tepat-side

Semecétthab has 5 cases: Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive, and Locative.

Nominative

The nominative case is the typical subject case in the language. Most verbs’ subjects take the nominative case, as in the example below.

The nominative is also used for direct address, for which I have no current example.

Accusative

The accusative is used for the direct object of a verb, as below:

Additionally, it is also used for the time an event happens:

Dative

The dative is used for indirect objects:

Also the beneficiary or purpose of an action:

Experiencer subjects also often take the dative case (no current example sentences).

Genitive

The genitive marks the possessor of another noun (phrase):

The genitive also is used partitively:

It is also used to show the material an object is made of, or some other attribute:

Locative

The locative shows the location at/by/in where an action occurs:

It also shows the duration of an action:

I got into conlanging through Biblaridion's videos, which talked about creating naturalistic languages, and I had fun doing that... for a whole hour before I started burning out on keeping track of every sound change and word I come up with. But I digress, lol.

Back to my question, how do you make such in depth languages with histories behind them without getting bored or burnt out?

Long answer: I don't. I get bored all the time. When that happens, I usually just work on another language for a bit. There's always something in other languages I'm working on that I need to do, whether it be fleshing out grammar or adding more words to the lexicon. But even then, if I'm not in the mood to work on any language at all, I just... don't work on them. If I want to do something else I do something else. I can't really force myself to do something I don't want to do without any repercussions, or else my body just straight freaks out. So I only work on languages when I'm in the mood to.

I will say, one thing that's really *really* streamlined the process for me is that I use Lexurgy to keep track and apply sound changes. Honestly it is a GODSEND especially with inflection-heavy languages. You can just pop in the proto-forms and it will give you the modern versions of it, so I can input all the proto-forms of noun declension or verb conjugations and it will give me the words that I need. EXTREMELY useful honestly for helping develop my lexicon. I will say there is a bit of a learning curve to it though. It's basically, like, coding, and sometimes you won't know how to express a rule without some hiccups, but once you get the hang of it it's PRETTY STABLE as far as managing sound changes. And really your first pass of sound changes might not be enough, you might wind up needing to add more rules or refine preexisting ones because they cause or ignore a sound change that you didn't quite anticipate. With the Mewling languages, I didn't use it, so I had to go through each word individually and evolve it myself from a list of sound changes I kept. With the Seraphic languages I started out with that process, but eventually transferred all the sound changes to Lexurgy and I basically use that when forming new words. With Ancestral (and Pushmari, still in development), I now write the sound changes in Lexurgy as I go, which cuts out the middle man. I'm sure there a better ways of doing it, but I need the repetitive stuff done in 0.2 seconds so I can actually *work* on the deep, important stuff in a language.

Díıši tikētıvée etínėm yíingėntši tot wātl’attán díıši atāváa.

/tʰɪ́ː.ʃi ti.kɛː.tɪ.vɛ́ː e.tɪ́.nəm jíː.ŋən.ⁿt͡ʃi tɔt ʍaː.t͡ɬ’at.tán tʰɪ́ː.ʃi ɑ.taː.váː/

But when the time comes for us to act, I cannot find you anywhere. You said we needed to take action, but now you've slipped away, leaving me to manage on my own. You said “we” but you did not mean it. You realized what you'd have to do and you decided it was too much. You learned that fixing the problem will require real effort and sacrifice and you didn't want to take that on. You offered only words and no actions.

One common thing I see among artists who are just starting out is that they are very precious about their work -- ironically, way moreso than experienced artists. They need to get every line JUST right, because in their mind, getting that line just right is what stands between the piece being bad and it being good. I was like that too, for so long that I'm still struggling to catch up because of how it hampered my progress.

Being precious about every line is kind of like a track sprinter starting a run, but then restarting every time their foot lands in any slightly suboptimal way. This is comes off as silly, because we know that the "unit" of what they are doing is a sprint, and that they would make their greatest progress by finishing the full sprints, because that's how they train.

Well, similarly, the "unit" of art is a finished piece. What stands between the sprinter and the time they want isn't 1 individual step, but 1000 sprints. What stands between the beginner artist and making art they like the look of isn't that 1 line, but, i'm sorry to say, 1000 pieces.

