Let's do the conlang thingies again

For the records: No, I didn’t just slack off (even though that’s exactly what I would have predicted me to do!) No, it was a very enlightening process for me, as I would usually create vocabulary in a bulk, like 100 items in an hour (which would of course be completely boring), or just create a word without too much thinking either, just whenever I’d need it. 

No, for Lexember, I took my time for each word (well, at least almost), created an etymology which in most cases was more interesting than ‘meaning didn’t change over the past 2000 years’, and I was mostly happy with the results. The problem for me was the pacing, I just couldn’t afford to create a single word in an hour-long process every day. Oh well, who am I kidding, I did it anyways :D 

But the even more pressing issue was that my conlang just wasn’t ready for that at this point; If you don’t know my conlanging history, let me tell you that my old conlangs were basically relexes of whichever langauge I was studying that that point. Which makes Settamu my first, let’s call it ‘adult’ conlang in a sense, but there are many issues that arose when I realized that a word wouldn’t just work the way I thought it would in a definitely non-Indoeuropean language, so I spent additional hours doing research for almost a week straight (and, annoyingly, hunting for books which were not available at my university’s library ... no dedicated linguistics faculty), which often left we clueless and without a good word for Lexember (and tired for the next day’s lectures). So my options after a week and a half were either cheaping out and posting a random simple word like ‘sun’ or ‘stone’ or tooth’ each day, or being faithful to the challenge I set out for and consequently admitting defeat. I chose to do the latter. 

In order to not end this post with a dark mood, I can report that my lexicon size still almost doubled in size during Lexember. I’m sitting at 295 entries right now, which I’d definitely call a success. And I made some significant progress with Settamu grammar and lots of other stuff during the last month or so, so Lexember really wasn’t all in vain. The grammar now spans more than 50 pages or so, with 15 more for the lexicon and another few dozen pages worth of notes spread throughout my appartment. So I’ll definitely have more than enough materials to work on, which I plan to share here on tumblr. 

Juuust ... like this little piece of writing system. 

It’s the proto-writing system of the writing system for my lovely Settamu speakers, borrowed from another people (whose language I sketched out over the past couple days), and started off as a collection of pictograms used for trading and religious inscriptions. The glyphs are supposed to be pressed into clay tablets (and maybe wax tablets, too), so that’s why they are looking quite plain and, well, angular. Also, ignore the non-IPA annotations for the sounds, it’s all still very much in the flow and intended for private use only ;)

A few days ago, I wrote down a note about how the word for children playing would be related to ‘whirling, twirling’. This is how I went with it while trying out what I can do with the derivational devices I currently have:

oo [oː] n. ‘current, cataract (water)’

Today’s starting point. It originally meant something along the lines of ‘moving water, waves, whirlpool’ , now has a more specialized meaning. The moving water was then generalized and also included other wavelike movements.

yuunoo [juːnoː] n. ‘a) rough sea b) storm, tempest’

A simple compound with yuun ‘big’.

onní [ɔ↓nːi] n. ‘a) seaspray b) splashing water or liquid in general’

Derived from ‘an (instance of) splash’

onnek-shi [ɔnːɛkɕi] v. it. ‘a) to splash (liquid) b) to overflow, overboil’

onnekka-i [ɔnːɛkːai  v. tr. ‘to pour (liquid)’ lit. ‘to make splash’

These are in turn derived from onní., same basic verbalization suffix, the second one has a transitivizing/causative suffix mashed in there as well. All blurred by sound changes (though very regular, many verbs in the dictionary follow the same pattern)

ooe-ru [oːɛɾɯ] v. tr. ‘a) to pat so. b) to tickle so.'

