedarí bu zevi. They will never understand.
Mien hasegek lasaf mamé? Will you [pl] be able to understand us?
Eoi ho-jiró renasaves? Is this understood?
(renasaves is a conjugated form of renasaf, for Class III nominative, as jiró, ‘thing’, is a Class III noun.)
Dorarí na-deng lelasaf. People want to be understood. (lelasaf is passiv infinitive, a form I only realised now that I needed. I’ve decided it’s constructed by lelo– + root, or lel– + root in this case.)
Lovely! I love your words and how they interrelate here!
I must say I am rather impressed with your derivational morphology. I am still working on mine. For example, I cannot fully explain why Lortho contrasts between [d] and [dʰ] or [p] and [pʰ], etc.
Thanks awfully! I do like having productive causative and inchoative affixes in Nahul, it makes it easier to make new words “for free” as it were!
Ah, so in Lortho, those contrasts are used morphologically for related words? Nahul contrasts between voiced, voiceless unaspirated and voiced aspirated stops, but for the most part not in any systematic grammatical way: the voiced, unaspiration or aspiration tends to remain in inflections and derivatios, for the most part.