The Dailies. January 31, 2023
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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5 thoughts on “The Dailies. January 31, 2023”
Starting work on number names! (Okay, it’s just a sequence of 10 animals they use to name many of the things that come in increments of ten.) This of course necessitates other words that crop up related.
(Okay, it’s just a sequence of 10 animals they use to name many of the things that come in increments of ten.)
Ooh, this is so cool! Can you give an example of this?
These compounds look so neat, it’s interesting to see the head at the beginning and the modifier added elsewhere, like in some French compounds. I like the look of egumyesh and egumruhitzon particularly!
Happy to! A brief background: the war clans are not a united polity. For the purposes of war and foreign policy, they are essentially four groups of clans, but for domestic purposes, each clan is sovereign itself. That said, the northernmost clan of Vannu, Alhaies, uses the Hilakhot sequence in general parlance but the Paschtha sequence for anything under the war government.
1. aiyung – phoenix
2. tiger
3. seonh – guardwolf
4. spearfish
5. greydeer
6. egumruhitzon – huntingbird
7. sunfish
8. snowtiger
9. rumhyitann – quickdeer (Paschtha / Vannu); rockdeer (Alhaies of Vannu / Hilakhot)
10. tsuve – dragon
The first three and the last one are native to their originating homeworld. The remaining species are native to the world they’re on now.
These are the names of the days within their ten-day periods (one might say “they rest on the halves, greydeer and dragon”, meaning the fifth and tenth days of the aghourre); the ten-day periods within a season (a season typically runs through snowtiger or quickdeer, which aghourre is swallowed by the equinox or solstice, days named for different dragons); and the elite military “hundreds”, which consist of 100 units (the first hundred is the phoenix hundred, which contains units 1-100; thus, the 312th unit would be in spearfish).
Anything placed in a sequence may use ordinal numbers or use the sequence names, if it increments in whole numbers and stops at or before ten. Military units containing three squads may call them first, second, and third squad or phoenix, tiger, and guardwolf squad. Measuring cups and spoons that are whole increments rather than fractions may be labeled with an animal icon rather than number glyphs, though fractions will use numbers.
In dates and military units, the choice of sequence name or number name is usually going to alternate for ease of understanding. A huntingbird ten is 60, rather than saying “six ten[s]” or “a huntingbird dragon”. If you say Spring’s snowtiger to refer to a ten-day period, you’ll call the day within it by its number, e.g. fifth day of the Spring’s snowtiger. But if you want to name the day, you’d say the greydeer of Spring’s eighth.
This is so cool! In a way, the sequence is used similarly to how we use letters of the alphabet for ordering things when not using numbers? (i.e., not because of any linguistic function but simply because the alphabetical order is so well-known). But in a much more interesting way than mere letter. So intricate and precise!
(Nahul has some similarities to this in part with the Nine Great Categories which are among many things used for dividing up the year into 9 different units with 12 months in each unit. The categories being Morning, Midday, Evening; Sun, Wind, Rain; and Gold, Silver, Iron. Nahul also has an additional set of words used for the days within each nine-day period (each month is selected into three parts with nine days in each parts; most of the months in their calendar have 33 days). Those words are derived from parts of the body.)
I hadn’t thought of that, but yes! It’s very much like alphabetical order because everyone knows it.
I really like the Nine Great Categories! The derivations look very naturally sourced. I love seeing your calendar work too.