Lexember Day 20 - jugful

Ik bringa hǣma rœčifylin wīnis gā du žultina froðu þulan anmœuǧin þ·ufþlœusin. Þā genǧik wisna inča hēþia mīna.

‘I’ve brought a jugful of wine home for the winter holidays to endure encourage the good cheer. I’ll be in my room.’

Lexember Day 19 - double

Twīfauþs is the result of a rather unusual merger of two similar words with similar meanings. It’s almost not worth commenting on, except that the two words have completely different etymologies. In Early Modern Valthungian, these were two distinct words – twīfnas and twižafauþs. The twi has a semi-common source: twi- is a common Germanic prefix for ‘two’, while twī (with a long vowel) is part of a root form of the same word. The -f- of both words is completely coincidental, however... see below. (This adjective does not have a comparative or superlative form, but I didn’t feel like futzing around with the formatting to erase them.)

Lexember Day 18 - malice

 Today's lexembreme brought to you by Elphaba and pals.

Lexember Day 17 - now

Just a fun neologism-ex-contractio today. 

Lexember Day 16 – extract

This is the word you will find in your kitchen cabinet on the vanilla or almond extract.

“But Jamin,” you might wonder, “isn’t -ins limited to verbal nouns? Isn’t this an actual substantive noun?” 

To which might answer, “Yup! Language is freakin’ weird, man.” Yes, we would normally expect a weak īn-stem noun for the substantive form (giving us **ustréni) but that’s just… not what it is. I dunno what to tell you. It can also be a verbal noun, though (“extraction”).

In Valthungian cuisine, you will also hear a non-descript “extract” called for in recipes. (My own patnabran recipe calls for a full tablespoon of ustrénins!) This is a little bit like curry or dumplings, in that every Valthungian grandmother has a very specific recipe, and they’re all different, and each one swears that hers is the only “correct” one. My own Valthungian grandmother taught me the “prime number rule” for making ustrénins, and I’m not going to share it with you here, because she said she would haunt me, but it involves prime numbers of parts of vanilla, lemon, almond, and blood orange extracts, plus Grand Marnier and a couple of other secret ingredients. It’s definitely the best I’ve tried. The bottle on the left is the ustrénins from my own kitchen; I just refilled it! (And that’s what Valthungian cursive looks like, but that’s for another day…)

Lexember Day 15 - bear

Remember, remember, the Ides of Lexember! We’re halfway there, folks! 

I didn’t have room today to include the full etymology, so that’s your blog bonus today.

Wauðuskīča is made up of the word wauðus ‘forest’ (← MV wawðus ← OV vavdyus ← Grt. *walþus ← PGmc *walþuz) and the verb skītna ‘to shit’ (← MV scîtɴ ← OV *skijtan ← Grt. *skītan ← PGmc *skeitaną) with weak agentive ending ‑ia (← MV ‑ja ← OV ‑ja ← Grt. ‑ja ← PGmc ‑jô), which causes palatalization of the final consonant of the verb (ergo, skītia → skīča).

Lexember Day 14 - anthropology

As indicated on the slide, Valthungian has two suffixes that readily translate to ‘-ology’, but that translation can be more complicated in reverse. 

-wīsi is a field of study or an area of knowledge, e.g. lēkiwīsi ‘medicine, physiology’

-wite is a practice or profession, e.g. lēkiwite ‘medicine, medical practice’ – particularly a specialized medical practice like cardiology or neurology.

And wīte is unrelated to both of the above. It means ‘punishment’, so don’t try to substitute it in if you can’t remember which ‑ology you need! (Lēkiwīte isn’t a word, because we live in a civilised – usmētina – society!) 

So, keep your wits about you. Ahem. 

Some other examples:

• lēkiwīsi ‘study of medicine’
• lēkiwite ‘practice of (specialized) medicine’
• kwižiwīsi ‘biology’
• reðawīsi ‘geology’
• sinigawīsi ‘archaeology’
• tunglawīsi ‘astronomy’
• ǧužawīsi ‘zoology’
• hǣliwīsi ‘medicine, healing’
• hǣliwite ‘medical practice, naturopathy’
• līkawīsi ‘physics’
• rastawīsi ‘linguistics’
• stōmawīsi ‘chemistry’
• tungawīsi ‘grammar’
• forgāftiwīsi ‘history’
• wrotiwīsi ‘botany’
• rīkiwite ‘poitics’
• brǭstawite ‘beer-brewing’
• wiðrawīsi ‘meteorology, study of weather’
• wiðrawite ‘meteorology, weather forecasting’

Lexember Day 13 - thirteen times

Today, in honour of the 13ᵗʰ day of Lexember, I bring you an old word with a new twist. 

