It’s Lexember time again! If you’re not familiar, Lexember is a conlanging community event where we make a new word in a conlang for each day of December. As with last year, I’ll be using my language Valya, which makes this the first time ever I’m using the same language for Lexember two years in a row!
My first Lexember word this year is buba, meaning “frog.” It’s from Proto-Valya *bubaa, which is almost certainly onomatopoeic.
But that’s just the in-universe etymology; the actual etymology for the word is a reference to Let’s Have a Bouba, the livestreaming conlanging duo that you can find on youtube, tumblr, and instagram. They will also be participating in Lexember, and as part of that they’ll be debuting a brand new font that I made for their languages N’asibómmó and Bokuz!
Coincidentally, the T’owal word for frog is also a reference to a conlanging friend: tethis is actually Tethys, a.k.a. @archipithecus!
Tüküra küra mbuba samünwintsa nggvagla kimblu?
/ty.ky.ra ky.ra‿m.bu.ba sa.myn.win.tsa‿ŋ.ɡvaɡ.la kim.blu/
How do frogs jump and jump and not get tired?
While Proto-Valya had the suffix *-la to mark the iterative (which is where a couple of word of the day words come from), in Modern Valya that suffix is no longer productive. But one thing Valya does use a lot is serial verb constructions, so a very common way to mark the iterative mood is via serial reduplication. So in this sentence you’ve got küra küra, which is very similar to the English “jump and jump,” but without the “and.” The tü- prefix at the beginning makes the whole serial construction into a converb, so the sentence could more literally be translated as “When jumping (and) jumping, how do frogs not get tired?”
In this sentence, buba is in the definite plural: mbuba. That doesn’t mean it’s talking about any specific frogs, though! It’s more about frogs as a whole, the same way we might use the definite singular in English: “The frog is an amphibian,” etc. And since we’re talking about definite forms, buba is one of the few Valya words that changes its initial consonant in the singular definite form: gvuba!
