The Lexicon Building Counselling Service

[Imralu]

In Ahu, kuíkiu /'kwikju/ means a small, mostly nocturnal, quail-like ground dwelling bird with big eyes, a tiny beak, and two antenna-like feathers. Kuikui would easily fit Ahu as a word for "small and cute".

[Thry]

Iberish is a Germanic language spoken in the Iberian peninsula (Iveriss in Iberish), so it has had as a substrate VL, Basque, Castilian and Catalan. I'm still taking baby steps with it. The word for "we" from PG comes out as wir /wiɾ/ or wyr /wɛi̯ɾ/ depending on emphasis. Do you like this calque from romance?

wirantere /wi.ˈɾan.te.ɾa/ cf. Cat. nosaltres, Sp. nosotros

Anter, the word for other comes from PG *antheraz, and is also the source of English other.

There are a lot of funny coincidences with Catalan and romance, for instance the word for "us" comes out as ons, but has been cliticized, which makes it have an allomorph -nos after infinitives, mirroring Catalan ens vs. -nos. For instance, hir ons hiwd vs. heven-nos (cf. ell ens dona vs. donar-nos) "he gives us" vs. "to give to us".

[Bristel]

Hey, that's pretty cool, I like the idea, Thry.

We may have to put our two tribes together, as my conlang has finally "settled" into Aquitaine for now, I think...

That brings up what to name them, as Aquitanii is not their original name, afaik. Maybe just make up a PIE speaking group called Aquitanii who live there along side the Vasconic speakers and derive their name from PIE folk etymology?

Something like *h2ekʷeh2 > (akʷa- water) and *(s)tenh2- (tena- thundering, rumbling or *tenh2g- (tenag- standing water)?

[Thry]

Thanks! I can move mine a bit south if you want .

Your folks call themselves standing water?

What I usually do is get an obscure / underived native toponym and get the name as a demonym from there.

[Bristel]

Thanks! I can move mine a bit south if you want .

Your folks call themselves standing water?

What I usually do is get an obscure / underived native toponym and get the name as a demonym from there.

I was trying to derive a demonym from "Aquitanii", the Roman exonym for the tribe/s living there, as the Wiki and other sources didn't seem to have an endonym. (the first example for the second morpheme would be "thundering", so maybe "thundering water", as in a waterfall or something?)

I'll try to find an toponym that would be sufficient though, but for now "Aquitanian" or something is fine.

Isn't your tribe located to the south of the Pyrenees? I don't think you need to move your tribe at all, as there are dozens of tribe names from the area all living in one small space.

I was thinking that if they survive into the future (wouldn't be fun to have them die out before daughterlangs could take hold), they would have local varieties or unique languages named after the more specific tribes of the Aquitani, like Tarbelli, Elusates, Ausci, etc. But those are all pre-PIE tribes, not Celts.

[Izambri]

I was trying to derive a demonym from "Aquitanii", the Roman exonym for the tribe/s living there, as the Wiki and other sources didn't seem to have an endonym. (the first example for the second morpheme would be "thundering", so maybe "thundering water", as in a waterfall or something?)

Since Aquitanian seems related to Basque another possibility is to derive an endonym from Guasco- / Wasco- / Basco- / Vasco-. Or from the main river of the country, the Garonne, which according to the French wikipedia:

«On l'écrivait Garumna du temps de Jules César, un nom composé du radical pré-indoeuropéen garr- (pierre ou rocher) et du suffixe -unn / -onna et dont la signification serait rivière caillouteuse, torrent.»

If taken from this one the endonym could mean something like "the people of the rocky river".

[Izambri]

What is best for "wind"? eus [ɛws], oès [wɛs] or falm [faɫm] / [fɔm]?

[Thry]

Eus.

Build me sentences, please. ("the wind blows cold", for instance)

[Bristel]

What is best for "wind"? eus [ɛws], oès [wɛs] or falm [faɫm] / [fɔm]?

eus [ɛws] sounds best to me.

falm [faɫm] sounds more like an oceanic thing, something to do with water, maybe sea foam or something. (yes, foam and falm [fɔm] sound alike, I know)

Maybe falm is some kind of saltwater fish?

[Izambri]

Build me sentences, please. ("the wind blows cold", for instance)

S'oès bofe glau or, more poetically, S'eus flame riçant.

[Izambri]

falm [faɫm] sounds more like an oceanic thing, something to do with water, maybe sea foam or something. (yes, foam and falm [fɔm] sound alike, I know)

I'm thinking giving it the meaning "squall".

[Bristel]

falm [faɫm] sounds more like an oceanic thing, something to do with water, maybe sea foam or something. (yes, foam and falm [fɔm] sound alike, I know)

I'm thinking giving it the meaning "squall".

Oh yeah, that's a good one.

[Thry]

That distribution sounds good to me. You could also use the eus root for proper names of particular winds (idk the English versions, but: alisios, céfiro...) sth like "northwind" or "eastwind".

Falm definitely has something oceanic about it.

