The Dailies. June 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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3 thoughts on “The Dailies. June 8”
More for Nahul.
wesá (v) I came; lo-wes ‘to come’
karo (n) large rock
hutet (n) danger
hutetil (adj) dangerous
patá (n) teeth. This word is plural in its basic form, so you don’t add a plural prefix o it. Not to be confused with pathá, ‘sky’ (pronounced nearly the same, but unrelated).
gupatá (n) tooth, with the addition of gu, ‘one’. (The standard way in Nahul of making a singular out of a base-plural noun.)
batá (n) fangs. Also plural in its basic form.
gubatá (n) a single fang
sanin (n) nails; plural in its basic form
gusanin (n) a single nail
zanin (n) claws; plural in its basic form
guzanin (n) a single claw
One other thing I’ve thought about regarding Nahul. This is a bit embarrassing because it’s going to sound so sloppy, but… I read that a number of languages use the same word to mean both “and” and “with” depending on context, and I thought Nahul would have that, too. So I’ve used da for both, although I haven’t used the ‘with’ sense much yet. However, I hadn’t thought of checking if the RL languages that do that are case-marking ones or not.
Nahul does mark case on its nouns, if not extensively: nominative, genitive, and an all-purpose object/oblique case which is supplemented with prepositions when not used for the accusative. (So there’s not even a distinct dative case in terms of noun declensions.) So the object/oblique case has always been used after prepositions, in a rather Germanic way.
Now, the equivalent of ‘with’ might not count as a true preposition, but it is also always followed by object case forms in Germanic languages, unlike words like ‘and’ where it depends on the surrounding sentence. I wanted to translate a sentence where the Nahul word da would be used in both senses. Should I use object case in the sense that corresponds to ‘with’ in English? Or was that too hidebound?
I decided that I would do that with this sentence, but that I’d try not to jump to that directly everytime I translated English “with” or Swedish “med” into Nahul. Probably in Nahul the ‘and’ sense is used even more than in English/Swedish, and the ‘with’ sense less. The most “with-like” uses would get object case, but not all of them.
If that makes any sense at all?
Here’s how the clause I wanted to translate came out. (It’s part of a larger text, twelve lines in all, which I’ll post later.)
Danger may come with fangs and claws.
Wesezó hutet da batán da zaninat.
I don’t have anything intelligent to add concerning whether case marking affects your prepositions and how they’re used, but I do love your words and how many came out of that sentence.
Thank you!