Lexember 27, 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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5 thoughts on “Lexember 27, 2021”
Another simple word for Firen today. Unfortunately, I didn’t get much sleep and I am paying for it now, so I’m just doing what I can.
sottoṙ n. parchment, vellum, or membrane
I already had a word for paper, ride, but I’m not sure I really thought through what the dominant writing material would actually be in the main time period I’m interested in worldbuilding for. Certainly it wouldn’t be modern wood pulp paper, though perhaps something resembling ancient Chinese paper or Mayan amate would be available. Regardless, parchment would be a reasonably common material, and without more sophisticated papermaking methods, well-made parchment would be a superior writing surface as well, being flatter and smoother. The history of it is rather interesting; apparently, parchment actually predates papyrus by a couple millennia, which is the opposite of what I expected.
I like this a lot! Ah, worldbuilding details. They do end up affecting language a lot.
Oh, this is really cool! Do they have codices in this time period? Or do they structure their texts in a different way, physically?
I’ve also thought about this, in some ways just because I wanted the North-East Continent to use something like scrolls rather than codex books, and so I made up a fantasy material which is paperlike but not quite paper… but which is useful enough, apart from being difficult to make codices from, that they still use it the most. The South-West Continent have invented paper, though.
I haven’t exactly determined what format their long-form writing takes, but it’s an interesting question.
Certainly they have scrolls/rolls, though I think that maybe instead of what we’d considered conventional scrolls they might mainly use rotuli (in a scroll, the rods are to the left and right of the text when read, which is columnated, while in a rotulus, the rods are at the top and bottom, and the text is in a single column the whole length of the roll, though they’re still often paginated. I guess it’s kinda like reading a PDF on a computer in single-page mode in that way).
In this time period, I don’t think they’d have proper codices, but they might have folded books, which are still a single length of material but folded into pages and bound flat. These existed in Europe but were pretty marginal there, because they quickly started cutting the parchment into pages to write on both sides, but various kinds of folded books were more common in India and China and were the main form of writing in pre-columbian America for many centuries, using early forms of paper which were cheaper than parchment but much more durable than papyrus.
I also made folding books common in the cultures of the (paper-inventing) South-West Continent!
It’s really fun to play around with different kinds of writing material and writing/reading formats.