The Dailies. June 18, 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?
0
2 thoughts on “The Dailies. June 18, 2023”
Beldreni words! Been wanting to post these for awhile now, but had, again, problems finding time to sit on the computer while also having energy to post.
washan-komūya (n) lit. ‘priest foot-journey’ and that is indeed what it means; any (longer) journey primarily on foot undertaken by one or – far more commonly – a collection of priests, whether it may count as a pilgrimage or not
I already have the existing adjective mārel, with the primary meaning ‘smooth, even’ and the secondary meanings ‘easy’ and ‘equal’. From this comes the also already existing verb mārelira, ‘evens out, smooths’.
New words now!
First there’s the derived noun māreletti, meaning a smoothing, literal about making a road or other surface more even or metaphorical about making a society more equal. There’s nothing distinctly clerical about this term, unlike the other ones below.
mārellimo (n) can also mean any kind of smoothing action, but among priests, it’s generally used to refer to any action where priests try to ‘even out’ imbalances in the natural flow and redistribution of “blessings” (low-level magic/spiritual energy). See more below.
mārel-gōma (n) lit. ‘smooth-work’; when priests travel from one place to another (usually not far from one another, but sometimes they can be), gathering in blessings in places where there is an overflow of them and redistributing blessings in places that are low on them. The object is never to make the distribution of blessings perfectly uniform and equal, which is impossible in any case, just to reduce the sharpest disparities. In order to perform these tasks it is seen as a requirement to have special tools on hand which we might call holy objects, or at least enriched/purified/sanctified objects. I want to talk more about those some other time.
The term is primarily used by priests of the Red and Yellow School, while it is avoided by priests of the Black School.
A journey for the sake of performing mārel-gōma is one example of a washan-komūya. Such a journey can also be called by a more specific name: dā mārellon/dā mārelliron, dā meaning ‘road, way’.
mārellon (adj) to do with smoothening out, religious, societal or (more rarely) literal. One might have expected māreliron, which did exist but is now largely archaic, except in the phrase dā mārelliron as mentioned above – though dā mārellon is still more common.
Dā-ba Mārellon/Dā māreballon ‘The Great Even-Out Journey’: During every summer a good number of priests from all three main schools put on blue clothing and call themselves Blue-School Priests, then they set out on long journeys following long pre-established routes and perform mārel-gōma in both inhabited and wild areas. Every third Year (a bit more than every 30th Earth Year), the journey gets twice as long and even includes parts of the southlands, otherwise abandoned during the summer. Many enriched/purified/sanctified objects need to be brought on the journey. It is a hard journey, and priests who are getting on in years are not encouraged to take part in it. It is not terribly uncommon for older or sickly priests to die during the journey.
nātan-gōma (n) Another related clerical term to do with handling “blessings”. It comes from the noun nātan, ‘balance’, originally a loanword from Lakespeech. The word is used differently within all three Schools:
1. The Red School uses nātan-gōma to mean actions where priests try to calm down blessings that have been stirred up by something and are now in a disharmonic flux.
The Yellow School uses heilugōma for the same meaning (heilu is East Beldreni for ‘peace; the West Beldreni equivalent is heiragōma, but in the west there are fewer Beldreni priests around and they are more likely to use loanwords from their non-Beldreni colleagues.
2. The Yellow School instead uses nātan-gōma as a term with wider meaning encompassing both mārel-gōma and heilugōma(/heiragōma).
3. Finally, the Black School also uses nātan-gōma as a overall term for work aiming to restore balance to blessings, like the Yellow School, but unlike the Yellow School they don’t try to separate out the two ways of working.
This last is because priests of the Black School dislike the term and concept of mārel-gōma for philosophical and theological reasons. They hold that the Gods know what they are doing when they make the flow of blessings uneven in the world, and it is in fact arrogant and wrong-headed for priests of the Red and Yellow School to go about trying to even it all out. They are also critical of what they see as over-reliance on holy objects by priests of the other two schools. While priests of the Black School do still perform actions of redistribution of blessings from one place to another, using holy objects in the process, they claim to only do so when it is vitally important to step in. Also it’s different when they do it.
But still priests of the Black school also join the Dā-ba Mārellon all the same. They claim to do so as a purifying pilgrimage and in order to gather more knowledge about the world and about blessings. Also, sometimes a place is so depleted in blessings (or, worse, having negative blessings – that is to say, “curses”) that you simply have to step in as an intermediary between the world/humans and the gods and do what you can. The Red and Yellow School priests say yeah, that’s exactly why they perform the work in the first place… but the Black School counter that such work should still be kept to a minimum, and so the debate continues on over the centuries.
Oh, I love all of this so much! The words, the overlapping meanings, the hypocrisy of it all! Especially since I can see the whole concept of do a little as you go along and it doesn’t get so terrible in the first place. Easier to maintain than repair, you know.
Just some fantastic stuff here!