The Dailies. May 4
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 4”
Some words to do with the medical field for Beldrēni! I had absolutely none before. Emphasis on penultimate syllable as usual.
dori, doriime (adj) sick, ill
kodori (n) sickness, illness
dorimestu (v) falls sick
posözu (v) heals (as in English, both transitive and intransitive) -A word that’s cumbersome and not very sonorant, but I like it for that reason. I would never have come up with a word like this in my youth, when I was big on It Must Sound Good!!
posözö (perf part) healthy again; healed, cured (like French guéri(e))
posözurío (n) nurse (etc.): basically any person in medical work not regarded as a doctor. Unlike our nurses, you can be relatively inexperienced and still be called a posözurío, but you can also have worked in the field your whole long life. These people are regarded as “yeoman doctors” of sorts, or if younger, as apprentices/working medical students (who also do formal studies). Originally the word meant anyone working in the field including doctors, and it’s still used that way sometimes.
posözubeirío (n) young people (as in, not yet of age) working in medicine in an assistant capacity. Usually assistants hoping to become doctors one day, or at least well-regarded “yeomen”. But not always. For instance children of medical workers often help out with simple things even when they intend to work in other fields later
Posözubarío lit. “The Great Healer”: a title bestowed on the Deity of Medicine (a god for some, a goddess for others). The priests of all the three great schools hold that this is the same deity as the Deity of Sickness, although ordinary people often disregard this.
Now, on to loanwords and partial loanwords!
Medical treatment is often found in places one might call ‘houses of healing’ or ‘houses of care’, combining clinics with hospitals. The Old Lumina word for such a place is sa’u’ehe (Lumina is very fond of glottal stops!). In Beldrēni, this was shortened and eventually paired with naku, ‘house’ [in the South], making the compound sahenaku, which is what these institutions are called in Beldrēni. Except if they are up in the North, or in the South but very small: in either case they are then called sahedake, since dake is the other, competing word for ‘house’.
In Old Lumina, the construction ka’in sa’u’ehe signified the person in charge of a sa’u’ehe, always a medical practitioner believed to be of merit. Other people of the profession who didn’t have such a position, whether they were working underneath someone like that, independent travelling doctors, or employed by high-status people such as a clan chief, were referred to as oloese in Old Lumina.
Language changed, both in Lumina and in other languages influenced by it. In Beldrēni ka’in sa’u’ehe eventually became kaïnsa in the East and kahinsa in the West, from older kaïnsahe/kahinsawe. But today it signifies what we might call a doctor in general, that is to say an accomplished medical practitioner who has undergone both formal schooling and practical training, and who is recognized as such by their peers.
Meanwhile, oloese became olese in Modern Beldrēni. For a good while it referred to priests of medical inclination: now it only refers to young priests, or novices, who study medicine.
washan-kaïnsa/washan-kahinsa (n) lit. ‘priest-doctor’, is the main current term in Beldrēni for priests of significant medical knowledge/doctors who have undergone religious schooling. The general assumption is that such a person will use sensitivity to spiritual energy as an aid in treating people. While by no means all priests in general have such sensitivity, most people who do have it become priests of some sort, and the priest-healer combination particularly carries expectations that this will be the case.
Incidentally, all sahenaku are enclosed in circles and other patterns that priests draw before they’re built and later renew in regular ceremonies, which are supposed to focus benign spiritual energy or “blessings” (cheirannos in Beldrēni) into the place.
I always love your little groups of terms and how they all interrelate and grew into and out of each other and changed along the way. These are all wonderful. <3
I aspire to someday reach this level of etymological thoroughness. It is far beyond anything I’ve done in Firen.
That is terribly kind of you considering that your posts always leave me impressed and wishing I could get close to your level of thoroughness and creativity for your conlangs. But I suppose since I don’t seem to be very good at phonology I focus on things like the historical change of semantics instead… (Old/Middle Lumina is my first go-to as a source of loanwords for Beldrēni, as it’s basically like Latin for the setting.)
I have some miscellaneous notes on the Jafren phonology that I didn’t mention before:
Each “syllable” is a chord, and length is phonemic, measured in discrete units which can be called “beats”. Chords are not restricted to being only one or two beats long, but three-beat and longer chords will be pretty rare. Lexemes are separated by a brief silence much shorter than a beat, while chords which are part of the same word have no spacing. (I’m still working on this a bit, and in the North Wind and the Sun translation I was conservative and used rests in places where I’m not sure they’re going to be necessary.)
Instead of “octave”, I’m using the term “hexad”, because the scale uses only 5 notes and octave is somewhat confusing.
No chord may include a hexad, which means that rather than there being eleven independent phonemes, there are 5 sets of them. This restriction slightly complicates the math for figuring out how many available
“syllables” there are, but not too much.
There are 11 chords of one note, 48 chords of two notes, 104 chords of three notes, 112 chords of four notes, and 48 chords of 5 notes. I’m fairly sure I won’t be using any 5-note chords, and 4 is pushing it, so if I restrict myself to chords of up to 3 notes there are 163 possible syllables, not counting length. This number is small enough that Jafren could be accommodated by something like a syllabary, and I am considering that.
I’m not sure if I want to accommodate differently-tuned voices; I think that it might be best if everyone agrees on a specific frequency for the lowest note. It needn’t be perfectly exact, but it should be close enough that there is no dissonance between the two speakers. Tempo, however, can definitely be varied. There is no specific speed that conversants must keep. As long as it is clear how many beats each chord is sounded for, any speed is fine.
Because I’m restricting hexads, this language could actually be played with a mere five pipes, as long as it is possible to shift the resonance up a hexad, or, in the case of the root, two hexads. This is actually how the Sůṙjafia produce their own language. They have inside their stone bodies five tubes resembling a pipe organ, though organs aren’t set up to have multiple modes of resonance within a single tube. I know that it’s possible to shift up a hexad by changing the airflow, because I played a trumpet a bit in school and that’s how you play octaves on one. The mechanism accomplishing this is not strictly mechanical; the Sůṙjafia are innately magical beings after all, so they can pull some tricks. But what can be done without magic generally should be, as magic is inherently unreliable unless one pays careful attention to it.
I think that there should be some paralinguistic uses of note combinations that aren’t used in words. For instance, shifting a note other than the root into the third hexad (which would be possible, it would just take some effort to get the air to move that fast) could be used as a call of alarm. And chords with 4 or 5 notes could be used like the paralinguistic clicks in many human languages to convey several meanings. I’ll have to do some experimenting to figure out how well that would work in practice, though.
As I said, these are just miscellaneous notes. I don’t have any sort of overarching theme for this comment, nor do I have any particularly good closing thoughts.
Oh, did this end up as a reply? Oops.