67 various awnsers to "why?"
Or maybe just 22.
I'm working on a conlang with 22 consonants and with my rules, 67 total sounds that can end a word. One of the goals of this conlang is to make it fairly easy to guess the meaning of a word based on both the other words in a sentence and the sounds that make up that word, each with their own meaning. (You know how in english Anthro- means "relating to humans"? kinda like that.) This last sound of a root word gives a hint on the purpose of the word as a whole. While tho'uh means "to say" tho'uth might mean "to recite as in a speech" and "tho'uz" would mean "to lecture".
The issue with this system is that finding 67 awnsers to the vague question "why" is a bit much, but also an interesting challenge. Using every possible combination of words give me more roots than I could ever use, (10,318) so it's not like each one has to be relevant. Some can be oddly specific and one can be "just cause" (the -v ending). There's certainly room for very vague purposes as well. Now, this isn't a conlang made to pair with a fictional culture (...kind of.) It's one I'm making primarily because I want to use it, and being able to guess the meaning of words I've written is handy. But the conlanf doesn't attempt to be culturally nuetral either, because I as a person am not that. Words for gender will be compounds of "pink/blue-associated-person" and have much looser definitions than other words, for instance. But if this was part of a culture, what would this why ending tell us about how people name their children? And for a real culture, the intersections of several that I exist in, what does it say about me that the purposes I jotted down first were "to create, to learn, to teach, for pleasure," and "to gain a feeling ambition/exhilaration (the word for this specific feeling is "bee" and I'm still working out how to describe it to people).
Maybe it was misleading that this post didn't include any awnsers, but I hope the questions at least we're interesting. Maybe I'll get stuck at 22 reasons. Maybe I'll find reasons in abundance. But if you have ideas, I'd love to hear them.
