Vocabruary 04 - nesombu - archipelago

There are a number of “grouping” affixes in Europic, which may or may not be mutually exclusive.

‑opr‑ most readily translates to ‘pair’, but it can also be used for small, set numbers of things that belong together. For example, vidopru ‘pair of eyes’ and mankopru ‘pair of hands’ seem straightforward enough, but vidopru can mean more than two eyes if the default number is higher, e.g. a spider’s vidopru is usually made up of eight individual vidu. Similarly, pristu ‘finger’ becomes pristopru, which isn’t two fingers, but the total sum of fingers on both hands. (This is a rare example where ‑opr‑ is a larger number than ‑evl‑, which is our next stop.)

‑evl‑ can usually be translated as a ‘set’ – it doesn’t represent a specific number, but the number is usually fixed and paucal. For example, as mentioned above, pristevlu is the set of fingers on one hand. Generally this means five, but sometimes the thumb is not counted for various contextual reasons, and not everyone has the same number even if they have a complete set.

-erd- is a ‘group’, usually low in number, but larger than ‑evl‑. This is the most common suffix for describing groups of animals, like polerdu ‘flock of chickens’, picerdu ‘school of fish’, or kaprerdu ‘herd of goats’. Europic absolutely does not indulge in the nonsense that English enjoys in naming groups of animals random ridiculous things. Unlike ‑evl‑, the number is not fixed, but the members of the group share some kind of cohesion to the unit and belong together. An orchestra is a djenterdu, for although it may have a fixed number, that number is a bit higher than what generally comprises a djentevlu.

‑omb‑ is a large group of non-specific number which may or may not be a cohesive unit. It may be translated as a ‘bunch’ or a ‘collection’. 

A good example to clarify all of these affixes is the word djentu ‘person’:

• A djentopru is a couple. Or maybe a triad. Probably not a polycule, though.
• A djentevlu is a team, often purposefully assembled for some purpose. A band is a djentevlu (specifically a muzorevlu), as is a committee or a sports team.
• A djenterdu is a group with some kind of common purpose or interest; perhaps a fandom, a gang of friends, the congregation of a church (cf. “flock”), or the attendees at a wedding.
• A djentombu is a crowd or multitude. It may contain any of the other groupings within it, but most of them probably don’t know each other, and they are assembled for a single purpose that unites them only temporarily. The audience of a play or the spectators at an event form a djentombu, as does a group of random bystanders and passers-by at a crime scene. To take it a step further, me-djentombu (a “together-crowd” – a large group of people who do have a specific common bond) is a ‘community’.

When a specific number of people must be specified, the structure changes. The usual way to construct this is to use the number itself with the suffix ‑ru ‘one, person’; for instance, duwa-ru is a pair or couple (synonymous with djentopru), triya-ru is a triad or threesome, tcera-ru is a quartet, and so on. The Académie Française of Ancient Earth was sometimes referred to in Europic as tcera-deka-ru ne-mortanta.

Anyway, here is today’s Vocabruary word: