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.)

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)’

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.