Tuesday, December 3, 2024

Lexember Day 03 - hemisphere

Today’s word isn’t new, but it’s been reconfigured because of that liquid shifting rule I mentioned: Heretofore it was **hreuvahlava, which was more annoying to say. Those sequential diphthongs are still a little awkward to say, but I’ll get over it.

Fun fact about this (and may three or four other words): hauva itself (‘half’) is a weak noun, but in compounds it is usually strong. I don’t know why this is, but the answer is most likely that I wasn’t paying attention somewhere, and now it’s permanent. (If it is my mistake, though, those are the sort of mistakes that I like to bake in to make the eyelids of future etymologists twitch.) (They know what they did.)



Monday, December 2, 2024

Lexember Day 02 - kiwi (fruit)

Since it looks like I’m going to do this, I spent some time last night futzing around with my formatting to try to make a nice (perfectly square) template for my Lexember entries this month. I’m not quite sure I’ve succeeded, and I have no idea what will happen if my word of the day is not a noun, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, have a kiwi!

kenināde n.st.n.ja ‘kiwi (fruit)’


Sunday, December 1, 2024

Is it Lexember again already?

 I woke up this morning to discover that Lexember has crept up on me once again. And once again, all of the old arguments of “it’s a bad time of year for this,” “I’m probably just going to run out of steam after a few weeks,” “…but the holidays…” “but I haven’t got a language in mind to work on…” Meh. No angst this year. I’ll join in and play along, and when it gets overwhelming, I’ll stop. I might skip a day here and there. No use working myself into knots about it.

After a great deal of thought – well, as great a deal as I’ve had time to think since the first #Lexember hashtag floated by on my screen this morning and I realized what month it is – I’ve decided to avoid working on Europic, because everyone is probably sick of seeing it, and I’ll be working on it throughout the month anyway without making it a part of Lexember. Gothic Romance isn’t any better off than it was 350 days ago. If I were smart, I’d work on Ox-Yew (Adzaay), because I’m going to need to get it beefed up soon so I can start using it to influence future Europic, but… I don’t wanna. 

I think instead I’m going to spend some quality time with Valthungian, which I’ve been ignoring for a while now. Before I got too wrapped up in Europic (and descendants), I had implemented a liquid  exflunctification rule in Old Valthungian that rejiggernated a lot of words containing L’s and R’s, but I never sat down and sorted them all out properly, so even though there are a lot of words that aren’t really “new,” they’ve definitely never been seen before in their current pokéform.

With that in mind, here’s new Valthungian word for Lexember Day 1, updated for new L rules…

šuvaþljúþ, n. vowel. 



Monday, April 1, 2024

What's in a Name? - Extended Remix

I often hear the question “How do you name your conlangs?” and I have answered parts of it in various fora, but I wanted to put together a comprehensive history here. The short answer is that there is no one source, and often I just don’t bother until I have been working on a project for a while. I’ll try to keep this chronological, so that in the future I will be able to edit it as I add more. It can also serve as a nice overview of my conlanging timeline.

1994: The first and second conlangs I created never got far enough to have names. But one should never talk about their first and second conlangs in polite company anyway. The first conlang I created—okay, the first six or eight words I scribbled down with the intention of creating a language from them—was entirely a priori, but I don’t remember anything about it other than that there was an animacy distinction, and na was the animate definite article. I had a brilliant idea about nouns, and I subsequently “invented” animacy; later I was gutted to learn that it already existed: My first and most devastating anadew! The second language still exists as snippets of terrible poetry, but most of the actual nouns, verbs, and adjectives seem to be made up randomly of French, German, Italian, and Russian, with some Hebrew, Greek, and Italian for good measure. The word ‘whatever’ was shto zhamei. I’m sure I thought that that was very clever.

1995: Dlatci /ˈdla.ʧi/. The name just came to me. I really enjoyed the unusual sound (for someone who only had experience with European languages at the time) of the initial consonant cluster. I can’t remember how I initially spelled the affricate – I don’t think it was ⟨tc⟩, but it’s been ⟨Dlatci⟩ for as long as I can remember now. Dlatci has undergone several revisions over the years, and the current one is “Dlatci v5.1.”

