Lexember 15, 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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4 thoughts on “Lexember 15, 2021”
I did a wee bit of Lexember catch-up on stream today, which was fun. My Star Trek conlang has personal pronouns, yay! And also cases. Or at least 3 basic cases, I’ll probably add more?
The cases are marked via particles (a la Japanese) most of the time, w nominative being unmarked, accusative being eho /ehɔ/ and genetive being ye /je/. I’m not sure if an unmarked nominative makes sense with particles, but at least it’s unmarked in the pronoun set. Thoughts on it being unmarked in regular sentences?
Here are the pronouns (nominative – accusative – genetive)
1p sing: Na /na/ – neho /nehɔ/ – nje /ɲe/
2p sing: Vi /ʋi/ – veho / ʋehɔ/ – viye /ʋije/
3p sing: Kec /keç/ – keho /kehɔ/ – keye /keje/
1p plu: Sem /sem/ – seho /sehɔ/ – seme /seme/
2p plu: Tom /tɔm/ – toho /tɔhɔ/ – tome /tɔme/
3p plu: Hara /hara/ – haro /harɔ/ – hareye /hareje/
I tried to get a good balance between regularity and variation here so things wouldn’t look too neat. I think I’m happy with it. What do you all think?
Additionally, there’s 3p inanimate (which I think since this is a Betazoid language and them being empaths would generally be anything that doesn’t have emotions? But I’m not sure…)
Singular inanimate: Ya /ja/ – yeho /jeho/ – ye /je/
I’m not sure what the plural is but I feel like maybe it should be the same as whatever the plural affix for nouns are, since these pronouns would basically only be used for objects and stuff. I’m thinking maybe aya for the nominative. And then for nouns it would be sthg like zadi (love) – azadi (loves).
I also reviewed my phonology and I think I’m mostly happy with it now. And I made a romanization table, pretty straightforward with just a couple of digraphs and macrons on the long vowels because as usual I couldn’t resist including /æ/ and using two æ next to each other for length looks really weird to me.
Here’s a question btw: how would you render the name “Deanna” (as in Deanna Troi from Star Trek TNG) in IPA? I feel like the way my brain renders it looks really weird but I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong.
diænːə for the name. Syllable boundary is in the middle of the geminate, so could be diæn.nə. I like your pronouns! I personally don’t know much about case particles but nominative unmarked seems normal. Does Japanese have a nom. marker?
That’s about what I would’ve done so good to know I’m not entirely off, hah!
Thanks! I like them too.
It does. I don’t know too much about Japanese grammar, but interestingly they actually have two nom markers, one for subject and one for topic. I figure I’ll try with unmarked nom and see how it feels once I can actually make small basic sentences.
Excellent!