Substantial postings about constructed languages and constructed worlds in general. Good place to mention your own or evaluate someone else's. Put quick questions in C&C Quickies instead.
Dē Graut Bʉr wrote:Kunesian: pirke pe [pçìɾçe pʲé], from pirke: "clay".
Next: rice
Poswa: blužupubwam, from blužu "any edible grasslike plant" and pubwam "(found) in swamps", since rice grows in a swamp. This is an unusual construction; usually the pubwam would come first, but Poswa has a strong preference for nouns describing edibles to begin with the cluster bl-.
Pabappa: blubara pumibum, essentially a calque of the Poswa word, but without forming a unitary compound.
Are crows really so stupid that they think a scarecrow is a living being that can hurt them? I thought they were some of the smartest animals in the world, such that they've been filmed throwing nuts out onto roads so that cars'll drive over them and crack them open. Yet they can't till the difference between a dummy made of straw and a real human being.
I dont know much about farms, but my mom likes birds and has a problem with squirrels eating the birdseed she pours into the birdfeeders. I suggested at one point she could scare them off with a fake plastic owl, and she bought one. It doesnt seem to have worked, but I could imagine this working in my conworld, although they would probably try to get a real owl to do it under human supervision. Nevertheless, you asked for a word for scarecrow, so I will give you
Poswa: pubvwofieta, from pubvwofa "owl" + džita "fake, false, decoy", plus Poswa's aggressive sound rules.
Pabappa: pumpib tipper, more or less a calque of the Poswa.
Both words describe an owl with ears, as there is a separate word for earless owls and I dont have a word for owls in general right now. I prefer long-eared owls aesthetically and I may decide that they are the only ones that live in this world or at least the only ones considered to be owls.
Soap wrote:next: yoke, goad (literal or metaphorical)
yoke: Tautisca yugun (cognate with the English word)
goad: Tautisca staigus "goad, rod (for prodding), (cattle) prod"
Both words also can be used metaphorically.
kag̃’a’s- to hesitate, related to kakag̃- “to stumble, trip” ultimately from the root kag̃- "to step" lákhshúnt- to hestitate, literally “to be unable to choose.decide” ultimately from the root lakh- “to gather”
Tautisca only knows the term from Latin; in translations of Latin texts it either leaves the word untranslated as palmula or calques Latin palmae poma as palmais abulus (Gen. of palma "palm, date palm" + abulus apple) or palmis abulus (possessive adjective from palma plus abulus "apple").
Next: through
mantior /ˈmɛntɕəɹ/ (prep) through; further away; (postp) past; through (passing)
- man- (pref) past; beside, alongside, next to; flanking, on both sides, complementary, around, encasing
- tior (prep) next to, beside; via; to (giving); with, by (means of); in a certain manner; (v) to stand next to, to stand side by side, to be lined up; (as serial verb) to go ahead and, to start (used similarly to let's... or go and [verb])
Probably pespel, also meaning "made of clay". However, since this word is likely to have been in the language for a very long time, it's possible that a direct cognate of the Poswa word would be used instead, which would diverge from the simple form about halfway through the two languages' period of separation, and become modern Pabappa pespli. I'm leaning towards not doing that, though, as the Pabaps would see the obvious relation between the two words and just substitute the more harmonious CVCCVC form by process of analogy.
If pottery is defined as a vessel that can hold water rather than merely something made out of clay, Pabappa would probably add a word like etaropi, which can mean variously "bowl, dish, cup" and therefore functions as a good cover term. In Poswa, this would not be necessary since the slight difference in meaning can be seen from the way the word would be used in a sentence.
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vala 'to choose, to elect, to vote in an election' phracvatha 'to voice an opinion' < phra 'forward' + cvatha 'to speak'
Next: beach
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A
thercheir ˈθəɹxəjɹ (v) to be barbaric; to be a plunderer, to be a pillager; to be uncivilized, to be uncultured
- therche- (pref) intensification; ‘to pieces’, ‘apart’; pulling or tearing off
- ir (v) to experience, to see (compare rgai); to regard, to consider (compare neddan); to judge (opinion, compare siotath) (n) vision; view, standpoint, opinion
(in the sense that they destroy everything in sight)
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next: electrical outlet / socket (if your conworld/country has no electricity but it does have other ways of transporting power into buildings, you can translate that instead)
This could be interesting. My first instinct is to suggest that, like English speakers, the Poswobs and Pabaps both would want to use a single morpheme rather than specifically describing it as an electrical outlet. But I will give multiple translations of varying degrees of specificity. I am fond of creating neologisms for modern terminology using my conlangs even though they live in a medieval or even pre-Biblical stage of development in most ways.