This one is derived from, basically, ‘do the whirling around’, which was later applied to various nice things you can do with your hands, probably including something sexual in vernacular Settamu. Finally, the original meaning was turned into ‘to whirl around with one another’ with a reciprocal/medial infix, resulting in:

Guess what ... a Lexember post per day didn’t work out as planned for various reasons. BUT I got to thing about a lot of things about Settamu during long car rides ... like inalienable possession and stuff, as well as a few new words for you. The first pair of words is so basic that I’d have to invent it eventually, so I just did it the moment it came to my mind:

hawa [hawa] n. kin. ‘mommy’

tatá [ta↓ta] n. kin. 'daddy’

Of course, they are derived from *päpä and *tätä, with the word for mother being especially disfigured by cruel sound changes ... but babies will say papa and mama and similar things anyway ...

*warning about conculture information dump*

Note that there isn’t one mother or father in the Settamu culture, as children are raised by a group of women about the same age as the biological mother, and they usually raise all their own children of about the same age together (which in turn are one’s siblings) As for ‘fathers’, as the Settamu people (I really need a term for their culture ...) don’t have anything like marriage or pressure to live monogamous (even though many do live that way), the role of the fathers is usually taken by the man in relationships with the ‘mothers’, although the ties aren’t usually as tight as with their mothers, as relationships are required to be exogamous and they don’t live in the same house as a consequence - it’s up to the children who they consider a father and who they consider a stranger. Anyway, the post is getting lenghy again *sigh*

Anyways, another pair of words which popped up in my brain yesterday:

ukkua-mi [ɯkːɯami] v. it. ‘to be smooth, flat (solid objects)’

hyaaym-mi [çaːɨmːi] v. it. ‘to be flat, smooth (for liquids, water and fog)’

The first word derives from the same word as uusú ‘water’ (yester-yester-yesterdays Lexember word), quite literally translated it means something along the lines of ‘it is like something shaped by (the flowing) water’, like a smooth stone found in a riverbed. The meaning was then later extended onto other things, like the surface of a table or maybe a knive (minus the edge). The other word refers to a calm sea without many waves, related to the word hyaam ‘breath, wave’, with the meaning being extended to include things like a sudden, quite confined fog bank.

The last word is ...

-nauhikí [naɯçi̥↓ki] n. inal. ‘ancestors, forefathers’

Talking about inalienable possession, this is the one and only kinship term I have right now (or at least that’s what my dictionary tells me), it is inalienably possessed, and as far as Settamu is concerned, this is expressed by it being obligatorily possessed. So, *nauhikí isn’t a grammatical correct expression - even when talking about ancestors in general or similar usages, they must still be marked with possessive prefix - like e. g. hanauhikí ‘my ancestors’, ‘kanaúhiki ‘your (sg. or pl.) ancestors’ (beware the tone change!), sunauhikí ‘someone’s ancestors’ (this one is as close to ‘ancestors in general’ as it gets). 

A little bit of a PSA beforehand: todays as well as the following Lexember entries up until Monday will be kinda short and uneventful, because I have to leave my computer behind for the weekend. But, of course, I’ll still try to post a new word every day.

So, today’s word is for a material kinda essential ... water! (Yup, I didn’t have a word for that yet, after almost two years working on the conlang ...)

shautom [ɕautɔ̃m] n. ‘sole of the foot, below’

Another relational noun, this time expressing ‘below’. A compound of *kjär ‘hardened’ and *tamp ‘side, surface of an object’, with a few changes throughout the millennia. The first component is also - incidentally - found in shaí ‘(flat-)bread)’, which is honestly quite a happenstance was my intention all along. I didn’t get anything else done as for conlanging, I’m afraid, so I’ll leave you with this sample sentence (which makes yesterday’s example part of a serial story, I guess):

kashitsú-u hyotós-nu-wa shautom-nu hateqittsusoshi. 

[kaɕi̥↓t͡sɯː çɔtɔznuwa ɕautɔ̃nːu hatɛʔit͡sːusɔɕi̥]

ka-shitsú-u hyotos-nu-wa shautom-nu ha-te<qi>k-tsu-so-shi

2PERS.POSS-child=PAT wood.col=LOC=GEN below=loc 1PERS.SG-hunt<PART>-3PERS-PERF-DECL

I search for the children below the pile of wood, but can’t find them. 

