The Dailies. November 18, 2021
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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2 thoughts on “The Dailies. November 18, 2021”
New words for Nahul. Note: Since the stress is always on the final syllable in Nahul, an accented vowels means it’s a long vowel.
I think I will settle on gorú for the meaning ‘just, only’. Without positing any kind of sound laws or anything (I’m very bad on that kind of thing), I’m still picturing some kind of ancient connection to the numeral gu, ‘one’. It has nothing to do with the negative prefix go- , but I can imagine humorists jokingly back-formationing the nonexistent word “ru” and trying to come up with a meaning for it.
molos (adv) ‘gladly, with pleasure’
purei (adj) ‘whole’. Conjugated pureyim for class II nouns, and puries for class III nouns.
taltal (n) 1) antenna, maybe also ‘whisker’ (on animal) 2) the act of cautiously approaching a sensitive subject
taltalá (v) ‘i grazed (sthg), i barely touched (sthg); lo-taltal ‘to graze, to barely touch’ (but not ‘to graze’ in the sense of herbivores eating grass, which is lo-koram)
zangá (v) ‘i knew (someone)’; lo-zang miel, ‘to know someone’
Also: a couple of more kinship words, with some bonus babble. I already had words for ‘son-in-law’, ‘daughter-in-law’, ‘mother-in-law’, and ‘father-in-law’. Those terms are all compounds where the first element is wani, ‘gift’, so your son-in-law is your “gift son”. I didn’t have words for ‘brother-in-law’ and ‘sister-in-law’, and I thought to myself, “So why don’t I just use wanikhorin and wanijomin to mean that?” I had completely forgotten that I had already used those two words to express a relationship there is no English word for: a co-grandfather and a co-grandmother. In other words, your son-in-law or daughter-in-law’s parents, the people you share grandchildren with apart from your spouse.
Well, I like having words for that, but I still wanted words for ‘brother-in-law’ and ‘sister-in-law’. So since I couldn’t use wani, I chose the adjective orai instead, which means ‘new’:
oraikhorin ‘brother-in-law’ (lit. “newbrother”)
oraijomin ‘sister-in-law’ (lit. “newsister”)
And I might as well go ahead and make up a new term which doesn’t exist in English AFAIK:
orainohin ‘sibling-in-law’
This fits with Nahul loving having lots of terms for kinship relationships. It probably has more terms to specify more specifically types of in-lawship, like whether you live in the same household or not and/or if you yourself are a man or a woman. But I’m satisfied with this for now.
Back formation stuff is so fun. People think about language consciously a little more than some linguists let on.
I love the words! taltalá is absolutely delightful in how the meaning derives. And the kinship terms! I love using gift and new that way and having a gender-neutral sibling-in-law term. Seems supremely useful!