[Izambri]

Both eus and oès come from the same root: Middle Peran audesu, from Audas, the name of the main wind spirit. So the root for cultisms would be aud(es)–. But being eus a cultism itself, mainly used in poetry, it would work well to derivate names of winds or wind spirits.

[Genome]

What definition should this word uiuiuyu [uiuiuju] have? I really have no idea except that it should have to do with plants or water.

[Bristel]

What definition should this word uiuiuju [uiuiuju] have? I really have no idea except that it should have to do with plants or water.

siren.

[Rhetorica]

A poet or public speaker who strangles the audience with repetitive or drawn-out onomatopoeia.

[ObsequiousNewt]

Ululation.

[Izambri]

I've worked some words for "coup d'etat" with different synonymous meanings:

petgedant "punch-ity"; it carries a sense of violence and forcefulness.
tuntravatz "power seized"
tombetaneu "seat knock-down"; closer to the dethronement; overthrow concept than the other two.

Any ideas for other meanings? What do you have in your conlangs for the coup d'etat concept?

[Thry]

Irlandic:

Colp d'astad /kolp dɐs.ˈtaw/ and an older and more general term estolement de sourania /əs.tol.ˈment ə su.ɾɐ.ˈni.ə/, abbreviated to estolement; from the verb estoler "to bereave, to deprive of, to take away"; other more informal terms include presa, esravement, rapt and vol de poder (vol more accurately means theft and is pejorative, presa means taking and is the only one to have positive connotations among those).

[Rhetorica]

Lilitika has the euphemistic verb zílúgíté, "to react to a state sort of like leaderlessness." zígíté means "to react to a state of leaderlessness" and is usually interpreted to mean "to initiate an electoral process," so zílúgíté includes legally sanctioned government replacement scenarios.

A related word, "lúzígíté," means "to sort of react to a state of leaderlessness." This is a fairly flexible spoonerism with moderate satirical appeal when discussing a dysfunctional electoral process.

[Izambri]

I'm curious, Thry: are estoler and esravement related to English stole and rave?

[Thry]

No, they're both unrelated heritage words from Latin:

estoler, from ex "out of" + tollō "remove, raise, abolish"; toler also exists and means "to take away", the first is more or less semantically equivalent to Spanish quitar, whereas the latter to Spanish retirar.

esravement, from raver, from Latin rapiō. This is an unusual, strong verb with a wide but highly context-dependent set of meanings: generally it means to kill something violently and intentionally ("slaughter" approaches its semantic range; as opposed to necar, the unmarked verb for "to kill"); but it also means "to destroy" (of objects, cities, dreams...), "to annihilate" (of enemies, as a threat), "to rape" (usually of women) and "to steal [sth precious], kidnap", the last only in the participle (rapt, as a shortening of raptad, from raptar "to kidnap"). The rules for usage are pretty complex [sometimes tense tells it away], there are also several derived nouns (ravéncia, raptura, rapt, ravement, ... of which esravement is one).

[Izambri]

No, they're both unrelated heritage words from Latin:

Hmmm, me likes the coincidence. They really seem taken from a Germanic tongue!

esravement, from raver, from Latin rapiō

Ah, rapiō > raver... So /pʲ/ > /v/? (assuming <v> is /v/).

I have that evolution in Hellesan: Sat. rūppea > Per. rubie > Hel. rúvie

[Thry]

Cool. I thought "rave" was from Latin (in English), but apparently it's related to resver in OF which is in turn from Germanic or sth. (it's "ravish" which is from OF ravir which is from Latin rapio, that confused me - and funnily "reave" and "bereave" are from PG *raubana [...or sth])

Ah, rapiō > raver... So /pʲ/ > /v/? (assuming <v> is /v/).

I have that evolution in Hellesan: Sat. rūppea > Per. rubie > Hel. rúvie

Sorry, that was poorly expressed, I just meant generically that the verb rapio yielded the verb raver, lexically, but the forms don't correspond; they're just the standard citation form for each language.

raver is from VL rápere, the strong infinitive, through the (stress-shifted) rabére > [ra.ˈβe.ɾe] > [ra.ˈβe.ɾə] > [rɐ.ˈveɾ] raver (and raure for the weak infinitive from the real etymon, rábere > [ˈra.βe.ɾe] > [ˈra.βə.ɾə] > [ˈra.βɾə] > [ˈraw.ɾə] raure).

rapiō itself yields rais, the 1s present form, through a series of palatalizing sound changes [if not analogy] (cf. sais, fais, hais...):
rapiō > [ˈra.pʲo] > [ˈra.pʲə] > [rɛtʃ] > [rɛʃ] rais "I slaughter"

In the Hellesan context (medially), /pʲ/ actually yields /θ/ (through /ts/ and apical /s/), like /kʲ/; i.e. where Catalan has sàpia or sàpiga, Irlandic has saça; historically this phoneme already disappeared, though, and survives only marginally, this being not one of the contexts in which it does: it's pronounced as if it were saia [ˈsɛ.jə].

PD: well indeed raver has that too, for instance: *rapiant illos> MI raçant-los [ˈra.tsən.tləs]; a very strong medieval equivalent of Castilian "que les jodan".