Lexember 1, 2021
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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13 thoughts on “Lexember 1, 2021”
I’m doing words for Lǣš-enne for this year’s Lexember, but I also have some general conlang dev goals for both Lǣš-enne, Orklang and my newest toy which is a Star Trek conlang. I have a goal per week per lang basically and will probably be working on those on my Wednesday streams on Twitch.
My day one word is: Memenje (memeɲe) meaning “flower”
Example sentence: “eso memenjenjo i-ælaw” (those flowers are blue).
ALSO I decided to post my Lexember words on TikTok so check out my username e_is_for_emma there if you wanna hear me pronounce stuff.
Pretty! I like it!
I wasn’t sure what language to do for this Lexember, so I decided that rather than commit to one immediately I’ll just roll a die to decide which to do today, and the die selected… Jafren, the musical language of the mountain-folk!
So Jafren’s new word for today is: [cDG], ‘stone, rock, earth’. Seems like an important word to have if you live underground. Semantically it covers everything in the ground that is solid enough to tunnel through (so not loose dirt or broken stone).
Jafren is notated using the ABC format in C major pentatonic, but the key actually doesn’t matter, all pitches are relative, so it can be transposed. I have done some research, and it seems that in ABC notation, middle C is written C, which is different from how it is written in Helmholtz notation, c′ (c’ in ABC is two octaves higher, which confused me while I was trying to demo it for myself). However, when I was actually listening to how it sounded on a wind instrument I liked it better one octave lower than that, so I may include a note to say that everything should be lowered by about one octave in my documentation.
I still don’t have a good system set up to actually listen to these words though. For this one I had to fiddle around with a virtual keyboard for five minutes trying to get used to the keyboard bindings. All in all, a rather slow and cumbersome start to Lexember this year, but things should smooth out in the coming days.
This is such a cool concept! Interested to see more about it over the course of the month.
So, not only pretty, but ooooh, I love the idea of this language and would love to hear samples when you solve for that. Veeery nice!
For Kofnea
aved, aveth: marked, as in Tayas Kms aveth Curunde, where Tayas Kms are considered 1st and 2nd personal names, but band, clan, and duty-lineage are all what one is marked rather than named. Etym. derived originally from “clawed” in the sense of having been marked by claws.
For K2-Nar, we have -hen as the original ergative case ending, derived from heme, “hand.” Methinks this one erodes to -en fairly quickly.
And ongit: tea.
Are you doing 3 langs all month or did it just happen to be 3 today? I love “ongit” for tea.
Glad you like! Just K2-Nar on purpose but it can roll some things down to the child language Kofnea, and I’ll just throw those in too.
Tea is gonna definitely see use in languages below, so I wanted to have that one. Going to try to hit Swadesh today.
I couldn’t resist participating this year, too, but I’m trying to not over-do it. So I’m working on my chillest conlang project, the Betazed conlang for my Star Trek fic.
I had already established nje as the 1st p sing possessive pronoun, and for day 1 I added na for nominative and neho for accuastive of the same. I’m not sure if na is /na/ or maybe /nɑ/ because I need to go over my phonology again and rejigger it a bit.
Sooo glad! I like your languages!
So is that nominative and accusative of the word mine, or I and me?
I like them! Neho has a nice sound to it.
Oh, soryr, yes, I meant it’s I, me and mine, haha. I decided that full nouns use a particle for the case (inspired by Japanese) that possibly used to be case endings, but for pronouns they’ve merged with the pronoun.
Very late reply, but great words! I’m glad you have a word for ‘tea’ in this language too!!
(What’s your favourite word for ‘tea’ in any of your conlangs?)
Oof, hard to say, though I’ll go with nuus, from Akachenti. I needed a tea word here because of some Kofnea tea metaphors, e.g. a provider / comforter / matriarch is known as a teapot and someone spoiled, beloved, or well-cared-for a teacup. Someone wet behind the ears is said to be watery or needs to steep a little longer.