Lexicon Building

[din]

I didn't reply, because I didn't have anything interesting, but it's been several weeks, so here you go...

Tormiott:
sihua ˈsiɕwa (n) horn (animal, acoustics)

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next: nobleman (or any type of high rank within your con-society)

[GamerGeek]

nobleman = risam

next: alien

[Soap]

nobleman = risam

next: alien

The Poswobs know that they live on a planet and that there are other planets in the universe. They also believe that at least some of the other planets are inhabited, including their sun, which they consider to be just another planet, albeit a very important one.

I refer to the supposed inhabitants of the sun as angels in English, and taba in Poswa and Pabappa. Like the angels of Christianity, I imagine them as somewhat like young boys, if only because the word was inherited from a stage of the language in which t- marked masculinity, and more importantly because the word itself merges with an unrelated inherited word meaning "boy", which survives only as a term of address. (Im aware that depicting angels as children is a modern phenomenon.)

It's unlikely that they would use a word like this for aliens in general. It would work well if the aliens were either 1) small and childlike, or 2) hard working people somewhat like robots, "thinking as one", like the inhabitants of the Sun are perceived to be. (After all, they keep the Sun coming, right?)

Nevertheless, taba would indeed be a word in both Poswa and Pabappa for an alien that fits these characteristics.

For the wider sense of a visitor from another planet in general, I'll have to start with the word for outer space.

Poswa:
Puvu means "dark sky", and the Poswobs are aware that when ascending high mountains, the sky appears dark even during daytime, and that therefore the sky must look like this all of the time from places even higher up than their mountaintops. Pupem means "across; on the other side of" and these two words can combine into
Puvompupem
"Alien; from across distant space".
This word has the advantage that it does not need to apply to living beings. A planet could equally well be described as puvompupem.

Pabappa:
samba purpapsam
"one who has completed the sky". I seem to have written this one in quite a while ago, when I didnt have as many words to play with. Nevertheless, I think in a way it might actually be better than the Poswa translation, if not as convenient, since it gives more information. The only odd thing is that the word for blood is one of the morphemes; it may have something to do with babies and/or friends, since it also appears in words for birth and friendship.

If the Pabappa word were translated into Poswa morpheme for morpheme, it would be samba bwuppam.

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next: to fry, to cook with oil

[GamerGeek]

nobleman = risam

next: alien

The Poswobs know that they live on a planet and that there are other planets in the universe. They also believe that at least some of the other planets are inhabited, including their sun, which they consider to be just another planet, albeit a very important one.

I refer to the supposed inhabitants of the sun as angels in English, and taba in Poswa and Pabappa. Like the angels of Christianity, I imagine them as somewhat like young boys, if only because the word was inherited from a stage of the language in which t- marked masculinity, and more importantly because the word itself merges with an unrelated inherited word meaning "boy", which survives only as a term of address. (Im aware that depicting angels as children is a modern phenomenon.)

It's unlikely that they would use a word like this for aliens in general. It would work well if the aliens were either 1) small and childlike, or 2) hard working people somewhat like robots, "thinking as one", like the inhabitants of the Sun are perceived to be. (After all, they keep the Sun coming, right?)

Nevertheless, taba would indeed be a word in both Poswa and Pabappa for an alien that fits these characteristics.

For the wider sense of a visitor from another planet in general, I'll have to start with the word for outer space.

Poswa:
Puvu means "dark sky", and the Poswobs are aware that when ascending high mountains, the sky appears dark even during daytime, and that therefore the sky must look like this all of the time from places even higher up than their mountaintops. Pupem means "across; on the other side of" and these two words can combine into
Puvompupem
"Alien; from across distant space".
This word has the advantage that it does not need to apply to living beings. A planet could equally well be described as puvompupem.

Pabappa:
samba purpapsam
"one who has completed the sky". I seem to have written this one in quite a while ago, when I didnt have as many words to play with. Nevertheless, I think in a way it might actually be better than the Poswa translation, if not as convenient, since it gives more information. The only odd thing is that the word for blood is one of the morphemes; it may have something to do with babies and/or friends, since it also appears in words for birth and friendship.

If the Pabappa word were translated into Poswa morpheme for morpheme, it would be samba bwuppam.

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next: to fry, to cook with oil

I didn't know we were sharing lexicon here!

[din]

I always like the background stories he posts, if that's what you mean to address (as the sole purpose of this thread is, in fact, sharing the lexicon of your conlang).

I always try to share some thoughts on the etymology for the words I post, to make it more interesting for other people who actively read this thread (if there any, haha)

[Soap]

Yeah, I enjoy this thread and I wish it was moving faster like it did a few years ago. Back then I used to post even more elaborate responses, but lately I've had less time to spare.