... okay, I admit that this example may seem quite forced at first sight, but maybe, er, the wood pile collapsed ... yeah, that’s totally what happened! 

‘kuye [k͡xɯjɛ] n. ‘back (of a person), behind (+ gen.)’

I needed more relational nouns (as a means of expressing direction and position of objects, as Settamu pretty much completely lacks pre-/postpositions for that job), and this is one of them. Sadly, the word doesn’t have a fancy backgroud story, so I’ll use this post to instead show off some delicious grammatical features of Settamu, namely evidentials, suffixaufnahme and a (simple) coverb consturction.

You’re looking for the* children? I’ve heard they’re often hiding behind the wood pile over there.

kashitsú-mi katettsúmushi tó? ‘soni hyotós-nu-wa ‘kuye-nu ‘kani ‘itsunanechi.

[kaɕi̥↓t͡sɯmi ka↑tɛ↓t͡sːɯmɯɕi̥ ↗tɔ? sɔni çɔ↓tɔznuwa k͡xɯjɛnɯ kani‿it͡sɯnat͡ɕi̥]

ka-shitsú-mi ká-tek-tsú-mu-shi tó? soni hyotós-nu-wa kuye-nu kan-i Ø-itsun-a-ne-chi

2PERS.POSS-child=TOP 2PERS-hunt-3PERS-INFER-DECL QUES? that.DIST wood.COL=LOC=GEN back=LOC go-SUB 3PERS-be.conceiled-REP-HAB-DECL

Narrow translation: (as for the) children, you search for (lit.: hunt) them, huh? At that back of the wood pile, I heard that they are often hiding (lit.: go and hide) themselves.

INFER = inferential evidential

DECL = declarative

QUES = question marker

COL = collective

SUB = subordinative (the be all, end all-mode of settamu subordinate sentences

REP = reported evidential

HAB = habitual aspect

Today was a really chilly day here in Germany, so I decided to try to lift my mood by coining a word for ‘hot’. Except that I didn’t want to cheap out on this, so I divided the semantic space occupied by ‘hot’ into several different words.

‘shaum-mi, shauQ- [ɕaumːi] v. it. ‘to feel exhausted because you’re out in the sun (pat.); to feel exhausted because you’re out in the sun and working (agt.)’

This one is an obvious derivation from shaumu ‘sun’ and an old verb *mir ‘to experience sth.’, and that’s all there is to it, really. 

‘tymhi [tɨmçi] n. adj. ‘to be hot outside’

Being a member of a relatively small and exclusive word class, tymhi is pretty much an ordinary noun, except for the fact that is usually not an argument of a verb (which restricts its usage to mainly attributive duties), and it can - like many similar nouns which encode other weather conditions - predicate a sentence, a position which is otherwise entirely reserved to verbs in Settamu. Thus, a valid sentence can consist just of the word tymhi ‘it’s hot outside’ Similar words ... might be invented this very Lexember. We’ll see. 

Viewed from a diachronic perspective, these weather nouns are the last remnants of the very much isolating nature of the protolanguage of Settamu, a world where verbs could be verbs on their own and didn’t require an auxilliary verb to make them predicates - that’s by the way where the -mi in my first word shaummi came from, and this pattern spread throughout the language (e.g. action verbs were most of the time formed with an auxilliary verb ‘to do’), resulting in modern Settamu’s verbal modes like the Declarative or the Hortative. 

But I’ve digressed way to much for one day, so I present, without further ado, the last word of today’s post, which covers most non-sexual meanings of ‘hot’:

tsukú-mi [tsɯ↓kɯmi] v. it. ‘to be hot (a solid object or a surface) (pat.)’

Remember that boy Hikos who’s been really arrogant two days ago? Turns out the name didn’t have any etymology associated to it, so I took on this task immediatly. Settamu names - or rather, a special kind of name, the birthnames - are usually good wishes for the child’s future (which may be chosen accordingly to one’s kauoi, see yesterday’s entry). Now, the Settamu people are mostly simple people who probably wish for their children to have a full stomach for most of their lives. For a boy, the traditional professions they are trained in are fishing and big game hunting, and Hikos is connected to the latter one (although the original meaning of the word was probably lost over time, but the name remained for children whose parents were more creative than naming their child after whatever they saw right now, e.g. ‘child of the winter’, ‘child of the dawn’, ‘firstborn child’). 

