The Dailies. September 2, 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?
2 thoughts on “The Dailies. September 2, 2025”
Well it took an extra week or so since when I first said I was going to do it, but I have finally actually created a draft for the semantic domain of love in Firen. These are not at all dictionary-quality definitions, they’re basically just lists of associations I have with the concepts, but hopefully they serve to get the idea across. I’m very much looking for feedback on these, they’re not finalized at all, and in particular several of them describe kinds of love I simply don’t experience or don’t distinguish from other feelings, but I’ve asked two people and they seem mostly solid, so I’m gonna post them here as-is.
First line is verb stem, noun. I didn’t really think about what noun class to assign them to yet; they’ll probably get abstract class/-tif endings, though words for feelings haven’t always been. Also not sure I like how many zero-derivations there are there, and also maybe some of these should be nouns only or verbs only, I haven’t quite decided yet. I’ve also included comparisons (not strict subsetting, don’t take them too seriously) to the main four Greek words for love, phileo, eros, storge, and also to a lesser extent agape.
strong friendship; based in shared interests; companionable; supportive; liking; reciprocal; sort of baseline kind of love; phileo
liking; affection; casual; uncommitted; phileo
romantic; emotional attraction; committed; public courtship; reciprocal, or at least usually desired to be reciprocal; emotional intimacy; eros
sexual love; physical attraction; physical intimacy; eros
protective love; love of parent for child; of caretaker for ward; unconditional; supportive; duty-bound; devoted; storge
love of child for parent; of ward for caretaker; of deities; unconditional; devoted; storge
love of siblings or close peers, developed from childhood, committed, unconditional, public expression; can include a degree of friendly rivalry; phileo
possessive love; exclusive; demands reciprocation; can bring about jealousy or envy; eros
infatuation; crush; limerence; unrequited; desire for physical intimacy and committed relationship; eros
infatuation; squish; unrequited; desire for friendship and emotional intimacy; something between eros and phileo
love of cherished objects, games, memories, stories, and activities; sentimentality;
love of country; of rulers/authorities; of sports teams (not that Ailhaotnůṙ has national professional sports teams, but for our context in the real world this is a good example); shared cultural identity; prideful; devoted; patriotic; (is this what agape is supposed to be? I honestly have no idea, it’s become too strongly Christianized for me to work out how it applies outside of the assumed monotheistic context)
Arguably this is too many words, but there’s enough overlap (you can feel multiple of these for a single person) that I think it’s workable. Also, while coming up with these, I read the Wikipedia article on “theories of love” and some parts of that, and especially many parts of one of the most influential theories, the color wheel theory of love, I find quite disagreeable to say the least. Kinda sapped my desire to read the rest of the pages linked from the main page tbh. I probably still should read more on the topic, it’ll help me clarify these ideas, although of course a linguistic semantic domain and a philosophical/psychological theory are quite different things.
Also, as a brief aside, I very nearly used “sti” as the noun for sexual love, because I was using my word generator and just thinking in terms of its phonetics in Firen, but caught myself and realized that while I usually don’t much care about collisions between Firen and English, this particular instance was just too egregious to abide, especially in context. So “vet” it shall be instead.
Lovely! At some point, I should thematically group up pages. I love all the nuances you go through here.
From my meagre foray to wikipedia, Homer used agape to refer to affection for the dead or familial, and while a grave once said the man was loved by his country, I’m not sure it quite hits on the patriotic. But that said, I like how you sliced up the love meanings very much!