The word is missing from the Gothic corpus, but there is sufficient evidence to believe it was either *þritaihun or *þrijataihun, the equivalents of which were likely both present in Griutungi as *þritehun and *þrijatehun. But Gothic also had an alphabetic number system, inspired by the Greek, and in this system, the numeral 13 was rendered as ·ig· and this system continued to be used throughout Old Valthungian. In Middle Valthungian, likely starting jocularly, certain numerals which formed pronounceable words began to be “spoken” in place of their linguistic equivalents, and ig was one of them. 

Word games also developed with some of the numbers, and we also see the reverse process happening, resulting in words like fiðrahunda þrižatǣn – literally ‘four hundred thirteen’ – coming to be a slang term for ‘road, highway’, as 413 in Gothic numerals is ·wig·, which is also the accusative of wiǧ ‘road’.

For a while in Middle Valthungian, three words for ‘13’ existed in somewhat free variation: þrizjatæn being the most “correct,” þrîtæn the most common, and ig the most informal. In the transition to Early Modern Valthungian, however,  a metrical change took place in the language and caused many words with two adjacent stressed syllables to get an epenthetic vowel. Indeed, this led to the brief existence of “þrîatæn,” but it quickly fell out of use leaving only the formal þrižatǣn and the informal ig. It wasn’t long before someone smushed the two together, and þrigatǣn eventually became the most popular of the three options. (The other two are still in use, but þrigatǣn is vastly preferred.)

In case that all sounds like a lot to swallow, note that something very similar also happened to nineteen, where the very awkward-sounding njuntǣn or njunatǣn and iþ merged to give us niðatǣn; in this case, however, njunatǣn has fallen out of use completely.

The final element of this story is the suffix ‑þis, which from a distance looks like a simple ordinal or genitive, but is no such thing at all. It is derived from the Griutungi *þīhs (Gothic þeihs), which also exists as the independent word þīfs ‘time, occurrence’, which supplanted earlier *sinþam ‘times’ among the adverbialized numbers.

Anyway, Happy Friday the 13ᵗʰ of Lexember!

Lexember Day 12 - tower

I’m very tired. Practically unconscious already. I don’t even know how I’m still typing. If you clicked on the link from today’s Lexember to see what nuggets of interesting etymology I put on the blog that I didn’t have room to include on the slide, I’m afraid you’ve wasted a click. Sorry about that.

Lexember Day 11 - stovetop

 There's not a whole lot to say about this one. Just a word I invented and liked. 

Lexember Day 10 - imperfect

Imperfect… as evidenced by my spacing and formatting today. I tried to update my template to be suitable for adjectives. It is not.

Edit: This is not the name of the grammatical construct sometimes called “imperfect” in various languages. That particular tense (which doesn’t exist in Valthungian) is called the forgāft fortrampa – something like the “past continuative.”

Lexember Day 09 - spice rack

Sometimes, despite our best efforts, a perfectly cromulent word with a perfectly valid derivation just comes out sounding silly, and this is one of them.

In other news about this word (and some related terms), I may have accidentally implied that East Germanic may have conflated the verbs sūpaną ‘to slurp’ and sūpōną ‘to soak’, which they surely did not, but the Valthungians definitely did. Oops. I’m not mad about it – these are the sort of happy conlanging accidents that I revel in, especially if they’re plausible, which I think this one is (as long as I can establish that it happened after Middle Valthungian when *sûpon would have still had the vowel of the Class 2 weak verbs).

Finally, in Lexember news, what are your thoughts about the new etymology table? I wanted to make it a little less “texty,” but I’m not sure how I like this format. Does it make sense?

PS – another total accident, but bingo for ‘rub’ (from bingun) is my favourite new accidental Valthungian word, and mimžabingo ‘meat-rub’ just brings me some kind of strange joy.

Lexember Day 08 - weeping willow

In case you’re wondering, yes, I did translate the whole song, but there are still a few awkward phrasings in there that I’d like to work through before I try to sing Valthungian country music at anyone.