Hikós [çikɔs] n. ‘a boy’s name meaning “always a successful hunt”’ 

The name is derived from a collective form of ‘hunting success’, a word which is also found in modern Settamu, but the meaning expanded over time:

hí [↓çi] n. ‘luck, success’ 

hi ‘awaru [↓çi ↑awaɾɯ] v. it. ‘to be successful, to have luck’

Another related word, derived from the root and a verb which is basically an essential copula (just like the last example btw, but this one dates back to an earlier stage of the language):

‘hikami, ‘hika- [çikami] v. it. ‘to be praiseworthy’

This word also makes a good interjection. Better keep it in mind, just in case you want to praise someone in Settamu.

‘hikatta! [ çi̥katːa ] ‘well done! ; nice one!’

hika-t-ta

kauoi [ka.u.ɔ.i] ‘one’s personal destiny’

Well, today’s word looks very Polynesian, but rest assured that the word, originating from the protolangauge, did in fact have consonants, but those went the way of West-Romance voiced stops. 

The word is a compound which literally means ‘that night’, and refers to the night one was born - the local shaman would then watch the nightly sky for omens, both good and bad (usually with the aid of hallucinogens), and might take prompt actions in case of really bad omens, which usually leads to the newborn being abandoned or killed ... now, that took a dark turn .. 

Anyhow, in case you survived the night you were born, the kauoi usually is the main influence for the child’s name (until it chooses a name on its own when it’s become an adult), and the parents may try to shape the life of the newborn in the ways forseen by the kauoi (it’s usually shared with the immediate parents, but remains secret to both the child itself as it grows and the public), often turning it in a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

In other news, because I required a root for this word, i also coined the word for night (I’m pretty sure that the meaning of the word can be very stable over time):

I think I might have overdone it with todays lexember, but one thing led to another, and I don’ feel like hiding my creative output, basically a byproduct of todays Lexember word... and I found out that my conpeople (or those who speak Settamu) actually count in a duodecimal system, so I had to supply them with some numbers. I was basically forced at gunpoint to do it!

It all started out with the little word tsú n. inanimate ‘finger’. That isn’t too special, right? But then I remembered reading about the numeral systems various Australian Aboriginal languages, some of which are very, uh, low budget with their numbers (they basically have two words for one and two and add them up as in one, two, two-one, two-two, two-two-one, two-two-two ... and a word for many for all numbers higher), and I just stole that idea and combined it with the finger bone counting method used in ... somewhere. You can count up to twelve with just one hand by counting each of the finger bones with the thumb, some cultures do it, just trust me on this, even though I forgot my sources. 

So, I based the numeral system on just two numbers and the finger:

‘hana, -wana ‘one’ (related to the word for ‘this’)

nyú ‘two’

tsú ‘three, finger’

Now we just combine these numbers to create bigger numbers for a bit (note that there were some small sound changes) :

tsúwana ‘four, three-one’

tsunshú ‘five, three-two’

At this point, one would expect something like *nyutsu ‘six, two fingers’, but that would become very inconvenient very soon, and would be a bad system for a pretty much innumerate (if that isn’t a word, consider it analogous to illiterate) people to learn. So, they did what people do when someone in the neighborhood has a superior culture and you have lots of contact through trade and other means with them: you just loan a word. 

‘hokku ‘six’ (which was loaned as a word for ‘ten’, because the loanee people used a pretty standard decimal system, and the speakers of Settamu weren’t good at maths anyway, so they just took the word for a number they probably heard often when trying to trade).

Now things get kinda boring, I guess: we combine our newfound numeral with the old numerals to make even more numbers (note that there’s a little remnant of a conjunction after our newly introduced numeral, as it was treated different than a native word and wasn’t allowed to compound with natives words).