Poswa:
The simplest answer is to just say bumbu "socket, hole for an object". Electricity can either be called sussa or pompa, the latter of which also means lightning. Since I'm suspicious that a language spoken by people at Poswobs' level of development would have a separate word for electricity, I may wipe sussa from the dictionary and just use pompa. I suspect sussa is an artifact left over from my very early conlangs, which were independent of culture and therefore freely had words such as nī "modem" as ordinary morphemes with no derivation from words for more basic concepts. (Though at the time, I thought that modem could be used as a verb, i.e. "i'll modem you the science lesson".)
So a more specific word for electrical outlet could be pompabumbu, literally "lightning socket". Although morpheme initial b- usually causes sandhi when appearing as the second element of a compound, this b- is of secondary origin and thus does not cause sandhi.
However, most people in the modern world don't think of lightning when they think of electrical outlets, they think of power. I feel that the Poswobs would do likewise, and there exists a verb vampwo "to suck, draw energy from something". While my conlangs are always 100% a priori, I subconsciously associate this word with the English word vampire and probably give the "suck" part of the definition more weight than it deserves. Still, it is the only part of the definition that refers to a physical action, so perhaps "suck" is the primary definition after all, even if it refers to a specifically aggressive suction process rather than the action of suction in general.
Using vampwo seems to me to call for using a different second element. When one sucks on something, it is usually an extruded surface such as a nipple; i.e. something that sticks into your mouth. Electrical outlets are the opposite, so it would be unusual to use a word like mum "nipple" here. On the other hand, milk gives people energy, and is in fact our most basic food source. Electricity is similarly basic to most machines and computers. There is another word for nipple, minnep, which specifically refers to a singular, whereas most Poswa nouns are unmarked for number. But this use seems odd, as it would sound to Poswobs the way the use of a phrase "single nipple" in common use would to us. Perhaps a highly polysemic term would do the job better here. One possibility is pupa, which means nipple but also means several other things, such as "eye", "arrow", and "to lay something down". Given this range of meaning, I suspect the word would not be in common use as a standalone word but might perform well in compounds. Its mental imagery should be weakened by its multiple meanings and therefore the resulting term vampwopupa seem more natural to speakers than vampwomum. Speakers aware of the etymology of vampwo might reject the pwo part of the word, which historically simply means "to suck", and coin a shorter word such as vampupa or vammum.
The US style three-pronged outlet could be referred to as a rulpufubu, "frightened face" or pumpupampa "crying doll", where the word for doll encompasses any representation of a human body or face, not just the kind of dolls that people play with. One last possibility comes from southern dialects of Poswa where the sound change of /pš/ > /p/ in word-initial position did not complete, and the language thus retained a word which doesnt appear in standard Poswa as a standalone term: pšu "doll". The standard word for doll is in fact a compound of one word for human (pumi) and the otherwise obsolete pu "doll". These dialects would therefore likely choose a shorter word, pšupampa, to mean "crying doll". Word-initial pš- is valid even in standard Poswa despite occurring in no native words. The sound change /pš/ > /p/ removed it from native vocabulary, but it still appears in placenames and given names that originated in other dialects.
Pabappa:
Any of the above could be loaned in directly, which would give the resulting Pabappa words bumbu, pompabumbu, bampuopupa, rulpupubu, pumpupampa, pissupampa, bampupa, and bammum.
But most likely Pabaps would use a calque of a Poswa word instead.
The simple answer is pubabim, which has a meaning very similar to Poswa's bumbu. Pomba pubabim is a more specific term that corresponds better to the English "electrical outlet".
