The Dailies. February 2, 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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2 thoughts on “The Dailies. February 2, 2023”
New Beldreni words! All tied together.
This took a while to settle properly, but here it goes:
follon (adj) proud
Derivations:
kofollon (n) pride
ifol, ifollon (n) accessory, decoration; esp in clothing
The word follon has the common adjectival suffix -on, but where does the first element come from?
I decided it was:
fola (n) An old-fashioned, almost archaic, but not obsolete word meaning ‘something placed somewhere high’; ‘elevated ground’. I already have a word for ‘high, tall’ – yasi, which is obviously not related to fola at all – but this is a rival root from Old Beldreni.
Digging further, we get the reconstructed root *fɔ: (or something like this; it’s possible the vowel was a bit different), which does seem to mean ‘high, lofty’.
And now we get:
fōwa (n) the older form of ‘sky, heaven’. In Modern West Beldreni the form for this word is fō’a, in Modern East Beldreni it’s fōva. It’s actually a very old compound, with the first element coming from above root meaning ‘high’ and the second element from a different word wa meaning ‘roof, covering’. This second word could also mean ‘sky’ all on its own, but that’s no longer the case. It’s unrelated to the also-old homonym wa (n) ‘ritual, ceremony’ which is still in use in spoken Beldreni today.
And this means I finally have the full explanation for why the West Beldreni word for ‘world’ is Chen-ni-wa. Chen for ‘earth’, ni is the postposition ‘over’, and wa in this context is ‘sky’. Literally, it means ‘sky over earth’, but in practice the meaning is more ‘sky and earth’=world. (Cf. Finnish maailma, ‘world’, from maa (earth) + ilma (air).)
After all of that, I actually don’t know how to say “I’m proud over X” in Beldreni. That’s for another day!
So first of, right off the bat, I love the idea of an accessory or decoration being one’s pride. Says a lot about the kind of social weight placed on those things at some point or another. (probably with both positive and negative connotations)
The etymology is absolutely delightful! I especially love the idea of the sky as an enclosure, even sheltering sort of thing, and the lovely wordplay / subtext of a ritual or ceremony as also being something of a covering.
I kind of love the idea of a metaphor of the world as a house, floor and roof, as it were! Just lovely words here!