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Do your conlangs have any words which are interesting or fun references or jokes?

Verdurian has amrab for "law code," which IIRC is a reference to Hammurabi.

Klingon has ghoti /ɣotʰi/ meaning "fish" which is a reference to that (annoying) creative spelling of the English word fish.

My conlang Fyrthir has a couple:

• tyra (pronounced just like as in IPA) means purple or mauve, and is a reference to the Tyrian purple pigment
• paaṇṇur /paːn̥ːur/ "grammar" is a reference to the Indian Grammarian Pāṇini

Note: in my orthography, an acute references pitch accent, which can occur on any vocalic mora (similar to Japanese or Ancient Greek). Since Fyrthir has three contrastive lengths, this allows for pitch contours, again much like Greek, except more possibilities.

Eventually, I plan to add more, because I really like these sorts of little nods, they make the language very fun to use.

duns_scotus wrote:Do your conlangs have any words which are interesting or fun references or jokes?

Of course! Sometimes these are true homages, other times incidental or accidental nods. For Verbruary this year, I found the Queranaran word snaremgvascuerhrtain, to sleep with ones arms and wings all akimbo. As you recall from your third grade vocabulary lists, akimbo is an adverb meaning "a-keen-bowed", like a bow pulled to an angle. So in Queranaran, the first part of the compound means to draw tight, the second part means a short bow and the third part means to sleep soundly.

Upayanas means welcome (literally, "it's good you're home"); this is taken from a Philippine word, upay, that means "good".

I have often taken the names of other glossopoets and turned them into words in some language or other. Beyond the languages, descriptions of The World are often riddled with obscure references to some tidbit of literature, history or myth. It always brings a smile to my lips when someone finds and figures out the treat!

" paaṇṇur /paːn̥ːur/ "grammar" is a reference to the Indian Grammarian Pāṇini" --- that one I like!

Common Caber has quite a few of them.

ip "man" (Ip Man)
śimo "friend" (shimobataar)
śimobatar "friendship" (shimobataar)
carau "grip" (clawgrip)
garưp "claw" (clawgrip)
maś "pit" (mosh pit)
opi "peek" (opipik)
ci "near" (Keenir)
one "bar" (Elizabeth Barone, an author who had some very nice things to say about Caber)
danơr "get the better of, trump" (Donald Trump)
ceisic "govern" (John Kasich, governor of Ohio, where I live)
bơrni "sandal, shoe" (Bernie Sanders)
ơnơ "cry, weep" ("Oh, no!")
gather "magic" (Magic: The Gathering, which I don't actually play but whatever)
top "height" (should be obvious)
fưś "fish" (English "fish")
ơpsi "trip" (oopsie!)
manda "trough, furrow" (Amanda Babcock Furrow of CONLANG-L)

And one from Ngade n Tim Ar:

king "red" (King Crimson)

elemtilas wrote:

duns_scotus wrote:Do your conlangs have any words which are interesting or fun references or jokes?

" paaṇṇur /paːn̥ːur/ "grammar" is a reference to the Indian Grammarian Pāṇini" --- that one I like!

Thank you! It's as much a visual pun as anything. In Fyrthir, the underdot (◌̣) represents voicelessness of sonorants, not retroflex consonants as in the usual romanizations of Indic languages. The way the grammar morphophonology works, roots must be of the form CCCVCCC (-ur is a nominative ending) so I have to be somewhat creative in how I do these borrowings at times! The geminated /ṇ/ at least somewhat helps keep the resemblance intact.

I don't do this very often, but Chavakani has mbíase "money" as a reference to Ted "The Million Dollar Man" DiBiase.

When I was first designing Vezurian, I was a big fan of Guild Wars: Nightfall. The word vanac 'zealous, pious' references an early antagonist who was a fanatical warlady.

I've got a couple of borrowings, luna moon and diru money. Bonus points for recognising which languages they come from. Mica hello comes from my first ever conlang/relex. And this one's a coincidence, but it amuses me whenever I'm at an Italian restaurant and see the word salumi, because that's my word for seven.

