The Dailies. August 16
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. August 16”
The other day I was being bummed about an Orklang thing and I might’ve found a solution.
So I had the line in a flash fic piece that went “Track-makers, we break camp!” and I wanted it to be one sentence-word in Orklang but translated more literally with track-makers actually being a verbal we-make-tracks and then serialized with we-break-camp. But I realized in/around a recent post here that won’t work because serialized verbs have to be in the same tense/mood /etc and I wanted we-make-tracks (a group name) in the habitual but we-break-camp in the imperative. So I was bummed about having to split it into two sentence-words.
But the other day I realized I could solve it by nominalizing we-make-tracks and making it the subject of the word-sentence. So it would essentially be track-makers as in the English version but rather than just being an active participle it would be a nominalized 1p pl habitual, rather more specific. So it would be a sentence-word with a complex nominalized subject, a verb (maybe in whatever the ork equivalent of a “let’s” type construction would be) and then an object.
Yes, yes! Nominalized verbals are super common in polysynthetic languages and are essentially treated as nouns despite having old verb-like qualities that may have become more baked in through history and attrition than straight up inflected. It solves the serial verb problem nicely. ♥
<3
I opened up my old spreadsheets to at least take a look at conlangs I haven’t worked on in a while. No new work yet but some ideas on where to go with Vardin, my first major stab at a gendered language, in which I had difficulties at the time and want to return to.
Good luck with Vardin!
I haven’t been doing much conlanging recently, but I decided to write a pangram in Firen today. Some unexpected letters proved surprisingly difficult, especially G, B, F, and V (which was the only one solved by a new coinage: vil, meaning “every”, which was clearly a necessary word for Firen and it’s not like it’s especially unlikely for it to be spelled with a V. Otherwise, I didn’t allow myself to make any new coinages for the pangram.) As part of the work, I also compiled a letter frequency list for Firen based on a rather small corpus: a touched-up version of my The North Wind and the Sun translation, and the only letter not to show up at all in it was R. I’ll put the frequency list at the bottom of this comment. I don’t quite have the time and energy at the moment, but later I’ll write it in baofusk and provide a gloss as well.
Vil lezaimnaote, kaṙse, bolskihigaiki roṙfundoṙjaosodu čunnolončo kosůṙ petlaza.
Every year, by law, a few red automatons swim with the biggest doṙjaoso* to its birthplace.
*: doṙjaoso: *n, animate*
“(an individual of) a species of giant, very intelligent, magically adept squid-like creatures”
This sentence, I feel compelled to mention, has no worldbuilding significance, being essentially composed of whichever words/inflections contained the letters I needed while being sensical.
The letter frequencies from my rather small sample:
Now I’m imagining a short story about nanny robots programmed to care for endangered species and get them to their mating spot safely.