1999: Latinovesa. An early Romance auxlang we are not going to talk about. It was also briefly called “Latinova,” but I later decided to add the -esa ending, which indicates language names. This was still before I had ever heard of any conlangers aside from Tolkien, though I later discovered that there were at least a dozen other Romance auxlangs called “Latinova.”

2000: Northeadish /nɔrˈθi.dɪʃ/, (endonym Druðþþᵫ̄ðesc [dɾʊˈθyːðɛsk]). Initially my Germanic answer to Latinovesa, but I couldn’t compel it into being an auxlang, because I loved my ablauting strong verbs too much! Of course, I had no concept of auxlangs as compared to artlangs at the time; this was during an era when conlangers were just starting to discover each other on the internet and find out that they weren’t the only ones out there with this “secret vice,” and at that time, it was hard to conceive of creating a conlang for any purpose other than to be used in a fantasy novel or an auxiliary language. The original name was not Northeadish, and this was also years before it occurred to me that a decent language should have a proper exonym as well as an endonym: Initially it was called Tsœxisca [ˈʦœçɪskə]. I have no idea where that name came from, but I think it was just a series of sounds that I liked that I thought represented the language. (Almost none of those sounds still exist in the language now.) At some point, initial ts was no longer licit in the language, and since I was on an Old Norse kick at the time, I renamed it Norðiska [ˈnɔɾðɪskə]. Later I had the Brilliant Idea™ to call it Theadish/Þᵫ̄ðesc, from *þeudiskǭ (the same root that gave us Deutsch and Dutch). It wasn’t long before I discovered that there were at least half a dozen “Theadish” languages on the internet at the time (along with variants like Theedish, Thiedish, and Theidish). At this point I had renamed it so many times, I just decided to stick “north” back onto the beginning, and the Northeadish exonym was complete. The endonym, however, had a few more sound shifts to undergo, and Norþᵫ̄ðisc became Nurðþ-þᵫ̄ðesc and eventually Druðþþᵫ̄ðesc. And so it remains, though I haven’t worked on it since Valthungian took over the Germanic side of my conlanging. I think it counts as abandoned by now, though I’ve rolled a lot of what I love about it into Middle Valthungian.

2000: Maltcégj /malˈʧɛɡʒ/. I often tell people that “I literally pulled letters out of a hat,” and I’m not quite sure why I started saying that, because it’s not true. It was a legal-sized inter-departmental mailing envelope—you know the kind with holes and a red string that you can “seal” it with by winding it around two paper disks by the flap? I guess that just doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as easily. But once I had got the basics of the phonology sketched out, I wrote out all my phonemes on scraps of paper, threw them in the envelope, and then pulled out a handful and tried to arrange it in a way that was vaguely pronounceable. At the time I documented it, poorly, here. I’m pretty sure that’s originally where Maltcégj’s signature [ɡʒ] cluster came from. This was a period in my conlanging life when I didn’t really understand the concept of “less is more,” and I was under the impression that if you could pronounce a particular cluster or sequence, it wouldn’t be fair not to include it in the language. FF’s sake, the word for ‘fish’ is ðbrukc [ðbɾukʃ]. Anyway, the name hasn’t changed much over the years aside from a few minor orthographic variations: For a while [ɛ] was ɛ, and that made the mandatory stress-marking diacritics time-consuming to type on a regular basis. Also, [ʃ] went through a number of iterations including ж and even § before I finally reassigned /k/ to k and assigned /ʃ/ to the now-free c.

2001: Something called “Fricative Chant Project.” I dunno, man. It’s just a few pages of lists of syllables. Not a plosive in sight. I think this was the abandoned project that taught me that languages without stops end up feeling a bit “floppy.”

2002: Baraq /baˈɾaq/. For the record, this was a few years before I’d ever heard of Mr. Obama: no relation. I have no idea where the name came from, but I later created/imagined a language family called Baraqesh, of which Maltcégj and Dlatci were also a part. There were so many vowels, and so many declensions. It was really ridiculous.