[din]

Tormiott (Rockall):

atiarh ˈɛtɕaɹ (n) to sear, to scorch, to burn the surface of; to fry; to cause to wither
- a- (pref) transitive
- tiarh (n) gold (also tiarhstanda); (v) to fade; to wilt, to wither; to be yellow; to be golden


I had to look up when deep frying could have realistically reached my concountry (being a rather far flung place west of Ireland and south of Iceland). I ended up using the Old Norse word for frying or roasting more specifically for deep frying:

staicia ˈstɛːtɕa (v) to deep fry {from ON steikja, to fry, to roast}

The passive form, stâiciaio ˈstɛːtɕɪjʊ, can be used attributively to say that a situation is out of control or has gotten out of hand.

I also came up with the following food item:

nouhmosie ˈnuːhməɕə (n) oblong or round deep fried dough puffs made with yeast and wheat flour, eaten with soups or stews to soak up the broth, or separately as a sweet or savory snack

It literally means 'jittering fish'

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next: shutters

[masako]

Yeah, I enjoy this thread and I wish it was moving faster like it did a few years ago. Back then I used to post even more elaborate responses, but lately I've had less time to spare.

+1

next: shutters

Kala: toposuma /topoʃuːma/

topo = door; gate (borrowed from Japanese: とびら)

suma = window (borrowed from Mandarin: 囱门)

"Shutters" could also be referred to as "apanyo" /apaːɲo/ literally meaning "device for closing", a bit more ambiguous, but workable.

next: subterranean passage

[din]

Tormiott (Rockall)

The most generic word would be:
creh /kɾəh/ (n) tunnel {from ON grǫf, ditch, hole}

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next: hat

[äreo]

Msěrsca:

pax - hat, headdress

Issima paxpás.
Let's go to the hat store.

Next word:
sleep paralysis

[Soap]

Msěrsca:

pax - hat, headdress

Issima paxpás.
Let's go to the hat store.

Next word:
sleep paralysis

Poswa:

This could be a tough one. Ive been trying to reorganize my conlangs, especially Poswa, around verbal roots as much as possible, which means that, for example, sys now means "to sleep" rather than "sleep" (noun), which has been replaced by the extended form syšunna. (Most nouns formed from verbs end in -(n)na.) Likewise, the root for "paralysis" that I'm about to create for this translation will be a verb "to paralyze", which can take a suffix on the end to describe the resulting condition. However, I think even languages with patterns like this will still generally use the shorter root whenever possible to build a compound, so the "sleep" part, at least, will be sys in Poswa.

For "paralyze" I will need to create a new word. There is a root peppa which means "to move a part of something", and the reflexive of this is peppap. Then, to this can be added what I call the "disabilitative mood" marker, -pwepu, which signifies being unable to do something. Thus I can create peppappwepu "to be paralyzed" and perhaps peppappwefona "paralysis" for the condition itself.

That said, I'm not sure the word for sleep needs to be in here at all. I've never had sleep paralysis myself, but I'm aware of what it is, and it seems that the paralysis that normally accompanies sleep intrudes into waking life, either right before falling asleep or right after waking up. So perhaps a phrase like bybras peppappwepu "paralyzed while eyes (are) open" would work. A third option would be to stay with sleep and add a morpheme meaning "around", the way some medical terms are coined in English. The Poswa version of this would be syspol "(to do something) around sleeptime". The resulting two-word compound is long enough to serve as a dictionary definition, but I think this is the one I like the most. Therefore:

Syspol peppappwepu "to be paralyzed around sleeptime".

If this were to be used as a verb, the grammar rules I'm currently following tell me to conjugate both words, not just the second word. This would result in something rather unexpected:

Swispol peppappwepi.
"I was paralyzed around the time I slept."

Because the first morpheme in the first word means "sleep" and therefore it must be conjugated for the 1st person past tense, just as the much longer second word is. This seems like an odd feature and I might not keep it.

Yet another option would be to put a word for bed in the phrase, but that could be confused with "bedridden".

Pabappa:

I expect as usual that the best formula in Pabappa would be to simply calque the words of the Poswa, but I dont yet have a disabilitative mood for Pabappa. The verb for "sleep" is different, having dropped the ancient sys root of Pabappa as sound changes withered it away to nothing. The new root is pepup, the reflexive of the verb for "to bend". I'm tempted to use this same root also for the "paralyze" morpheme, since one who is paralyzed cannot bend. However, even though people would probably understand the double meaning, the word would basically break down as "sleeping while not able to sleep", since the word for "to bend oneself" is the same as the word for sleep. I will instead just go with the cognate of the Poswa word, which is pepap. Likewise I can't pull off any fancy tricks such as conjugating half of a word since Poswa doesn't conjugate its verbs for person and I'm not sure I'd like the idea of even allowing things to come after the tense marker.

