Lexember 9, 2020
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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4 thoughts on “Lexember 9, 2020”
Today, I’m coining a word for Firen. And not just a word, a verb, which Firen is woefully short on. They take at least twice as much work to coin as nouns, I think. On the other hand, they are a lot more interesting, with their multiple senses, and I can often derive additional words from them. In this case, I have three senses and two derived nouns.
kidda /kídːa/
Often, when I don’t immediately have an idea for how to coin a word, I’ll do research on what the etymology of similar terms in natural languages are (by which I mean I look up the English word for it on Wiktionary and then click on a few of its translations), and I actually learned a few interesting things about how the words for tripping in other languages are related to other concepts. In several, they’re related (or even homonymous with) words meaning ‘to fall’ and ‘error’ (many languages), but also more unique things like ‘to be at fault’ (Greek), ‘animal leg/paw’ (Italian), or ‘to die’ (Japanese) and ‘to kill’ (Greek), the last two of which I found particularly interesting. I wonder how those came about. And in Japanese apparently the other word for tripping also means ‘to have an affair’, which I assume is a euphemism, but I’m not sure, because Wiktionary didn’t have any additional information and I don’t quite have the energy or time to do more extensive research on it right now as I know very little about Japanese and wouldn’t understand the context.
Old English actually had an unrelated word for ‘to trip up, to ensnare’ as well, ‘screncan’, which apparently derived quite directly from a PIE root with the same meaning, which seems to have remarkably few cognates. On the other hand, the word ‘trip’ itself seems to have ultimately come from a root meaning ‘to run’, based on the information on Wiktionary, which seems to have shifted to ‘to walk heavily’ early on, and which then evolved into words meaning things such as ‘trample’ and ‘trap’ in English (these are actually cognates), ‘step’ or ‘stair’ in German, and, interestingly enough, in French, ‘to dance’, and, of course, ‘trip’ itself. The French word was apparently borrowed into Middle Dutch and Middle English, the latter possibly by way of the former, but the dance-related meaning is rather marginal now in English.
There really are a great many ways to derive (or derive from!) any given verb, and the simpler and more common the verb is the more ways there are. This is both a blessing (it’s really interesting and rewarding to learn about, and gives you the chance to be really creative and make your language feel unique) and a curse (coming up with a verb that doesn’t just mimic one in a language you already know is hard, and also verbs basically always have at least two or three distinct senses).
Very cool! Also that is way more research than I am doing this lexember, hah!
Thank you! I am, shall we say, rather deliberate when it comes to art. It probably doesn’t help with the glacial pace at which I tend to work on it, though. And I wouldn’t even consider this to be Real Research because I didn’t even attempt to look at anything except Wiktionary. Normally I’d have actually looked into those details that were missing, but today I was tired and had a headache that was just about severe enough to make that not worthwhile. But I didn’t want to coin a word that I’d be confused by or unsatisfied with later on.
Really cool! The “to die” relation in Japanese makes me think of how I’ve heard that the sight of a human figure on the ground tends to trigger an immediate reaction of alarm in us, an assumption of injury and maybe even death.
In Swedish the most common verbs meaning ‘to trip’ are snubbla and snava. The former seems to be a dialectal cognate of the latter, and apart from meaning ‘trip’ and ‘fall’ it could also mean ‘jump’ or ‘make a sudden clapping movement’; cognates in or derived from Middle Low German, and beyond that it’s all murky.
There really are a great many ways to derive (or derive from!) any given verb, and the simpler and more common the verb is the more ways there are. This is both a blessing (it’s really interesting and rewarding to learn about, and gives you the chance to be really creative and make your language feel unique) and a curse (coming up with a verb that doesn’t just mimic one in a language you already know is hard, and also verbs basically always have at least two or three distinct senses).
Oh man, this is so true! Blessing and curse both. And the fear of imitation/mimicry.
Edit: I must have been tired last night because I mistranslated “to trip” into Swedish in my head with a different meaning. Corrected now.