How are the Xurnese dialect names written?

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Thomas Winwood
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How are the Xurnese dialect names written?

Post by Thomas Winwood »

Inegri is given as Wei-nex-ri so I wondered what the other dialects were written as. I've managed tentative guesses for all but two.

Easy ones first:
Xazengri - *Xa-zen-ri
Bolongri - *Bo-lon-ri
Corauši - *Tu-ral-šin; the only one to use -šin rather than -ri - is there a variant *Coralauri or similar to emphasise the peculiarities of Coralaur speech rather than the standard language, or is the standard still close enough that there's no meaningful distinction?
Evangri - *E-van-ri; not from Lake Van, but from the name of the god associated with it; the two are understandably somewhat difficult to untangle.
Jimbri - *Jil-me-ri
Idestri - *Ye-de-veiz-ri; that's one hell of a phonetic reduction.

These I'm not completely sure of:
Rajjari - *Ran-ja-vi-ri or *Ran-ja-ri depending on whether the word has been regularised in modern Xurnese.
Lejur - *Lij-u-ri; I couldn't find an Axunašin etymon, which doesn't help, as the antecessor is probably more vowelly to explain the intrusive -u- silly me, the morpheme is the adjectivizer -uri. The loss of final -i is odd. unless it's a feature of Lejur dialect not mentioned on the Xurnese page.

And the two I can't do:
Momori - couldn't find an Ax. etymon, no Almeopedia page for Momor.
Čimagri - clearly from Čimaq + -ri, but again, no Ax. etymon or Almeopedia page.

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Re: How are the Xurnese dialect names written?

Post by zompist »

Momor is Wede:i Mo:mor 'young town'.

I'm not sure where Čimagri came from! It's possible it's just an error, but I'll have to retcon it. I'd assume the first syllable is the same as in Čiqay (the river and state).

As for Lejur, that's actually regular; compare neyvaur 'ninth' < neburi. This is complicated by the fact that -ri has been reborrowed from Axunašin as a suffix.

I should really work out which are the ~770 glyphs used for full words, as some of them would surely appear in place names.

This makes me want to work on Xurnese orthography, which must be an unholy mess. Note that the system can't directly recover Axunašin spellings if a merger has been consistent. E.g. Corauši is really cu-ral-ši, as seen at the top of the grammar.

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Thomas Winwood
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Re: How are the Xurnese dialect names written?

Post by Thomas Winwood »

zompist wrote:I'm not sure where Čimagri came from! It's possible it's just an error, but I'll have to retcon it. I'd assume the first syllable is the same as in Čiqay (the river and state).
The reason I assumed it's from Čimaq is because it's listed in the lexicon under the entry for the word čikeri. Seems like you may have confused two different pages of notes or something?
zompist wrote:As for Lejur, that's actually regular; compare neyvaur 'ninth' < neburi. This is complicated by the fact that -ri has been reborrowed from Axunašin as a suffix.
Ah, okay. I don't feel so stupid now.
zompist wrote:This makes me want to work on Xurnese orthography, which must be an unholy mess. Note that the system can't directly recover Axunašin spellings if a merger has been consistent.
So it's akin to English spelling - representative of the speech of a few centuries ago, but somewhat inconsistently regularised?

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Re: How are the Xurnese dialect names written?

Post by BGMan »

Thomas Winwood wrote:So it's akin to English spelling - representative of the speech of a few centuries ago, but somewhat inconsistently regularised?
I'm thinking more along the lines of Japanese writing.

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