2002: Bálabhádh /baːlaˈvaːð/. My first collablang, with the incomparable Zeke Fordsmender and William Annis. This was an adorable little language, and I’m still quite fond of the orthography we came up with for it. As with most collablangs, we all got distracted and sort of wandered away before very long, though I like to say it collapsed under the weight of its own pronouns: We had had the idea that there should be a complete array of pronouns to describe every gender and sexuality on the spectrum, and this was still back when there were really only four letters. I think we made it up to something like 21 first-person pronouns before it caved in. (These days I lean towards completely non-gendered pronouns. It makes life a lot simpler: I recommend it.)

2002: Bruga (/ˈbruɡa/, I guess). Aside from the name, a short phonology, a list of all possible syllables, and a handwritten present tense conjugation scrawled in a notebook, nothing ever really came of this one. In fact, I didn’t even remember that it existed until I found it while compiling this list.

2003: ɮaxu /ˈɮa.xu/. An early stab at a philosophengelang. 49 cases. 63 screeves. No idea where the name came from. I don’t even want to talk about it. It was a lot.

2004: Iatu Nukta Amat /ˈijatu ˈnukta aˈmat’/. I never did much with this conlang, but the name was shouted at me by some demonic force in a nightmare. This was later conflated with something I called the “4x4 weekend challenge,” in which I had 44 hours to create a minilang using 16 phonemes (4 stops, 4 fricatives, 4 sonorants, 4 vowels). That itself was an extension of an earlier 3x3 challenge, which never had a name and is probably lost to history, though some of the “3-based” elements later found a home in Ox-Yew.

2010: Valthungian /valˈθʊn.ʤi.ən/, (endonym Grējutungiška [ɡrai̮juˈtuŋɡiɕka] or So Grējuga Tunga [so̞ ˈɡrai̯juɡa ˈtuŋɡa]). This started out as Gutish/Gytiska, which was horrible from the start, but the logical diachronic development of Gutiskō ‘Gothic’. There’s a whole story about when and why I changed it in 2018, here: The Grey Tongue. Tl;dr, the important take-away here is that the exonym is an English mispronunciation of a Latinate mispronunciation of the name of the wrong tribe of Ostrogoths (the Walthungi, cf. Tervingi), and the endonym is a Valthungian rebracketing of a different tribe, Greut-ungōs (“the Gravel-people,” perhaps referring to the rocky shores of the Black Sea) as Grēw-tungōs (“Grey-Tongues”). I’ve been toying with the idea of changing it again, slightly, to “Valthingian” or “Valthengian,” for reasons I won’t go into, but I think it’s probably permanent now. In addition to Valthungian/Grējutingiška, there are also historic forms – Old and Middle Valthungian (nothing too interesting there, name-wise), and Griutungi/Griutuggō (basically a dialect of Gothic which is how Greutungi would have been rendered in Gothic).

2014: Brooding /ˈbrudɪŋ/ (endonym: Brooding [ˈbru.dɪŋ] ‘Related to the Brood/Family’ or Baus Broodingee [baʊ̯s ˈbru.dɪ.ŋi] ‘Language of that which is Related to the Brood/Family’) This is the first conlang I worked on that I wasn’t directly involved in naming, and the first “professional” conlang I worked on. I didn’t create Brooding – I was originally created in 2012 by V. Hamilton for the Riddlesbrood Touring Theatre Company, and I “adopted” it and have been expanding it ever since. The origin, though, is interesting and worth mentioning here: I’m not sure where the name “Riddlesbrood” came from – I believe it was just imagined by the troupe’s director, Ryan Long (a.k.a. Clyde Riddlesbrood), but the name and logo were both elements that Vee took into account while creating the language, and ‘Riddlesbrood’ riduhlzbrood ended up meaning something akin to “family of mystery,” from riduhz ‘mystery’ + -l- (possessive) + brood ‘family, troupe, tribe, social unit’. The language itself was named for Brood ‘family’ + -ing ‘relation/association’, or Baus ‘language’ + Brood ‘family’ + -ing ‘relation/association’ + -ee (adjectivizer).