For now, I will use pula to mean "unable to", saying that it's a suppletive negative for top "to be able to". The normal way to negate a verb is to add pida either before the verb as a separate word, or after the verb as a suffix. But I think a three syllable word (plus a fourth when conjugating) is too long for such a basic meaning.

So this leaves me with
Pepupus puda, pepap pula.
"Around sleeptime, unable to move."

And if conjugated as a verb, it would be something like
Pom pepusis pudabis, pepap pulabi.
"Around the time I slept, I couldn't move."

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next:

bait, food used as a lure or trap

[spanick]

next:

bait, food used as a lure or trap

Yinše
namšoku /nam.ʃo.ku/ 'bait, snack, Lit. little food'

Composed of three morphemes:
nam- verbal root meaning to eat followed by -šM a nominalizing suffix with an underspecified mid vowel which harmonizes to the frontness of the root to which it is attached. This yields namšo meaning food. To this is attached -kH a diminutive forming suffix with an underspecified high vowel.

This would be used in conjunction with other words to specify its use. For instance: namšoku hoyanta hunting bait; namšoku laapanta fishing bait

Next word:
acre (or, any unit used to measure land area)

[din]

Tormiott (Rockall):

I hate it when you go through a regular process of derivation, and end up with something stupid (like my word for 'to depart', which is condome...). Well, I guess this is one female given name that won't catch on in my concountry.

manuella ˈmɛnwəlːa (n) acre
- man- (pref) past; beside, alongside, next to; flanking, on both sides, complementary, around, encasing. nearby
- uella ˈwəlːa (n) tilled land, field for growing crops (compare duoi) {from ON vǫllr, field, meadow}

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next: stitch (textile)

[GamerGeek]

(as the sole purpose of this thread is, in fact, sharing the lexicon of your conlang).

I thought it was helping invent lexicon...

[din]

(as the sole purpose of this thread is, in fact, sharing the lexicon of your conlang).

I thought it was helping invent lexicon...

Well... All we're doing is prompting the next person to create a certain word. I guess I should have said "... give people a reason to expand their lexicon and share their new additions".

And isn't it a little more interesting and inspiring if you can see that person's thinking process? I don't think I've derived many words without looking at the etymology of a similar word in at least one other language. A good number of words have very interesting histories.

[GamerGeek]

(as the sole purpose of this thread is, in fact, sharing the lexicon of your conlang).

I thought it was helping invent lexicon...

Well... All we're doing is prompting the next person to create a certain word. I guess I should have said "... give people a reason to expand their lexicon and share their new additions".

And isn't it a little more interesting and inspiring if you can see that person's thinking process? I don't think I've derived many words without looking at the etymology of a similar word in at least one other language. A good number of words have very interesting histories.

fair enough.

[masako]

next: stitch (textile)

Kala:

suama - /ʃʷaːma/ - sew; seam; mend; stitch

This is used as both verb and noun. tsule - /t͡suːlɛ/ - would be used to talk about a specific "thread"

next: to parrot; to repeat uncritically what someone says

[din]

Tormiott (Rockall)

pidadol ˈpiðɪðəl (n) drinking bird, dipping bird; yes-man, bootlicker, groveler {active participle of pidol}
(v) to parrot, to repeat mechanically, to repeat mindlessly; to blindly follow (a leader)
- pi- pi (pref) small, little; short; low (reach); decreasing, shrinking, becoming smaller, diminishing (only used if this is an inherent feature)
- dol ˈdol (v) to dip {active participle of ol, but reanalyzed as a full verb}
- - ol ol (v) to be deep


The active participle essentially essentially 'ol' with three times the conjugation for the active participle (disregarding the prefix). That's because 'dol' (deepening) was reanalyzed as a full verb (to dip), and that was used as a noun, which then ended up being used as a verb. And the active participle of this verb is then the 3rd time: ol → dol → dadol → pidadol → pidadadol /ˈpiðɪˌðɛðəl/.

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next: judgment

[Soap]

next: judgment

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Khulls:

A nōl is a person trusted to make judgments, and perceived to be morally clear. A nōl is not assumed to be free from sin, but rather one who can see sin in other people. The word comes from a verb meaning to point at someone, the traditional means of identifying criminals in their society.

A xìna is a sentence, paragraph, or other concise unit of language, usually one that is memorized and recited word-for-word many times in various situations. Funnily enough this morpheme turns up in the word for parrot, although in Poswa (šinam) rather than Khulls. Khulls does not have a word for parrot yet but it's likely to be a visual description rather than a description of their speaking abilities (on this planet, other animals can also talk).

