Lexember 27
Welcome to the Lexember Challenge!
Every year, conlangers can take the opportunity for the month of December to challenge ourselves to add a new word to our conlang’s lexicon.
What word have you coined today? Any cultural or associated worldbuilding notes? Tell us about your inspiration!
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7 thoughts on “Lexember 27”
very late to post this but the day’s words:
Oh, I love that there’s a lexical separation between local trade and trade with the rest of the world! (Do the different endings correspond to any semantic pattern seen in other words? Just curious!)
Is there a linguistic connection between the word for silk and the words for trade?
So itokh is a citation form noun, the root being tokh. Itakhet uses the -et affix, which means roughly “related to”, and shows up all over the language for derived words. Technically, -et, -it, -at, and -ot are all variations on the same affix, with -at being the least bleached. -et most frequently appears with generic relation words, -it with a relation to a specific or definite thing, and -ot with stuff subjectively determined by people or done for people. This is because nominally -et and -it came from “related to third person” and -ot came from “related to second person”. -at as “related to first person” is typically still used as its original meaning more often than not, rather than for lexical derivation.
Awesome! And then does tokh mean ‘trade’ in its most general, barest sense?
So historically, the Ogunn (who speak Akachenti) called trade tokh (or whatever it sounded like in the protolang), then ended up being at the nexus of a massive trade route and started calling trade in the context of with outsiders tokhet or some other reflex, basically saying the activity was an extension of their own trading with each other.
At some point in Akachenti’s development of ubiquitous pronominal markers, the citation form of a noun due to its being used most commonly included the prefixation of i- from ih. So now, it can still be used as tokh in the right circumstances, but its citation form is itokh.
That said, the modern Ogunn are still insular (hostile) against outsiders and probably would make the distinction if coming up with new words for the two.
Ah, so cool! (Sorry I keep forgetting about the uibquitous pronominal markers!)
‘uru /ʔuɾu/ = n. tusk