2014: Nurbia Nacura. This was a very short-lived project that still makes me a little anxious to talk about. It was never really a proper conlang or even an attempt at one, but rather a sort of cipher I created to convert Latin or Latin-sounding words into something unrecognizable that still had the same general phonaesthetics of a generic Romance language. The name “Nurbia Nacura” is literally just Lingua Latina run through that cipher. I hadn’t got far beyond just setting up the formula, though, when I posted a little blurb about it on social media, and some jerk immediately commented, “Wow, so cool. I’m going to use this!” and proceeded to rip off the idea wholesale. I wouldn’t even have minded if they wanted to do something similar, but they literally took the entire formula, ran a Latin word-list through it, and then started posting about “their” new conlang. It made me feel kind of gross and violated. You know that meme about English chasing other languages into dark alleys and beating them up for their grammar? Yeah, I was lingui-mugged.

2018: Grayis /ˈɡreɪ̯.əs/ (endonym: Grayis [ɡrä.jɪs]). Another name I didn’t create, directly, but it’s an interesting story. I had posted something on social media about Valthungian (a.k.a. “The Grey Tongue,” as described above) and I was subsequently contacted by a game designer who noticed the post because the name was similar to one of six alien races he had created, the Grayis Kin; he needed a language for them, and subsequently hired me to create it. The game, Pilots of Gallaxia, was eventually released in 2020, and as far as I can tell, had no trace of the language in it, but in case you play it, just know that they do have a language out there!

2019: Ox-Yew (endonym: Adzaay [adɮaːtɬ’]). When I initially created the language, I used all of the Latin letters except for E, O, W, X, and Y, so I put them together and made up a crazy back-story about the Ox-Yew people, or the People of Cows and Trees.

2019: Veonic /veɪ̯ˈjɑ.nɪk/ (endonym: Veionasi (Uthral) [ve.joˈna.si (uˈθral)]). Another professional conlang; not really allowed to say much about it other than “Veonic” was the author’s working name for it and the Veiona-si of the endonym is the genitive of the same. Uthral just means ‘language’.

2019: Iskan /ˈɪskən/ (endonym: Iskān (Shaskua) [is.kaːn (ˈʃas.kua̯)]) Another professional conlang, for author Gavin Hamilton. A nice little Greek-meets-Hebrew-flavoured language I created for an upcoming novel. The author had already created a number of names in the language; Iskā is the name of the ancient homeland of the protagonist culture; Iskān is the genitive thereof. Shaskua means ‘language’. It readily ported over into English as “Iskan.”

2020: Zjenavi (endonym, Zjenav [ʒeˈnav]) Another professional conlang, for author Luca-Fabio Di Franco. The author had already created a number of names in the language, and there was a lot of dithering about the exact name of the language itself, and I’m not sure the dithering is done; as far as I know, the name is currently fixed at Zjenav (it was formerly Zjenaviv), with Zjenav-i as its exonym. It is the language of the Rahavahi people.

2020: Modern Standard Imperial (endonym: Drikva Yakke [ˈdɾi.kva ˈjak.ʃe]) The first of seven languages I’ve created (or am still in the process of creating) for graphic novelist Anthony Gutierrez. Many of the names of his languages have exonyms already as they are translated into the graphic novel The Lost Children; the endonyms have been a little trickier to come up with, but Imperial (or, officially Modern Standard Imperial) was easy: drikva ‘language’ and yakke ‘of the Empire’. It is also known colloquially as mekra lekron ‘the common tongue’, because every evil empire needs to have a Common Tongue that the Common People speak! (NB: The writing system is called kuggi yakke ‘Script of the Empire’. One does not say exactly “I speak Modern Standard Imperial,” but rather kvepa yakke gvida meu: “I say the words of the Empire.”)

2020: Lezyalu (Okau) [ˈleʒalu (oˈkaw)] A language I created for author and musician Ty Sheetz. It doesn’t really have an exonym. There’s not much I’m able to say about it yet except that the full name means ‘Language of the Holy Ones’, and it’s very cool and I’m very happy with how it turned out and I can’t wait to be able to tell folks about it when the book comes out!

