Lexember 3, 2019
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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9 thoughts on “Lexember 3, 2019”
Wow, I have a word and it isn’t even bedtime yet 😛
RUHA (ɹɵha) verb (intrans)• to talk, to speak
which is different from pre-existing YMÆ – to say, to tell
🙂
Oh, very nice!
Memwo: to tip, rock (a boat, stool, etc)
Memwobād memokab: the boat tipped (I didn’t do it)
-I’m not sure how general I want the -bā construction for passive voice to be. It might just be some random verbs that can take that. It was originally for the subjunctive.
-I didn’t deliberately choose memwo to be related to memo (small boat), but I love it, they’re definitely related now!
Ah, I love it!
nobiste • adj., to have been played or manipulated
Awesome!
Firen again:
kedtif, n. “sweet”
A nice and simple one for today. Though, the gender did take a bit of thought. Before I thought about it, I was going to put it in the inanimate gender, but I decided that the idea of sweetness itself, as opposed to a sweet thing (which is attributive, and genders for attributive nouns are erased) isn’t actually a “thing”, so it’s instead in the abstract gender. As the first word for a taste, or in fact any specific sensory experience aside from colors and pain (unless maybe I forgot something), it gets to set the pattern for the rest of them.
Though now I check, pain (pittai) is inanimate. I suppose that that actually does make sense, though, since pain is a very visceral thing. It’s a pretty common and concrete thing to talk about, even if it isn’t an object. What would be really interesting would be making the word for pain animate, but I don’t think I actually want to do that. There’s nothing in the culture to support giving pain a special status, and while Firen doesn’t have natural gender and the other two genders have lots of semantic overlap, the animate gender is pretty rigid.
In other gender-related news, I’ve decided on the proper naming of the abstract gender, which I’ve just used. I’ve also called it the divine gender, because deities have that gender, but words for divinities are a very small fraction of the total set of words and most of the words in the abstract gender refer to concepts and ideas. However, in-world language documenters would definitely call it “divine” based on the idea that that’s the most central and important use, at least culturally speaking.
Also I’m still going to gloss it as D because A is taken for animate and I don’t want to have to type out ANIM, ABST, and I’m not sure what I’d even write for inanimate. I/D/A is much nicer.
I think Abstract is a great name for that. ^^
I like it a lot!