The Dailies. August 23, 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 23, 2025”
I’ve just finished Rowan Ellis’s new video about aromanticism (review: very good, go watch) and I’ve decided that this is a good time to coin some word for love and relationships in Firen. I’m not going to just copy the Greek model that you see so often, but I will be referencing it, because I think English is woefully imprecise about these things. Anyway, Firen currently just has tozza, meaning “to love”, and tozzo, “love (emotion)” which is formed by the agentive/instrumentive noun scheme for unclear reasons. Seems like it should be the abstractive or, maybe, resultative. Unless I did that derivation in reverse, in which case the ending of the noun has no particular bearing. Also present are ikase, “romantic couple”, and čunikase, “childbearing couple”, bůṙi, “child (age)”, and suski, “child (relation)”. So, not too much there to work with.
Then I fell down a 4 hour rabbit hole trying to track down where I originally explained the Firen kinship system, and it turned out it was on the Imzy community before this blog even existed. Fortunately I did export my own comments before it shut down, but the comments I was replying to aren’t included in that so everything is confusing and stripped of context. And then I decided to try to look up when I first added vowel harmony to Firen because I have inconsistent handling of harmony for ⟨ůṙ⟩ and ⟨aṙ⟩, and it turns out that that inconsistency was there since the beginning. I said that ⟨ůṙ⟩ was a central vowel sometimes, and that aṙ was a central vowel other times. It seems that I eventually settled on treating ⟨ůṙ⟩ /ɚ/ as front, effectively pretending that it was like *⟨eṙ⟩ /ɝ/ for harmonization (and to be fair, it is unrounded whereas ⟨ů⟩ /ɵ/ is rounded so in that sense it is a bit less back-sounding than the central /ɵ/ (both rounding and the ‘back’ tongue position lower F2)), but I didn’t consistently apply that to the lexicon, which means that the speculative mood and elative case harmonize as -aṙ/-oṙ and -gaṙ/-goṙ respectively, and in the other direction, the word ailhaotnůṙ, the very name of the world the conlang inhabits and therefore one of the words I use most often, allows a weak ⟨ůṙ⟩ (supposedly front) to follow a strong ⟨ao⟩ (in fact the way it’s coded into my word/sentence generator produces the IPA /áɪl.háʊt.nɔ˞/ due to the harmony rules), and I don’t even know what’s going on with the resultative verb nominalization pattern, which is described as “-aṙ, -ůṙ/-oṙ” in my notes.
It’s probably too late to add an actual ⟨eṙ⟩ to the language, which would allow for an actually sensible fix to this problem (treat both ⟨ůṙ⟩ and ⟨aṙ⟩ as central, like the unmodified ⟨ů⟩ and ⟨a⟩ are).1 Without doing that, I can either leave it inconsistent and say it’s usually the case that ⟨ůṙ⟩ and ⟨oṙ⟩ form a harmony pair, apply the rule I have consistently and change a bunch of words, or change my rule to account for this somehow. I’ll need to think on it I suppose. If I do go the route of adding a new vowel, I’ll have to decide if I want to change any existing words to have it or to just add it to my set for new words and let it be rarer than the other rhotic vowels, which are already not the most common.
Anyway, back on kinship, the thing I was looking for turned out to be much less in-depth than I remembered it being. So instead of quoting that old comment from 2017, I’ll just explain it again but do it more clearly than before. Firen has a word nuspi2 for “cousin” and jůṙnuspi, “grand-cousin”, actually refers to the child of your grandparent’s sibling (great aunt/uncle), which would be your second cousin once removed in English, because English bases “removedness” of cousins on your relative generation, and therefore your second cousins’ parent (the one related to you, at least) and children are both “second cousins once removed” to you. In Firen, instead, they’d be called your “grand-cousin” (English: once removed), “grand-cousin’s child” (not removed), and “grand-cousin’s grandchildren” (once removed again) instead. The pattern for extending jůṙnuspi would follow the same rule I already made for great-grandparents, which is, uh, I guess not written in my dictionary. I suppose that the implication is that you just continue repeating jůṙ. That’s fine of course, but I thought I had a different system.
I’ll have to get back to actually coining the love and relationship terms I said I was going to do in the first paragraph another day, I’m out of time for the night. (I say, and then spend almost another hour editing this comment.)
1. It was at this point in typing this comment that I went and borked my whole X session trying to get compose key sequences for ⟨⟩ working and had to restart it, so I might as well get some good use out of them now.
2. Speaking of harmony, -i never harmonizes in my current notes which I’m not sure feels correct to me. I mean technically it was another whole root and therefore should be strong, but it functions more like a suffix in many ways. For example, there’s no -se gender marking on -i words. Except when there is in a few cases because I forgot that rule I guess. tbf Firen’s gender system is a little weird anyway and I’m not certain I still won’t significantly alter it at some future time.
Oooh, how fun! I have a bunch of different love type words floating around my … multiple caches of lexicon. Yeah, united reference document would be a win, sigh.
There’s also some kind of harmony or disharmony going on occasionally (-miets becoming –miatsukh when combined with the regular possessive was the first example of it), but I’ve never dug out my samples thereof and developed rules.
I like your kinship terms too!
Firen has a very basic harmony system motivated largely by the fact that despite trying fairly hard several times I have never managed to pronounce /y/ correctly, much less in an actual word, and harmony systems usually only harmonize either backness or roundedness and therefore will produce front rounded vowels. Firen just has “weak vowels” (I think these are called morphophonemes, but it’s a bit confusing, and they might be diaphonemes instead) which are /i ~ u/, /e ~ o/, and /ɚ ~ ɔ˞/ (supposedly), harmonizing on both qualities (Wikipedia mentions one language which harmonizes on both, but it says that it’s theorized to be two independent harmonizations superimposed on each other, so I assume there are some edge cases where it acts differently), and “central vowels” /ɵ/, /a/, and /ɑ˞/ which don’t participate in harmony. But apparently harmony can also happen with seemingly arbitrary vowel sets, based on unclear rules, with a few examples known, so Firen isn’t unrealistic in this regard, just somewhat unusual.
Hmm, maybe I could make the central vowels harmonize on roundedness actually. Then you’d have /ə ~ ɵ/, /ä ~ ɒ/, and /ä˞ ~ ɒ˞/ (not fully satisfied with this). I combined the rounding with a slight retraction so technically this is harmonizing on backness as well, but it’s not as big of an effect, it just felt more comfortable to say them that way. (Also, I’ve been pronouncing /a/ as [ä] this whole time anyway, it just didn’t seem worth transcribing that way until now, when there was another open vowel to compare it against directly.) It probably wouldn’t be reflected orthographically, and you wouldn’t have weak (harmonic) and strong (disharmonic1) versions of the central vowels I think, even when they’re in accented positions that are normally strong, they’d just always harmonize, so they’d be proper allophones. Not totally sold on that just yet but it’s worth considering. Doesn’t help at all with the lack of a proper harmonic contrast to /ɔ˞/ though.
1. Although really it’s just unharmonic. I’m not sure why the term seems to be the same for invariant-under-harmony and contrary-to-harmony. Firen actually does have one instance of the latter, in the dissatisfactive conjugation so maybe I will just use the term “unharmonic” to have a sensible contrast in terminology.