2021: Gothic Romance (and periphery) (endonym: Gotica Romana) Officially, the backstory here is that Valthungian was originally slated to be “What if the Goths who sacked Rome in 410ᴀᴅ just kept speaking Gothic and it continued to evolve within the Romance Sprachbund,” but it ended up going in a very different direction, and Gothic Romance was my attempt to complete that original goal. But mostly it was born of puns. Not only do I have an immediate audience of every member of the Dark and Spooky Nation who would want to learn it (especially because it really does sound kind of dark and spooky in a lovely way), but its direct ancestor on the Germanic side is called Bad Romance, and Romance Novelle on the Italic side. I’ll show myself out, but there’s some background here. I continue to fool around with this language every few months, and it’s far from ready for primetime (as you can see from this past Lexember), but one day soon it will be a deliciously dark and sumptuous language.

2021: Northern ~ Alder’mane /ˈɑldərˌmeɪ̯n/ (endonym: Alderxmanuvgöm [al.der..ˈman.uvˌɡɤm] ‘Language of the Cradle’ ~ Dhënuvgöm [ˈðøn.uvˌɡɤm] ‘Language of the North’) This is the second of seven languages created for Anthony Gutierrez’ graphic novel The Lost Children. The name came pre-baked; I just added the -uvgöm ‘language of’ suffix.

2021: Nymeran /ˈnɪ.mə.rən/, (endonym Tlíl Nime [tlil ˈnɪmɛ] “Language of Nym” or Ní Tlíl [ni tlil] “Our Language”). I didn’t originally create this language or choose the name. The language was created by Niamh Doyle in 2015, and I believe the exonym existed even before that, created by Ray Chou and Vince Ferreiro, founders of MythWorks (formerly Mythopoeia) and creators of the comic Glow, taking place in the land of Nym where Nymeran is spoken. I’ve heard it called both / ˈnɪmərən/ and /naɪˈmiri.ən/, so do with that information what you will.

2021: Arbulian /ɑrˈbu.li.ən/ (endonym: Seprotu Baet [sɛˈpro.tu bäˈɛt] ‘our way of speaking’) The third language created for The Lost Children. The endonym is a little half-assed, I’ll admit; the exonym refers to the shadow realm of Arbul, where the deities who speak the language dwell in exile.

2021: Ashian (endonym: Kéðryňa [ˌkeːðˈrʏ.ɲa] ‘Language of the Kaede’) The fourth language created for The Lost Children: The Exonym was created by the author. The endonym is a little more roundabout: The author required that the name of the Ashian people contain certain sounds and be derived from a particular sequence of letters that had historical importance. That name ended up being Kéðaš, which, paired with the word for language, ʀýňa, gave the endonym Kéðryňa.

2022: Hakdor /ˈhæk.dor/ (endonym: Iuqilol (Taqetis) [juˈʤilol (taˈʤedis)] ‘The Language (of the Hakdor)’) The fifth language for The Lost Children, this language was a lot of fun to construct. The Hakdor are a genetically modified race of humanoids who do not think in quite the same abstract and symbolic terms that humans do. They are very literal and procedural, and that comes through in the language. The exonym was provided by the author; the endonym just means “the language” – itself a compound meaning “word-collection” – though it can be modified with Taqetis ‘of the Hakdor’ if further specification is necessary. The word Taqet ‘Hakdor’ had a particular meaning – maybe something that the Hakdor were called by the Alder’mane? I can’t remember – but I forgot to write it down and now it is lost forever.

2022: Braereth /ˈbraɪ̯.ərˌeθ/ (endonym: idem [ˈbrae̯.re̞θ]) I was approached by author CJ Kavanaugh to create a dialect or creole of French for The Chronicles of Braereth, a novel series she was writing, and after some initial discussions, we concluded that a dialect wasn’t quite right, and instead we would need a separate branch of Romance languages that should still be more or less intelligible to other Romance speakers, but didn’t “belong” to any particular area. She came up with the name Braereth (and I fiddled around with the spelling a bit). It is also the name of the Shadowland where it is spoken by a range of fairy-tale creatures. I created a Classical (extinct) dialect and a modern “official” dialect. We later added three additional dialects, which are not quite mutually intelligible: Tenibvreth /ˈtɛnɪvrɛθ/ (endonym: idem [teˈnivreθ] ‘Language of Darkness (Tenebres)’) spoken by Vampires, Eomentesa /eɪ̯(j)oʊ.mɛnˈtɛ.sə/ (endonym: idem [e̞.u.me̞nˈte̞.sa) ‘Elemental Langauge’) spoken by witches, and Merineth /ˈme.rə.nɛθ/ (endonym: idem [ma.riˈnit’] ‘Language of the Sea’) spoken by Mer-folk and Shapeshifters. The latter has some pretty dramatic sound changes that make it particularly unintelligible with the usual Romance crowd, but make it much easier to distinguish the sounds under water.