‘hokkumowana ‘seven’

‘hokkumonshú ‘eight’

‘hokkumotsú ‘nine’

‘hokkumotsúwana ‘ten’

It seemed only logical to me that, if you use the word for finger as the basis for a numeral, you should use other body parts as well. So the word for twelve is based on the word for hand (which is nowadays kuróshi ‘hand’, but the numeral base word went another way), and the word for eleven is ... 

‘hanakkuí ‘eleven, one to a (full) hand’

kuí, ku- ‘twelve’ (the latter variant for compounds)

For higher numbers, kuí is used as a base, and things become pretty much regular from here on. For example, the word for twenty-two would be

‘kumohokkumotsúwana ‘twenty-two, lit. hand + six + finger-one’

So, in the end I ended up with a very transparent numeral system, which in itself is a very different approach to numerals for someone who only speaks and knows Indoeuropean langauges with very oblique numerals. I’m quite happy with it, and I will post a more complete post some time soon when I figured out some more things like higher numbers work. For now, I’ll leave you with another word (maybe the actual lexember entry for today), which is directly related to our old friend tsú ‘finger’. It used to mean ‘to point at something’, but over time developed a quite different meaning:

tsú-su v. it ‘a) to be arrogant (agt.) b) to take pride in ordinary and easy to fulfill things (and be the aim of mockery in result) (pat.)’

The example sentence is probably both true-to-life and has a funny sounding word in it ... doesn’t always have to be a huge verb to express what’s important. Also, it sounds like ‘tsk!’ and is probably a good word to keep in mind for gossiping. Anyway, Happy Lexember!

hikós-mi ‘keru-shin tsútsutsussusu [çi̥↓kɔsmi kɛɾɯɕĩn t͡sɯ̥↑t͡sɯ↓tsɯsːɯsɯ̥]

hikós-mi ‘keru-shin tsú-tsu-tsu-ssu-su

Hikos=TOP today=ESSIVE INTENS~be.arrogant-3pers.PAT-PAST;PERF-DECL

Today’s gonna be a little smaller due to some unfortunate time constraints, duh. 

Well, it’s about time that my conlang Settamu gets some new vocabulary. And it is, coincidentally, Lexember! Currently, my measly lexicon consists of 179 entries ... and I’m gonna try to make grow up to 300 in Lexember. Or fail because I’d much rather be lazy. That’s why I expose myself to the peer pressure on the social medias, I guess ...

Anyways, the first word is ....

tsukún-chi [t͡sɯ↓kɯnt͡ɕi] v. it. a) to be burnt (food) (pat.) b) to have aqcuired a bad taste due to bad cooking skills (pat.) c) to be parched¹ by the sun (food, dead bodies, earth) d) to be thirsty (coll.)

I hate to admit that I didn’t have a root for ‘fire’ or anything related to it ... but now I do. The word contains the root for ‘fire’ and an old verbalization marker which is nowadays pronounced -shi, realized as -chi due to fortification, with another small suffix -n- suffix making the word a resultative, from ‘to be burning’ to ‘to be burnt’. Overall, the shape of the word didn’t really change much over the millennia (well, like two millennia, but still ...).

A little example in the end (didn’t end up too little I’m afraid):

yoppí-mi kátsukútsukukontoewanetta maá! [ jɔ↓.p.pi.mi ka↑.t͡sɯ↓.kɯ.t͡sɯ̥.ku.kɔ.n.do.e.wa.ne.t.ta ma↓.a]

yoppí-mi ká-tsukú-tsukukon-t-oe-wa-nek-ta maa!

meal=TOP 2PERS.AGT-to.be.burnt~INTENS;CAUS-3PERS.PAT-MALEF.SPEAKER-VIS.SENSORY-HAB-ENERG DISC.PART (as for) the meal, I see that you make it very burnt on a regular basis, which is bad for me, stirrs up my emotions, and I consider all this an annoyance (and expect an apology).

Really, you totally burn my meal all the time!