What words do you have as basic terms in your conlangs that are of specific interest to you?
For example, it's been said that Toki Pona has no words for left or right, but does have a word for "transsexual". (From what I can find, it's actually two morphemes, but you get the idea.)
In my conlang, I have separate morphemes for the computer science concepts of "set", "array" and "linked list". There is also a word meaning "times sixteen to the power of".
And the eskimos, as we all know, have a hundred words for snow.
I'm mostly interested in words that are important to you personally, not to your conpeople, but I guess those qualify too.
Falgwian has like 18 different words for "bush" or "shrub." But that wasn't of my own choice. I didn't create Falgwian after all. The Ancient Falgwians apparently felt it necessary to distinguish a tall bush from a fat bush from a slump bush from a bush which is good for foraging. There are also words for a tall tree and a short tree and a really tiny tree and a tree which is on the verge of falling down
I tried to give Tasak Nos a distinctly foreign feel in its grammar and root semantic sets, while keeping the phonology and basic typology boring -- I probably had too much fun with it, but what the hell. Some of the odder words:
<xok> [ˈxokʰ] n-adj. (irregular noun used only in genitive) red-hot, glowing like an ember; colored like a red ember, subset of <repek> "red and/or yellow"
<kisad> [ˈkʰisad] vt. (all arguments are optional, but transitive verbs may take accusative arguments; intransitive may not) seem like; call to mind, [nominative] reminds [locative] of [accusative]; show signs of being : recognize :: <kisad> : think about; base verb for look/sound/smell/etc like X
<tasa> [ˈtʰasa] vt. speak (a language etc, and be understood); converse (with a person in locative, about something in accusative); say something habitually
<fahus> [ˈɸahus] vi. speak nonsense (at someone in lative), babble; speak an unknown language; barbariate
<raba> [ˈɾaba] n. pattern; design (in fabric etc), rhythm, pervasive smell; atmosphere; repeating or continuous sensory phenomenon
<toka> [tʰokʰa] n. shape, outline; dot, spot, mark, sudden sound or smell; limited or bordered sensory phenomenon
I'm rather enjoying giving Eastern Aten words a lot of (idiomatic) meanings;
Guǎ
wax, wax-like
to inscribe in wax, in a wax tablet
to write down, to scribble in a hurry
to know and soon forget
a poor memory, someone with a forgetful memory
forgetful or easily forgotten
a top secret, Burn After Reading kind of item
The character for this word is a square with a horizontal line through it; one stroke in writing. (But five in printing.)
I have to have words for at least the following types of tree: oak, elm, maple, birch, and willow.
Also, I tend to give "upper arm" a separate word (either just separate from "arm", or distinguished from "lower arm" and potentially having a word that means both combined).
There seems to also be a tendency for me to want MANLY words (n.b. as opposed to simply masculine) to start with /b/, /m/, /k/, an unvoiced dorsal fricative (e.g. /h ħ x χ/), /st/, or /ʃt/ (whichever of those are allowed as syllable onsets in the conlang in question). But I don't think this was what the OP was after.
My conlang, Kuurdang, has separate words for something that is brand new and something that is very young, though the words are related. There is also a word for something that is not old, yet not young.
Zhoo foz aawem yaachaa.
We have only a minute (Lit. We minute only have).
Baranxeï has two separate kinship term systems, one that is solely used for one's own relatives and one for somebody else's. The former is highly descriptive, whereas the latter tends towards classificatory. And I find it awesome.
In that vein, there are also three terms for 'child': ostī - one's own child kunsī - someone else's child sundźī - a child (a 'youngling', quite literally)
I also accidentally created an interesting pair of homonyms. kuna can be either 'say, speak, talk' or 'give birth; beget; have a child' - interesting in the sense of "I can use that for some puns".