2022: Western (endonym: Nƛeňǰax [dɮeɲˈʥax]) The sixth language for The Lost Children. This one really took it out of me! I don’t think the name means anything specific – at least, if it does, I don’t remember and I didn’t write anything in the notes about it. Nƛe ňǰa means ‘the mysteriously unknowable red one’, so I’m pretty sure that’s not where it came from. I’m almost positive I just ginned up a word and declared it a name.

2022: Chardane. The seventh (and final… so far?) language for The Lost Children, spoken by a sort of sentient pack-animal with independently movable eye-stalks. This one is still under construction and currently paused while I finish other projects, so no endonym yet. The name Chardane was provided by the author.

2023: “Pulselang” – a sketch of a language created for B.A. Bellec’s 2023 Novel Pulse: Book Two, for which I will come up with a proper name if it becomes appropriate later on. I’m credited in the book with creating an “Alien Language,” but it’s really not from an alien source, which won’t be revealed until book 3: Stay tuned!

2023: Europic ~ Eulingo ~ Fauxperanto (endonym: Yuropicu [ju.roˈpi.ʃu] ‘Europese’) This is ostensibly a proto-language for a series of languages spoken about two millennia from the present. It is very Euro-centric, by design, but not quite as transparently as Esperanto (though it went by the code-name “Faux-speranto” for a while before I had really hammered out a lot of the details). I’m keeping this one pretty tightly under my hat until things get worked out a little more fully, because frankly, people are horrible, and the internet is dark and full of terrors. There’s a short-term descendant / variety / dialect of it (intended to be) about 250 years after the original language that I’m calling, variously, “Vulgar European” or “Late Western Europic” which has an endonym of Iropicu [i.roˈpi.ʃu], but I don’t think that quite counts as a separate language yet.

2024: Rupesh ~ Proto-Human (endonym: Ropich [roˈpiç]) This is a direct descendant of Europic / Yuropicu / Iropicu, above. While it is probably gauche to call something a “proto” language that has a documented direct ancestor, this refers to the in-world detail that this was the language spoken by a group of humans who left the Earth in the 26th century, so it is the first and only Terran language on the new planet. (Update: The time-line on this language is still shifting a little, and “Proto-Human” might actually end up being something more like Iropicu. There’s also a descendant of Rupesh going under the code name “Arxippian” (i.e. what they speak on the arc-ship), but that name is definitely not going to stick, so I hesitate to mention much about it until it “congeals” a little more… stay tuned!)

Wow, did you really just read all of that? Thanks, but why?

Friday, December 15, 2023

Lexember, Day 15: lencura

I have a lot of diachronic rearranging to do. 

I’ll try to remember to blog about it if I come up with anything particularly interesting. 

Happy Holidays & Happy New Year!



Wednesday, December 13, 2023

Lexember, Day 13: ôtri

I’m having a bit of an existential crisis about the language today, rethinking a lot about how to tetris together the many 3D diachronic puzzle pieces that make up the language. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to unravel it all today, or in the foreseeable future, so in case you notice some inconsistencies, that’s probably why. 

Really, next year, any other month is probably better for this!

Anyway, in the meantime here’s a recycled word I created a few years ago that still holds up to scrutiny, and has some interesting stuff going on:


Lexember, Day 12: istêna, pethru

Today’s words are an example of something that happens quite often in mixed language and languages with strong influence from another: synonyms of the same word from different families. Usually over time such words take on narrower meanings as they attempt to “share” semantic space. 

