The Dailies. August 16, 2025
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?
3 thoughts on “The Dailies. August 16, 2025”
So this actually happened days ago when I was talking with someone about my last comment, but I realized that jafrentif doesn’t actually make much sense as the Firen name for the language, because rentif means ‘speech’ and Jafren isn’t actually “spoken” as such. So, instead, a better name for it is jafslannaotuf from the verb *slanna, ‘to sing’,1 via the noun slannaotuf ‘music’ following the abstractive nominalization pattern. Now it’s not really much more accurate to say that Jafslannaotuf is sung than spoken, but I figure that this noun is subject to enough semantic widening and the analogy is close enough. I mean, the Sůṙjafi definitely aren’t playing instruments either. Naturally I’m definitely not going to rename all my associated files, so I’ll still be looking at jafren.txt for a while.
I’m mostly still just refreshing my memory of what I already did 6 years ago (wow, time flies), so I don’t have much that’s properly new work to share. But, I realized that since Jafslannaotuf (I generally leave off the -tif of firentif in English, out of tradition really tbh, but for some reason it just doesn’t sound as good to me to leave it off of jafslannaotuf even with the extra syllable. Maybe it’s just that it ends in a vowel? That doesn’t really seem to explain it since I’m plenty used to words ending in vowels in both English and Firen.) uses the zero copula for predicative statements, the cases I couldn’t figure out uses for (dis/semblative and essive) would probably serve in them to express the specific relation between the subject and the predicate. Essive would probably get use in a lot of relative clauses and attributive nouns too I think. There is also exactly one use of the essive in my existing notes, where it’s used in an attributive position in a hypothetical gloss of a purported translation of “what do you like about the sky?” which isn’t actually fully rendered on account of not having the vocabulary for it yet, but I’ll produce an incomplete rendering here:
The first line is abc notation, except that for readability, spaces represent short rests (which I think should be z/2 although I’m not sure I’ve thought about this properly; my notes simply say “a break in the sound” and the full version of The North Wind and the Sun I prepared a few years ago uses z/4, sixteenth notes, but I think I was misunderstanding how lengths work in abc as that feels quite short) except at the end, where the long rest that marks the end of the sentence is explicitly notated, assuming I didn’t make any mistakes.
The gloss is a little nonstandard because I’m using certain punctuation as abbreviations for particles, but the ? (c’) means the sentence is a question and = (G) means it’s specifically a wh-question. The = particle is then followed by a pronoun which the question is asking the correct referent for, in this case “what”. You could call this wh-movement except that instead of leaving a gap, the “what” is repeated later on in its usual position. Reading this now I’m not 100% certain I like this syntax, and I also never wrote down (or possibly even considered) whether Jafslannaotuf is noun-initial or noun-final language, but the examples use the English-y and Firen-y noun-final order, so this is all very subject to potential change. Especially considering that in the process of trying to translate it back again, and considering what the non-question equivalent of this sentence would be, I’ve realized that it is (slightly) unclear/ambiguous as to its meaning, which is why there are two translations under the gloss; it’s not because the meaning should be taken as intermediate between or inclusive of both of them. The first is what I intended to say, the second is my best guess for what it actually means. That’s mostly on account of my notes being too incomplete for me to determine the exact semantics; once I settle some of these questions I’ll have a more confident translation which should be able to express whether liking of the sky is being presupposed (this is mostly a logical language after all, at least grammatically, and avoiding ambiguity is essentially the point of them). And when I do, I’m not even sure it’ll still use the essive case.
Unrelatedly I have too many browser windows open, they’re getting hard to manage. I started writing this in the browser window on a different virtual desktop from where I have my conlanging notes open so I was awkwardly switching between them for a while until I decided to just temporarily set this window to all desktops.
Y’know I could probably just literally repost my comments here as-is on my own website and call it a blog. I’ve been worrying so much about having actual Posts™ to put on it and trying to edit some essays I have half-written to be suitable for it, and I just already have all of these in-depth explanatory comments which are currently rather annoying for me to cross-reference so I’d literally benefit from copying them to my own website anyway. I mean it’d be even better to wikify them but that’s a lot of effort that I’m definitely not going to do any time soon; copying and pasting some html around is much more feasible. I just have to get, like, the technical stuff sorted out and then I can pretty much just go for it right away.
1.2 I’ve realized that even though these verb ‘stem’ forms are not reconstructions precisely, they are not forms that wouldn’t actually be attested as being ‘words’ since I’ve chopped off some mandatory inflections for ease of analysis, which means that strictly speaking they should have the * marker. I don’t know if I’ll keep it up going forward, it’s kind of annoying, but I figured I should do the formally correct thing in the absence of reasons not to. Oh, and I had forgotten (and nearly misreported, until I looked it up) that rentif actually has no related verb in my current lexicon, the verbs meaning “to speak” are *tilla or *han (I’m not sure why I have both; examples would be useful. *han also lists “to tell, to express” at least). In fact there are no words I can see that have any strong resemblance to rentif. I have in some cases translated it as “tongue” following the rather archaic English usage of the word, but the Firen word for “tongue” is tillise so that’s definitely just a translation issue.
2. Wait is it pretentious to use numbered superscripted footnote in a blog comment? I feel like this might be pretentious. And I mean now I’m doing a nested footnote which is definitely pretentious. Oh well, I have the formatting available in the editor, I might as well use it.
I keep forgetting that blockquotes are italicized which kind of messed with my significant formatting here. I expected that the <em> tags would invert italicization in this case, like is typographically standard, but it seems that that is not their default behavior in html. Oh well, I just wanted to italicize the placeholder English words so they stood out as not part of the notes.
Sorry about the blockquote issue! And be pretentious! I like good earnest footnotes, parentheses, and complex punctuation whenever it’s called for!
I know exactly what you mean about digging through old conlanging notes, and to be frank, reassessing a translation and asking myself the very deep questions and sometimes outright revising things.
But I like the work you’re sharing here! Feels very meaty if not all hammered down yet, which is a fun place to be during good times!