Khulls has very simple morphology compared to many languages spoken further east, but there are still sound changes in some compounds. I'm considering adding a sound change of /lx/ > /h/, since /lxʷ/ > /hʷ/ already exists. If I dont do it, I will still say that the /lx/ cluster will be front-loaded onto the second syllable, resulting in the syllabification /nō.lxì.na/. But for now, I'll plan on doing the sound change after all and therefore having as my translation the word

nōhìna "judgment; judge's sentence"
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Poswa:
The Poswa cognate of Khulls' nōl is nurata, and carries the same meaning. (The inherited agentive noun formula was lost in early Poswa, and now has to be padded with -ta). However, Poswa uses verbs to form its compounds, not nouns. It also has a much more powerful derivational system than Khulls, and does not even need to add a second word meaning "sentence" or the like in order to form a word for judgment. All that is needed is to insert the affix -ib-V-nna around the last vowel in the word being expanded, and apply compensatory sound changes. Since -rib- automatically contracts to b, the result of this transformation is

nubanna "judgment, sentence, curse". I also have a second word,

webumpa, for the punishment itself, as opposed to the judgment that designs the punishment. This has no etymology yet, but seems to be made of words that in the parent language meant "responsibility" (fei) and "to push many things into one place; to cram" (bempa), so perhaps an allusion to the practice of grouping many prisoners into a single overcrowded jail cell.

I wont bother with Pabappa this time since it would be exactly the same as Poswa except for having a single /n/ instead of a geminate in the first word.
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to cuddle, to face each other

[äreo]

Msěrsca:

nennar - to cuddle

next: hero cult

[din]

Tormiott (Rockall)

miucain ˈmyːkɛːn (v) to cuddle; (n) stuffed toy, stuffed animal; wimp, sissy, wuss (colloq., often as tiaucathmiucain or tiaumiucain)
- miu- (pref) in the stomach or abdominal region (seen as the center of well-being, love and excitement); in front of, ahead of, towards the front of, to the start of, at the beginning
- cain (v) to grab; to clutch; to clasp onto, to attach, to link up

As for tiaucathmiucain : it is a combination of the diminutive tiau-, and a prefix cath-, which is used for endearment, but also relief or making things sound less serious or impressive. Both prefixes are quite productive and are used to show emotional attitude.

__________

(edit) Took too long...

I guess we can simply say riccaciult ˈɾikːakyːlt, from:
- ricca ˈɾikːa (n) hero {from ON rekkr, warrior}
- ciult kyːlt (n) cult; dedicated following, dedicated fan base {from LA cultus via FR culte}


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next: fletchings (of an arrow)

[äreo]

Msěrsca:

níf nom. s. nívi nom. pl. níhoa gen. s. níhoï gen. pl. nís dat. s. nívis dat. pl.
(noun) fin, fletch(ing)

next word: to refrain from mentioning something, let sleeping dogs lie

[Nortaneous]

In North Pannonian, there's no particular word for this other than the general term for 'hold oneself back':
dēšíˀfi 3sg. pres. ipfv., dēšúhaifi inf., dḗšvaˀfi 3sg. past pfv., dḗšer part., dēšä́ˀfi 3sg. subj.
(Derived reflexive verbs have no participle; instead, one uses the underived verb with the passive participle.)

combined with the general term for 'mention':
mention:
vīlýžiˀ 3sg. pres. ipfv., vīlýžuhai inf., vīláˀž 3sg. past pfv., vīlýžt part., vīlä́ˀ 3sg. subj.

so, dēšúhaifi vīlyžmá 'refrain from mentioning'

Next word: humidity

[Soap]

Next word: humidity

Poswa:

mebba "hot, humid air; haze"

This word by itself would do for most of the uses of the English word humidity. To talk specifically about a measure you would add bub (for things commonly measured) or fwase (for things less commonly measured). The Poswobs are not known for their weather technology, so the latter would be probably the more common expression.

Indoors, people might speak of bablepys, roughly "boiled water", especially if it was also hot.

Pabappa:

mepa "hot, humid air; humidity"
pabli wapel (same as bablepys above)

As above, these words will do fine by themselves, but can be padded with the suffix -sup, which is not cognate to either of Poswa's suffixes, to specifically denote a quantity measured.


Late Andanese:

uhuha "fog, low clouds; condensation"


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next:

to save, protect from harm, rescue (i.e. the active form for "you're going to be OK now")

[din]

Tormiott (Rockall)

tharec ˈθaɾək (v) to rescue, to save
- thar- (pref) pertaining to water
- ec (v) to link, join; to fasten, tie, bind

Since it's a seafaring island nation, I guess it makes sense that I came up with this etymology

ueramporh ˈwəɾampəɹ (v) to protect, to shield
- ueran- (pref) containing, enclosing, closing, surrounding, all-encompassing, complete, whole, covering, wrapping, protecting
- porh (prep) in front of; for a reason; against (protecting, compare estior, tior iccad) (n) front

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next: coat hanger