I forgot to list probably the first two ever!

• ḷaáakun "friend" /l̥ɑːːkun/ named for a close friend of mine's online handle, lacuna
• veesta "black" /vɛːsta/ named for my cat Vesta, who is black

As mentioned, in the orthography, an acute represents pitch accent, which can fall on any vocalic mora in a word (but only one). In syllables with long or overlong vowels these cause pitch contours. So in ḷaáakun the first syllable has a pitch contour of low-high-low.

Ryan of Tinellb wrote:I've got a couple of borrowings, luna moon and diru money. Bonus points for recognising which languages they come from.

Ha! The answer for both, it turns out, is Latin! Luna, probably via Spanish and into English is obvious. Wiktionary is our friend for other obscurer words. Diru is Latin (denarius) via Basque of all things. It kind of looked familiar, in the way some total strangers in foreign cities kind of remind one of a well known friend. In this case, very many money words come from Latin. Related to diru are dinar, denier, & dinero.

elemtilas wrote:

Ryan of Tinellb wrote:I've got a couple of borrowings, luna moon and diru money. Bonus points for recognising which languages they come from.

Ha! The answer for both, it turns out, is Latin! Luna, probably via Spanish and into English is obvious. Wiktionary is our friend for other obscurer words. Diru is Latin (denarius) via Basque of all things. It kind of looked familiar, in the way some total strangers in foreign cities kind of remind one of a well known friend. In this case, very many money words come from Latin. Related to diru are dinar, denier, & dinero.

Ha. I took diru directly from Basque, because I'm still only a couple of chapters into de Rijk's grammar of Euskara Batua. But yes, the promised bonus points for you.

Duns Scotus wrote:Do your conlangs have any words which are interesting or fun references or jokes?

Loads; far too many to list here in fact, although they're probably too obscure for most ZBBers to appreciate.

alice wrote:Loads; far too many to list here in fact, although they're probably too obscure for most ZBBers to appreciate.

Well I suppose if you don't mind, if you can't list them all, then perhaps you can give us a sampling of your favorites, with the origins explicated.

I've mentioned this elsewhere but I do have a few (although they're not nearly as clever as some of the ones in this thread!).

A big one I use frequently is nam which in Dnukta'u and Yinxe means "to eat" and "food" in Mal. It's based off of the onomatopoeia "nomnomnom".

The rest of mine are usually rough borrowings/inspiration. In Dnukta'u the root that has the general meaning of to rule, king, etc. is bVʔlwhich is derived from ba'al. Dnukta'u, Yinxe, and Old Yateqtix all use the Semitic KTB root as the root for things relateed to writing or books:
Dnukta'u: ktub "writing, letter"; ktab "to write"
Yinxe: kaab "to read"
Old Yateqtix: katip "book"; katipa "paper"; qiktep "to write"; katep "to study"; ketpo "to read" etc...

There's lots like that. I like to use PIE roots as inspiration for roots in my conlangs. And I even borrowed the word for wheel in Dnukta'u directly from PIE: kúkul

My current projects are both a posteriori, so these sort of things are harder to work in (I may find an opportunity when the languages are more developed). In my previous project, I slipped in a few Semitic roots that laymen might be familiar with (mayim, ʾadon, ʾad < ʾab, ʾaḫ < ʾaḥ, wa-, ʾil, leḥem, ṣiddiq--not all of these have the same meaning as their Semitic equivalents, and I rather pointedly left out baʿal), for example from Biblical names. More to the point, in this particular case, ṣiddiq is not directly a reference to Hebrew/Phoenician ṣideq "legitimate heir, heir-apparent" but to Siddig El Fadil/Alexander Siddig, the actor who portrayed Dr. Julian Bashir in Deep Space 9. Not a specific word, but the typical greeting in this language was "Wealth beyond measure," a reference to Morrowind.

spanick wrote:I like to use PIE roots as inspiration for roots in my conlangs. And I even borrowed the word for wheel in Dnukta'u directly from PIE: kúkul

I do this too a lot. If for no other reason then that it aids with memorization. In particular, I've tried to make my numbers and pronounced IE-ish. Since Fyrthir is duodecimal, I decided to mostly borrow the duodecimal numbers in Maldivian.