In this case, while both have a base definition of ‘stone’, istêna often has a further connotation of a decorative or precious stone or mineral, while pethru is generally more of a common rock or stone on the ground or perhaps used for building; a bit like stone (a direct cognate of istêna) and rock, an early borrowing from Medieval Latin rocca, from an uncertain source (possibly from a Celtic or non-Indo-European language).



Monday, December 11, 2023

Lexember, Day 11: frêiu

This is a weird little word that trickled down from Germanic. It means ‘world’, but in an abstract sense not tied to the planet – the Earth itself is called Ṫerra. Frêiu is more like “the range of human experience.” Originally frêius carried only the meaning of ‘world’; it took on the secondary meaning of ‘people’ in the same way that French monde took on the same connotation, probably from an earlier tout le monde ‘everyone’ (compare: le monde entier ‘the whole world’). 

Interesting side-note: The Proto-Germanic word, *ferhwuz, also meant ‘oak tree’, and is related to the Latin quercus with the same meaning, hence the taxonomic genus.



Sunday, December 10, 2023

Lexember, Day 10: nôs, vôs

The plural pronouns in Gothic Romance are a busy set. In addition to the first person plurals, nôs (exclusive) and vôs (inclusive), there is also the second person plural iôs

Etymologically, nôs comes to us directly from Latin nōs via Romance Novelle and Bad Romance nos. Not many places to hide there! And iôs is only slightly less direct from Proto-Germanic *jūz via Griutungi *jūs, Old Valthungian iuvs, and Italian Gothic yous. Vôs, on the other hand, is a little trickier. It comes from Germanic *wīz via Griutungi *wīs and Old Valthungian vijs. With Italian Gothic and Bad Romance co-existing in close proximity, Bad Romance vos ‘you’ was quickly replaced by the Germanic form to avoid confusion, but the influence of the Romance pronouns caused the change in vowels to vôs from where we would normally expect **vês.

Each of these three plurals also has a dual variant: ioth ‘you two’ from Italian Gothic yoth, from Old Valthungian jut, unchanged from Proto-Germanic *jut; veth ‘you and I, we two’ from IG veth, from Old Valthungian vit, Griutungi *wit, and Proto-Germanic *wet. Finally there is neth, a dual pronoun innovated from the exclusive nôs, ‘the two of us’ – mostly only useful for couples referring to their significant others.

There are also oblique forms, such as second person dative plural iżus, or first person inclusive dative dual venqua, but those are for another day.

Lexember, Day 09: comprao

The l in the infinitive ending in Bad Romance and the resultant o in Gothic Romance are from a dissimilation rule that kicks in after Romance Novelle, in which two r’s cannot coexist in adjacent syllables, so ostensibly all verbs with r in the final stem syllable have infinitives in -ao where we would normally find -ra. Meanwhile the final o is from another Bad Romance era rule that turns pre-consonantal and word-final /l/ into /u/.



Friday, December 8, 2023

Lexember, Day 08: combreċa

Bear with me, I’m trying out something with the orthography. I have this whole palatal series, and I don’t really like digraphs, but I also don’t really like putting diacritics over consonants.

Or, I should say, in this context – I’ve said stuff like that before, and someone always comes up with some kind of “…but you use ǧ ž č š in Valthungian!” or “…what about all the wild digraphs in Modern Standard Imperial?” but not every feature is going to “taste” the same in every language. Think of it like this: Features like diacritics and special characters and deep orthographies – and, for that matter, palatals and pharyngeals and approximants, and anti-causatives and impersonal voice and iterative aspect – are all just individual spices in your conlanging cupboard. You can’t use them all in every recipe. I have recipes where I use offensive amounts of nutmeg, and I have conlangs that have an uncomfortable number of diacritics sprinkled on them. But 2tbsp of nutmeg doesn’t belong in most recipes, and diacritics on more than half of the graphemes don’t belong in most conlangs – and in the case of Gothic Romance, I’m a little diacritic-shy. 

(Is it a run-on sentence if there are four other complete sentences and a secondary parenthetical enclosed in a parenthetical?) 

