Lexember 12, 2021

Lexember 12, 2021

Comments 7 comments

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!

0

7 thoughts on “Lexember 12, 2021”

  1. So I’ve actually piled up a backlog but didn’t really get to desktop to plunk them in, so here goes:

     

    God’s Tongue (K2N Era)

    So basically, this language has a name, but I’ve no idea what it is in-universe, so I’m dubbing it God’s Tongue because it figures in their names and also borrowings. They also may be immortal but they have kids and they’re just as likely to evolve their own speech over time as any mortal person, so there are probably a pile of dialects, so I’m noting this is aligned with their first mixing together with humans.

    I’m uncertain that they have grammatical gender. I think they just have a relatively paradigmatic approach to personal nouns differentiating by gender. Also, since they have lexical stress, I’m marking it with an acute.

    1. jhuhjhá: brother
    2. jhuhjhéra: sister
    3. qhíras: female cousin
    4. qhiréras: female cousin
    5. minguaéras: power born of one’s essence
    6. noguaéras: object born of one’s essence
    7. noguamín: object born of one’s power
    8. sijhuák: spear
    9. siqhót love, affection
    10. whot: child, tie (of power); from “knot”
    11. whotéras: child tied to a god’s power

    A god’s essence is what they are born with and is inherent to who they are. Their power can be given them by another god, shared from or with another god, earned and developed, or inherent to their essence. These are distinctions that are significant to their people.

     

    K2-Nar

    1. jhiyon, -sye: coll. sun (abstract, divine); sgt./plt. star(s) (individual, specific)
    2. anouwe: divine black
    3. baihyeun: (one’s) heart-mind; temperament
    4. bwani: a woman older than oneself who has demonstrated some responsibility towards one, implying reciprocal responsibility, from “aunt”
    5. chritei: bone, exposed or otherwise separate from the body
    6. dawyin, -s, -sye: coll. words, language; sgt./plt. word(s)
    7. huoeq: far
    8. jouwe: divine blue
    9. lighuet: coll. bone (in the body)
    10. maietta: night
    11. mietsche’: arm
    12. mitna, mitsmit: friend
    13. mitscheum: skills; tools one is skilled in using
    14. nitka: the younger person of an “aunt” (bwani)
    15. pret: tie, phys. or assoc. link between two entities
    16. sasa: kid, young person
    17. seagh: infant
    18. shieun: (one’s) spirit-mind; character; soul-personality
    19. shukshuk: small lamp
    20. taghe: stone
    21. tieko: kiss
    22. wuatchot: glory (splendor, power, greatness); divine ‘eras’, a high one’s person in presence form
    23. yajha: chatter, dummy word for speech
    24. yeun, -s, -sye: coll. thought; sgt./plt. thought(s), idea(s)
    25. era, -s, -sye: (borrowing from eras, GT). life(force); sgt./plt. individual life
    26. tivuip’: health
    27. hoeras: recipient of a god’s power, borrowed from “whoteras”

    The gods in this story do not have bodies. They do have a presence which coincides with the location of their consciousness. It is not limited by distance nor required to be discrete or instantiated only once. They are able to “condense” into the appearance and solidity of a body and even may maintain more than one, though they never do so without vast distances between the two. This presence tends to always be one of a set/range of colors, thus giving rise to the “divine color” terms that show up in Nar.

    At some point, going to properly sort out the tables / classes for singular-plural-collective vs. collective-singulative-plurative nouns, but at least it’s quite clear to me they exist at this point.

    2

    1. Lovely (and impressive, as always) list. To clarify (maybe my reading comprehension hasn’t woken up yet :P) is “bwani” the word for aunt or just related to the word for aunt?

      1. It would likely be translated aunt, but it’s separate from the word for biological aunt, though derived from that. I glossed it aunt in another definition because it seems the best gloss for in practice.

    2. So cool!!! As Emma said, impressive as always! Your imagination is so deep and variable it reminds me of Le Guin’s.
      Very cool to hear about the properties of the gods. I was particularly struck by “This presence tends to always be one of a set/range of colors, thus giving rise to the ‘divine color’ terms that show up in Nar.”

      How do the terms for “divine colours” relate to words for more mundane colours, so to speak? Is there a mundane non-divine word for ‘black’, for instance?

      My favourites this time:

      • shieun: (one’s) spirit-mind; character; soul-personality
      • shukshuk: small lamp
      • wuatchot: glory (splendor, power, greatness); divine ‘eras’, a high one’s person in presence form


      1. There are mundane colors! Roughly the difference quickly becomes about hue/shade rather than ‘what noun is that color’, which is how it starts. This is the source of a later habit of calling powers by a color name as well.

    3. Forgot to comment on this:

       

      I’m uncertain that they have grammatical gender. I think they just have a relatively paradigmatic approach to personal nouns differentiating by gender.

      This is a bit similar to Nahul, which does have grammatical gender but lumps masculine and feminine together into the same animate gender, both for regular noun declinations and for pronouns. However, there are often different words for male and female referents of various kinds, especially when it comes to kinship terms.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.