The Dailies. March 29, 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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6 thoughts on “The Dailies. March 29, 2023”
So back to Kofnea-Kolos! At last.
Still going to try not to go too hard on Great City terms, but a few nominative pronouns:
I have no idea if this language varies for number or case, so I’m just leaving it at that.
This is so rich and fascinating! Love all the uses we see here for the nakhau root. And the different time words and their divisions! Cool to use words for ‘hands’ and ‘claws’ to show more fine-grade units, and having a specific word for ‘civil time’, too!
So there’s sun watch, sea watch, and night watch. What about the watch between solar noon and sunset?
How do they keep time so exactly at night? Do they use their advanced technologies for that, or do they use simpler technologies like for instance water clocks?
You have discovered my missing word, “grey.” The grey watch and greydeer don’t have translations yet because I’m 70% sure I have the parent word for grey written in a notebook somewhere.
So yes! Solar time is tracked by the Knowing at this point, due to once you have set up proper accesses to the ecosystem of their old nanotech (which they’ve done in the current generation), then getting the current time for the exact spot you’re standing on is actually possible.
But even so, when the colonists first arrived on the planet, the very first generation prioritized setting up labs and observatories to set up the foundations of technology that would be needed going forward while people familiar with it and their starting resources were still available. So they had access to an accurate astronomical calendar right off, which tbh, among the regular folk, the night watch was NOT really tracked exactly to solar midnight. The sea watch was considered variable in length and the rest were used regularly. Once they developed a standardized civil version though, (with some increments to keep the starts of the watches close to the right time for the season), then they could track those even during the centuries they did not have accesses to the Knowing set up.
I’m not sure if they went with water clocks or not, or how fast they got pendulums, etc. I do know getting full blown internet, communications, and accesses to the Knowing up is a very recent development.
Very cool!
Ah, I know that circumstance well, when you just know you have a word for something written down somewhere but it just can’t be found…
In recent posts I wrote about the word zhaima, meaning a confederation of clans, which one might translate as ‘tribe’. (Though obviously “tribe” is itself a ridiculously ambiguous word in English, as is the equivalent word “stam” in Swedish.) I would also like to talk about two words that both mean ‘tribe leader’.
zhaimadaumuyo is the uncomplicated one. Simple compound where daumuyo is a stylistically neutral word for ‘leader’ suitable for all registers of speech, literally meaning ‘forewalker’. This word tends to get used the most for tribe leaders of the current day, especially in their function as high-level administrators and formal spokespeople on less grandiose occasions. It is also the term that is used more often for non-Beldreni tribe leaders.
bandekiban is the more complicated word. It’s this word that gets used to describe tribe leaders on ceremonial occasions, but also typically the word that gets used for charismatic people who have filled the post and managed to wield more power than normal doing so – particularly in the warlike past.
It’s an old formation, currently opaque. It comes from the phrase suban de suban su/l), with the verb sul* (or perhaps by that point still the older form su) at the end loped off. This literally means ‘the marker [marks] the/a marker’, but suban is the word for ‘clan chief’. You might expect suban ho suban instead (the clan chiefs’ clan chief) but that’s not what happened. De was the old objective case marker (now di). To this was added ka’i, the old infix for high politeness, with normal politeness then being –i-. (Now it’s nakei for high politeness and kei for normal politeness.) So you get suban-de-suka’iban, but this cumbersome formation was pared down over time to bandekiban, with variations bandeban, bandeka’íban, and bandikiban in the current language.
EDIT: Forgot to ask that in some (historical) contexts, bandekiban might actually be best translated as ‘khan’ or ‘king’** – there were times when someone in this position could wield a great deal of power! But it should not be conflated with two other words that can also be translated as ‘king’, onshu and suza. Those terms are more suitable for powerful historical rulers of Winter polities.
*which is now sulai in modern Beldreni
**I am unsure whether women ever hold the post of tribal leaders in the strict sense. I do know Beldreni women can be clan chiefs, but it’s not terribly common. If they do become tribe leaders, it may be that they are only called zhaimadaumuyo, and not bandekiban.
Ooooh, I love all the details of this! And the way they cut that phrase down to something tolerable. Tribe does definitely cover a lot of ground in English, likely due to how our social structures just dramatically kept evolving after its introduction, thus resulting in slow repurposing while never losing all the old variations.