Anyway, I’m trying out the dot-above-as-palatal thing for a minute, because I don’t like the taste of the cedilla option, and all of the digraph possibilities I can think of feel a little flat to me.



Thursday, December 7, 2023

Lexember, Day 07: iê, ieth, que

There are two important things to take away from today’s Lexember words. 

The first is the distinction between and ieth, which is etymologically vast, but for practical purposes is the same as the distinction between a and an in English, or knowing when to use le or l’ – or any other kind of liaison – in French. There are a lot of these sorts of words with alternate pre-vocalic forms, though this is the only one (so far) in which the two forms come from completely different sources.

The second important takeaway is that of the clausal versus phrasal conjunction. These are not interchangeable: and ieth must always be accompanied by a verb and join two clauses, while que connects two words in the same clause (usually nouns). It can help to think of and ieth as equivalent to “and then” while que is closer to “and also.”



Wednesday, December 6, 2023

Lexember, Day 06: cronu

I set out today to showcase and discuss a small but bigger-than-you’d-think class of words in Gothic Romance that can be traced back equally to Latin and Gothic. That is, their forms are similar enough and a few sound changes align in the right way that the resulting word would be the same ragardless of which branch it came from. This is compounded by the “word game” culture of the speakers of Bad Romance and Italian Gothic (which, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, were spoken in tandem by mostly bilingual speakers in a small city in northern Italy from the 12th to the 17th century), where jocular swapping of the occasional vowel often gave rise to permanent hybrid forms (cf. voqua ‘water’). 

In addition to cronu, a few others are veru ‘man’ (cf. Latin vir, Gothic waír, both from PIE *wiHrós), ezja ‘her’ (cf. Latin ea, Gothic ija), dreombra ‘to dream’ (cf. Latin dormīre ‘to sleep’, Gothic dráumjan ‘to dream’), and lôgura (cf. Latin lavāre ‘to wash’, Gothic lauga ‘laundry’).

However, before I got through making the above panel for cronu, I went for a trip down the proverbial rabbit-hole, trying to figure out the best way to derive a deadjectival (adverbial) suffix (‘‑ly’). Romance languages pretty universally use the suffix ‑mente from Latin mēns ‘mind’, and while it has an interesting semantic history, it wasn’t where I wanted to go with Gothic Romance. Germanic languages are a little less uniform, but a plurality of them use some derivation of ‑līk, from ProtoGermanic līką ‘body’. Now, a reasonable person would just look for a good derivation of a word that means ‘way, manner’, and for a moment I almost used ‑mo, cf. modus, quomodo, &c. But at the last minute, it occurred to me that another merger was at hand: mēns ‘mind’, līką ‘body’ – the obvious bridge to that gap is ‘heart’. 

The word ‘heart’ itself is another mixed word, croth (cf. Latin cor, with a stem-final d that gets lost in the nominative, and Gothic haírtō), but I wanted it to remain a little bit removed from the sound shifts applying to the full word, so after some fiddling around I settled on ‑cre from an earlier ‑core.

Then there’s the use of the genitive where in Romance languages we might find the “partative de,” which I’ve been noodling around with, but haven’t used in practice yet. This brought up the issue of the declension itself. I don’t want Gothic Romance to go too heavy on the inflections, but I thought it would at least be funny to steal back the genitive plural suffix from Old Valthungian which stole it from Latin to begin with. Latin ‑ārum and ‑ōrum became  Old Valthungian ‑aaru and ‑ouru,  giving way to Italian Gothic ‑aro and eventually Gothic Romance ‑ro. So **cron‑ro, but n and r are mortal enemies in Gothic Romance, and a persistent rule instantly separates them with a buffer d, which is how we end up with crondro for ‘of the horns’.

If that’s not enough excitement for one day, there’s also the unusual choice of Latin solitus  for the base of ‘usual’, which, with an unstressed vowel deletion, becomes soltus, which is when I decided to make good on my ruminating over causing a shift of VlC → VuC. An intermediate **soutu in Early Gothic Romance easily gave way to sûtu, plus our new ‑cre ending and we have a nice word for ‘usually’ as well. 

And with that, I might still make it in by midnight!