Vocabruary 08‒11 – strange and remarkable annoyances

Sorry for not keeping up with Vocabruary the last few days – there’s a lot going on. Mostly good stuff (inventing a new conlang, getting some paid consulting work), but also some less fun things (yes, I used fun as an adjective. I won’t put up with that insufferable prescriptivist nonsense anymore), like my washing machine exploding and then falling on my arse in the snow… twice. But I guess it’s nice that we’re finally getting a proper winter in Nova Scotia.

For the first two words, I thought it was important to have a distinction between ‘strange: unusual’ and ‘strange: weird’. Katri-la is also a Classical calque which bumps up against a few other terms almost problematically enough to give it a miss, but that’s where the fun part of language grows: In addition to ‘strange’, katri-la is also a direct calque for ‘extraneous’, and its non-calque form means ‘outward-moving’.

Skervatu is a useful little word that is actually kind of a lacuna in English. In Europic, the suffix ‑atu is always a countable noun, while ‑acu is an abstraction, so skervatu translates ‘bother’ or ‘annoyance’ in the sense of a specific noun – “the result or product of annoying” – while skervacu translates the same words in the sense of a deverbal noun – “the act of annoying.”

There is nothing remarkable about the last slide, but it should be noted that a direct homograph, remarkable, could actually have two separate meanings: re-mark-abl-e ‘to be remarkable’ compared to re-marka-ble ‘to become noticeable again’. I hyphenate here for emphasis of the constituent parts, but the proper hyphenation would be re-markable versus re-marka-ble, respectively. This is why hyphens are important!

By the way, on a totally separate note,  I’ve made some revisions to the diachronic sequences leading from Iropich to Rupesh, and it’s getting… fihk. Hopefully in a good way that will line up better with Ox-Yew, with which is will be interacting heavily during the next phase of this language’s evolution. (Fihk also means ‘strange’ in Ox-Yew, but while it’s [fiçk] in Rupesh, in Ox-Yew it is pronounced [ʃiχˑ].)