The Dailies. July 15, 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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7 thoughts on “The Dailies. July 15, 2023”
New Beldreni words! And at least one more name, possibly two!
Also, I’m looking at one of my older words again, hanad, ‘tea’, noticing it does not really fit well with the kind of phonology that Beldreni has turned out to have. Considering replacing it, even if I still like it. Maybe with something similar like “handei”. No decision yet.
Noting that lately new words are usually nouns, sometimes adjectives, but more rarely verbs. For whatever reason.
raiki (n) fog, mist
galmu (n) thunder
galgalmu (n) huge thunderstorm
pentos (n) flow, stream, streaming (from the existing verb penta, ‘flows’)
chei (n) also flow, streaming, stream. Related to chío, ‘river’, and cheirannos, ‘Blessings’.
kaleyo (n) worker, from kale, ‘works’, with the agent ending -ío changed to -yo as sometimes happens. One might have expected kalerío instead, which does exist, but only regionally.
gōshan (n) slave. Here, gō– is the same root as in gōma, which once meant ‘work in general’, then ‘arduous work’, then currently ‘spiritual work’ carried out by priests. –Shan is a rare person ending also seen in washan, ‘priest’ (wa– here meaning ‘rite, ceremony, ritual’). Originally gōshan simply meant a worker in general, then kaleyo took over this meaning, and gōshan came to mean first someone who does the heaviest type of physical labour, then ‘forced labourer’, then ‘slave’. Indeed, it might be that the association with gōshan is the very reason why gōma became the less common word for ‘work’ in general and was replaced in this sense by the newer word kaletti.
alu (n) a tall, steep hill
oshu (n) alluvium; alluvial soil. There is also an archaic meaning ‘flood’
ni’ochei (n) flood
ni’opentos (n) flood
(ni’o is an adverb and nominal prefix meaning ‘too’, ‘excessively’)
oshen (adj) – Finally a non-noun! This means ‘fertile’.
vörío (n) finder, a person who finds something (not a profession). From the verb vö, ‘finds’
Abbivörío – A possible character name for the main POV character’s father. Abbi is an existing word meaning ‘bridge’, so the sense of this name would be ‘Bridgefinder’. He’s a wainwright by trade and normally has little to do with actual bridges, so I assume the sense is metaphorical – maybe because he married outside his own original clan into another – but maybe there really was a literal bridge involved at one time in his youth, too.
I like the sound of this name, but I have a vague feeling I once planned to name him something else. Can’t seem to find a note to that effect now, though…
Alu’oshen – literally ‘fertile steep hill’, the adult name for the main character’s mother. It’s a little weird because that type of hill is typically dry soil that mostly just grows grass and shrubs and perhaps a stubborn tree. But names are often paradoxical… To be quite honest both the name and its two components are a back formation. I found the name “Al’shen” and thought it would suit this character, but it doesn’t look quite right for a Beldreni word, so I decided it’s a nickname based on her true adult name. And then I had to figure out what the real name was and what it meant. (In my defence even Tolkien did this kind of thing at times…!)
Addendum: It’s quite possible that the mother would write her name more like “Alwoshen” than “Alu’oshen” (or rather the equivalents in their syllabic writing system).
Nice! I am intrigued by this writing system. Do you have it all the way worked out?
I replied to the wrong comment! but it’s further down on this post. Sorry!!!
I love doing back formation conlanging! And I have also been there with the I eventually have three names for one character by the time I’m done collating all random notes and have to pick. Urgh.
Love the evolution of the work words and all the subtle differences in meanings over time. This is a nice collection!
First of all, I’m so sorry that I’ve waited a whole month to reply to this! It’s been a rough month but it really shouldn’t have taken me this long!
Yes, I got it worked out, in fact it was several years ago, so maybe I’ve posted about it here before. It’s basically a syllabary which the Beldreni have adopted from other languages, especially from Old Lumina. But while a syllabary fits Lumina very well, as that is a language without consonant clusters, it doesn’t actually fit consonant-heavy Beldreni that well. However, nobody has gone and invented an alphabet, so that’s how it goes! The Beldreni have adapted the script to their own purposes, repurposing some characters and inventing others from scratch. Just like most language-users on the North-East Continent have done.
Each consonant and vowel combination has its own character.
Also, every consonant has a vowel-less character as well. That’s the bottom row on this diagram. It’s the character for that consonant + [a] + an extra diacritic mark that removes the [a] again.
So for instance “Beldreni” is spelt out like Be + L + D + Re + Ni.
Exception: The velar nasal [ŋ] is only used at the end of a syllable, just like in English (although some languages on the continent use it initially, too, like Ngara and Kummin). So that consonant only has the vowel-less character.
The lengthening of a vowel is shown through an underscore under that character: see the example with the word fā, ‘divine’, below the diagram.
Ooooh, delightful! Complete with remove-the-base-vowel diacritics! Love, much much!