Taking note of any mistakes you made afterwards is something done by both the experienced artist and experienced sprinter -- this is healthy and helps you improve. But you can do that later, after you're done.

Here's the kinship terminology for the Ancestral language! Ancestral kinship is a modified version of Iroquois kinship, where the same gendered siblings of your parents/grandparents share the same term, while separate gendered siblings of your parents/grandparents have differing terms. Diluvians as a species are pretty sexually monomorphic, and biological sex isn't immediately apparent until a diluvian reaches sexual maturity. And in once you do, whether you have male or female sexual organs is largely irrelevant. Your sex is defined as being either homoecious (having both male and female organs), or monoecious (having either male OR female sexual organs, but able to switch when necessary). In Ancestral culture then, your gender isn't dictated by your sex , but by your parenting role; for Ancestral diluvians, the distinction is "mother" vs. "father" instead of "female" vs. "male". Since both homoecious and monoecious diluvians are capable of both gestation and fertilization, the roles are defined as which diluvian gestates (the mother) and which fertilizes (the father).

Here's the kinship terminology for the Ancestral language! Ancestral kinship is a modified version of Iroquois kinship, where the same gendered siblings of your parents/grandparents share the same term, while separate gendered siblings of your parents/grandparents have differing terms. Diluvians as a species are pretty sexually monomorphic, and biological sex isn't immediately apparent until a diluvian reaches sexual maturity. And in once you do, whether you have male or female sexual organs is largely irrelevant. Your sex is defined as being either homoecious (having both male and female organs), or monoecious (having either male OR female sexual organs, but able to switch when necessary). In Ancestral culture then, your gender isn't dictated by your sex , but by your parenting role; for Ancestral diluvians, the distinction is "mother" vs. "father" instead of "female" vs. "male". Since both homoecious and monoecious diluvians are capable of both gestation and fertilization, the roles are defined as which diluvian gestates (the mother) and which fertilizes (the father).

It's that time of year again

When you're making the biology from the ground up with perfect knowledge of the clades, it's natural for you to just make clade names that are descriptive and perfectly align with the organisms under them.

But that's not how it works in the real world. In the real world we have:

Relics of outdated frameworks: The whole kingdom, phylum, order, class... setup is still kind of present even though we know Linnaeus was wrong about it being neat categories.

Relics of older ideology: Humans in the clade primates (related to prime, primary) because we put ourselves at the top of a hierarchy. We no longer think that's valid, but the name persists, as are the names that define lower clades of primates by proximity to humanity (Hominin, Hominid, Hominoid), and our self-assigned binomial name Homo sapiens "wise man".

Just plain errors: Like Crocodilia being in a clade called Pseudosuchia ("false Sobek") because originally we thought of those as crocodilian-like, but didn't realize crocodilians were actually part of the clade.

Of course, a spec-bio project is already a massive undertaking (one I probably won't be doing any time soon), and this extra layer would be a lot of extra work. You'd have to develop all your creatures with placeholder labels and then go back and figure out the history of biology and paleontology. Maybe you could do the biology work and hand off the naming to another person.

I also understand it could be confusing to the audience, especially if you have some historical errors thrown in.

Public PSA: Royal Commission

The royal commission into antisemitism is closing submissions on MAY 31st. Please ensure you submit.

You can talk about your experiences if you are Jewish or not

Please do your bit. Tell everyone about what you see and experience.

There are free resources to help you draft your submission or if you get called up for a public hearing:

1. AUJS - for Australian Jewish Students contact [email protected]

2. National Legal Aid - [email protected]

The birdandmoon image “Animals With Misleading Names” says that the mountain goat is not a goat.

Now, unless this has changed recently, both of those animals are caprines.

Both of those statements can be correct, but only one at a time.

If you consider all caprines to be goats, then yes the muskox is a goat. And so is the mountain goat, the sheep, and so on.

If you consider only members of genus Capra to be goats, then no, mountain goats are not goats. And neither are muskoxen, sheep, and so on.

Regular person: No, whales are mammals.