The Dailies. February 27, 2020
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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4 thoughts on “The Dailies. February 27, 2020”
One new root word and a number of new compounds + 1 derivation!
The new root is öysi, ‘equal, same’. Combined with the word tol, ‘day’, you get tolöysi, which means ‘equinox’. This is a relatively learned word.
Same with:
yānen-tolöysi ‘vernal equinox’
zasha-tolöysi ‘autumnal equinox’
The more common word for the Vernal Equinox is Shirasis. This comes from shira, ‘turn’, and asis, ‘new’.
Compare: hateshira ‘year’ (from hate, ‘complete, finished’ and shira, ‘turn’)
ayöshira ‘solstice’ (ayö, ‘sun’)
vurishira ‘winter solstice’ (vuri, ‘winter’)
mandeshira ‘summer solstice’ (mande, ‘summer’)
The Vernal Equinox marks when a new calendar year starts, so Shirasis really means New Year. This is a highly important time all over the North-East Continent. That’s when the city life draws to a close and right afterwards the Great Journey North officially starts for everyone. (You can start earlier, but then only as small scouting parties. All larger parties of travellers need to wait until the New Year celebrations have ended.)
The common word for the Autumnal Equinox is yogeshira, ‘half turn’. This equinox officially marks that the winter half of the year has started and that the city state is up and running again after everyone has returned from the summer lands in the north. That’s also often when elections take place in the cities.
I also have two new words that both mean ‘season’!
chen-ïast (lit. ‘earth-time’)
hateshisara (hateshira, ‘year’, plus the infix -sa-, ‘part (of)’)
While they are synonymous, chen-ïast, the more common word, gets more use in talking about nature and the weather and particularly about farming. Hateshisara is more used when discussing the Year as a more abstract unit.
Chen-ïast resembles English “season” (but not Swedish “årstid”) in that it can be used for other periods of time than the classical seasons, like a season for sowing X, for planting Y, for harvesting Z, for hunting Å, etc. Hateshisara is more absolute and refers either to 4 seasons, or to 6, since Beldreni has separate root words for ‘early spring’ and ‘early autumn’ contrasted with ‘late spring/spring in general’ and ‘late autumn/autumn in general’. To argue if the year has 4 seasons or 6 is a common Beldreni pastime. Sometimes people say the year really has eight seasons, bringing in early summer and early winter as well. (Notably, this fits with the nomenclature in the language Takleya with its eight root words for seasons; it’s a big language that many Beldreni know.)
Oooh, I really love this. I love watching the worldbuilding in this, the technical terms and how the people view things like seasons and equinoxes. And then how the words come together and the variations based on who’s saying it in what context. I’m in awe.
Thank you so much!
I forgot another new compound:
estidomo
Esti is the word for ‘early spring’, before the Vernal Equinox. Domo means ‘end’, and estidomo is sometimes used for the Vernal Equinox itself, especially in poetry; more commonly it refers to the last period directly before the Vernal Equinox. These days estidomo is often used for the last month before the Vernal Equinox, the last month of the whole long Calendar Year.
Names for the months – all 110 of them – differ between city-states (and clans), and often various Beldreni speakers just use the name most common in the citystate they belong to, even if it’s in another language. Estidomo isn’t the official word for the year’s last month anywhere, but it’s become wide-spread as an inoffical pan-Beldreni term.
That is so pretty and I like it and how it’s used poetically as well. I love that city-states have their own words too.