The verb vampwo "to suck, draw energy from something" is not found in Pabappa. A less aggressive word might be a better choice here. Mama is the primary word for both drinking and sucking of liquids, and is often used also to mean "absorb". This could be rounded out with the unrelated mum "nipple", as in Poswa. However, this word might be liable to misinterpretation, as young listeners would hear about mamamums and think they could go there with a cup and refill their milk. A more metaphorical term would probably achieve greater currency, so at least one part of the compound should be nonliteral. I would propose using a Poswa loanword, popi, which despite originally meaning "bathtub" quickly came to be used as a word for any standing or sitting place where one spends a short period of time. This would probably be spelled as two separate words in Pabappa rather than as a compound, thus resulting in one saying mama popi.
The last two Poswa words would be unlikely to appear in Pabappa as standard terms, but could be used informally. "Frightened face" would be rulpu rubu. Pabappa has a lot of words for crying, differentiated mainly by the reason for the crying, with one generic cover-all term, pupapap. But I choose pasum, which has a more specific association with an open mouth and the sense of danger. As for dolls, Pabappa lacks the word that Poswa uses for dolls that has an extended range of meaning, but associations between the two cultures would likely mean that most Pabaps would be aware of the word's existence. Thus it could be loaned, and Pabaps describing an American-style electrical outlet could indeed refer to it as a pumpu pasum, "crying doll".
This was a fun one, I made quite a few new words to capture different meanings.
The first that came to mind was bu'lu 'king, leader' but the primary translation there is king. From the same root would be ba'lmu 'ruler'. Both of these have stronger political connotations. A more generic word comes from a likely related root and yields pálmu 'leader' this would also be used for cases with guide.
As for conductor...this language is supposed to be spoken around the same time as PIE so it has neither musical conductors (not in the sense I imagine it anyway) nor train conductors, but I made up the words all the same... pálmu hu'ta'hú'is 'leader of music, conductor' and sukpallmu* 'train-helper, conductor' (interestingly, <pallmu> whose root pVll looks similar to the other roots used above namely: bV'l and pV:l, is actually not related to either).
*sug derives from the root sVg with the general meaning of dragging or towing. 'Sugu' means something which is dragged or towed. The word ultimately gets repurposed in modern times in daughter languages for train...although this particular form is ancient, not modern.
töryr [ˈtø̞ryr] - to boil, seethe, smoulder (intr.)
törišyr [ˈtø̞riʃyr] - to smoulder, glow (diminutive form of töryr)
törišyr is often used in the phrase töriše altša [ˈtø̩riʃe̩ ˈɑlt͡ʃɑ] "his/her flame smoulders," meaning that the person is depressed or distant from his spirituality.
pgacathi ˈpʕakɪθjə (v) to be clumsy, to be awkward, to be inconvenient (compare pgaliam)
- pga- pʕa (pref) wrongly, in the wrong way, mis-
- cathi ˈkɛθjə (n) hand; friend {also solopp or sôloppo} (v) to be all-purpose; to be multifunctional; to be practical, to be handy, to be useful, to be convenient
pgaliam ˈpʕɛjam (v) to be inconvenient, to be at the wrong time, to be at an inappropriate time (compare pgacathi)
- pga- pʕa (pref) wrongly, in the wrong way, mis-
- liam jam (v) to lie, to lie down (oneself); to lay, to lay down (something); to be placed horizontally, to be placed flat on a surface; {in momentane form} to lie down; to cover with a blanket or sheet (obsolete), to spread (food or butter); to apply (creams or ointments)
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next: female neighbor
Even if you don't have a specific word for it, like Dutch buurvrouw (vs. buurman), you still have to be able to express the concept, like: 'woman next door/across the road'
ukraukal [ˈukrɑu̯kɑl] - neighbour (ykör "beyond" + auka "door" + -al "agent suffix"). Gender is not expressed in Sharan, so the closest translation would be: tšumšyö near-woman.
Tautisca: réx (yes, related to Latin rex and Old Irish rí) designates kings and traditional / hereditary rulers in general. A village chief would be more likely called waicunus, a clan chief potis "Lord, master" or propator.
Next: generation (meaning an age cohort)
hwhatting wrote:Next: generation (meaning an age cohort)
máma’inu /ˈmaːmaˌɁi.nu/ from maːɁ “to beget, mother” plus –in “makes abstract nouns from verbs” plus –u “Nominative”. The reduplication of the root generally intensifies verbs and marks most nouns as collective. Stress rules prevent two stressed syllables in a row, hence the vowel shortening of the root.