Zaarin wrote:More to the point, in this particular case, ṣiddiq is not directly a reference to Hebrew/Phoenician ṣideq "legitimate heir, heir-apparent" but to Siddig El Fadil/Alexander Siddig, the actor who portrayed Dr. Julian Bashir in Deep Space 9. Not a specific word, but the typical greeting in this language was "Wealth beyond measure," a reference to Morrowind.

I like this! These kinds of references are fun, and actual expressions are often neglected in conlangs anyway.

Here's another root I remembered that you all might appreciate:

• sjéna /sjɛnɑ/ "letter" named for King Sejong the Great

Obviously, this one is a bit of a stretch, since Sejong is pronounced [sʰeːdʑoŋ]. It's as much a visual pun as anything else.

So I was just thinking about how to step up my joke/easter egg game in my conlangs...

Old Yateqtix: wololo "priest" ...a nod to AoE

Imperial Sinemi has some Overwatch references:

falā, "hawk, eagle, raptor", from Pharah
mikkli, "duelist, gladiator", from McCree
hānun, "duel", from High Noon

None yet...

... but when I saw this topic I immediately began contemplating adding a specific word for "arrow to the knee".

snappdragon wrote:None yet...

... but when I saw this topic I immediately began contemplating adding a specific word for "arrow to the knee".

Sounds good. Can I use "snappdragon" as a root for "old meme" ?

I am not much into in-jokes in my conlangs, but two (yet unexplored) Hesperic languages bear the names of friends of mine (Arne and Conni), and the Old Albic name of the Moon, Sino, was inspired by Sin, the Akkadian name of the moon-god.

Of course, all these words have intra-fictional etymologies which have nothing to with the extra-fictional references.

Duns Scotus wrote:

snappdragon wrote:None yet...

... but when I saw this topic I immediately began contemplating adding a specific word for "arrow to the knee".

Sounds good. Can I use "snappdragon" as a root for "old meme" ?

I have a better idea. Use it as a root for "nerd".

I'm afraid mine are a bit scholarly/esoteric, not so keen on the pop-culture importations myself.

Ätara

däne [də.ˈne] "man" (Athabaskan Dené/Diné)
brambä [ˈbɾam.bə] "house" (Malakulan rambaramp "cult-house")

Aikuu

náuru "ground, floor"
sushi "meat, flesh"
sharia "brain"

And more dubious as to whether it is actually an Easter-egg:
rukai "cook, prepare food" (there's no actual semantic connection to the Rukai language and people, it's just there)

Duns Scotus wrote:

I wrote:Loads; far too many to list here in fact, although they're probably too obscure for most ZBBers to appreciate.

Well I suppose if you don't mind, if you can't list them all, then perhaps you can give us a sampling of your favorites, with the origins explicated.

How about a conlang called "Zedeti", with noun classes called S, Z, H, N, P, V, and C, and an unproductive formerly iterative suffix /-ir/ which only appears in verbs meaning "move large quantities of something", "search for", "drink", and "vomit"? And that's just the start. It's a bit subtler than calling a spear /britnus/.

Frislander wrote:I'm afraid mine are a bit scholarly/esoteric, not so keen on the pop-culture importations myself.

Those are the best!

Along those lines, a root I'm particularly proud of:

suúdaa /suːdɑː/ "book" from the Byzantine Encyclopedia, the Suda.

alice wrote:How about a conlang called "Zedeti", with noun classes called S, Z, H, N, P, V, and C, and an unproductive formerly iterative suffix /-ir/ which only appears in verbs meaning "move large quantities of something", "search for", "drink", and "vomit"? And that's just the start.

I'm intrigued now. What does it all allude to?