And I agree with valiums, polysemy can be fun. laukna for example, means:
1. to tie, to bind
2. to unite, to join
3. to marry
4. to do magic
5. to link (as in, online)
andömach - meat of a very young lamb ärseneth - non-fresh (but still drinkable) milk belenchö - husbandry of milk-giving animals (e.g. goats, sheep... but not pigs or horses) thimene - a pregnant sheep törwes - an injured/limping sheep (neither of these has any relationship whatsoever to the generic word for 'sheep', which is bäth... possibly onomatopoeic) tuteon - to engage in sexual reproduction (for non-milk-giving animals, e.g. pigs or horses)
Cathbad wrote:A bunch of these in Trurian: tuteon - to engage in sexual reproduction (for non-milk-giving animals, e.g. pigs or horses)
Yeah, the Trurians really like their sheep...
Or perhaps they just love sheep milk (or milk in general). So much so it seems that if animals which give up milk fuck they have a word for it, if there's a pair of animals fucking which don't give up milk, then they've a word for that too. Hah, I love it.
From:
Economic Left/Right: -7.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.69
To:
Economic Left/Right: -6.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.33
Cathbad wrote:A bunch of these in Trurian: tuteon - to engage in sexual reproduction (for non-milk-giving animals, e.g. pigs or horses)
Yeah, the Trurians really like their sheep...
Or perhaps they just love sheep milk (or milk in general). So much so it seems that if animals which give up milk fuck they have a word for it, if there's a pair of animals fucking which don't give up milk, then they've a word for that too. Hah, I love it.
Well, yeah. I mean obviously you can expect different types of things from animals reared for milk vs. animals not reared for milk... so it's obvious that different kinds of words should be used to denote their reproductive activities.
The cultural background is of course that the rearing of milk-giving vs. non-milk-giving animals is quite segregated and stratified - in a single village, families that specialize in rearing horses or pigs (and sell horses or pork to other families) are regarded as much, much lower in social status than those that own Sheep (since sheep also give wool etc.). Goats are somewhere in between, while cows are considered very, well... vulgar. This stems a bit from former nomadic values - cattle were considered a mark of Settled Culture, due to their relatively large size, use as agricultural draft animals etc. And agriculture is seen as implying even lower status on the internal peasant hierarchy than husbandry. (Subsistence horticulture yes, but having fields as an independent peasant is severely frowned upon - even though at least some members of all livestock-rearing families do agricultural work for nobles, who own most agricultural land...)
Cathbad wrote:A bunch of these in Trurian: tuteon - to engage in sexual reproduction (for non-milk-giving animals, e.g. pigs or horses)
Yeah, the Trurians really like their sheep...
Or perhaps they just love sheep milk (or milk in general). So much so it seems that if animals which give up milk fuck they have a word for it, if there's a pair of animals fucking which don't give up milk, then they've a word for that too. Hah, I love it.
Well, yeah. I mean obviously you can expect different types of things from animals reared for milk vs. animals not reared for milk... so it's obvious that different kinds of words should be used to denote their reproductive activities.
The cultural background is of course that the rearing of milk-giving vs. non-milk-giving animals is quite segregated and stratified - in a single village, families that specialize in rearing horses or pigs (and sell horses or pork to other families) are regarded as much, much lower in social status than those that own Sheep (since sheep also give wool etc.). Goats are somewhere in between, while cows are considered very, well... vulgar. This stems a bit from former nomadic values - cattle were considered a mark of Settled Culture, due to their relatively large size, use as agricultural draft animals etc. And agriculture is seen as implying even lower status on the internal peasant hierarchy than husbandry. (Subsistence horticulture yes, but having fields as an independent peasant is severely frowned upon - even though at least some members of all livestock-rearing families do agricultural work for nobles, who own most agricultural land...)
I bet your conpeople make some delicious concheese. Mmm constructed cheese.
From:
Economic Left/Right: -7.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.69
To:
Economic Left/Right: -6.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.33
Kvan wrote:
I bet your conpeople make some delicious concheese. Mmm constructed cheese.
They even have a productive nominal suffix for different kinds of cheese. (And no, I did not make this up just now, I've had it for like 2 years or so.)
Kvan wrote:Alright as a cheese lover I find that fucking phenomenal as well as justifiable.
Is that suffix added to the animal from which the milk came? For instance cow-cheese, sheep-cheese etc.
Indeed: bäth 'sheep' > bäthnas 'sheep cheese'
But you can also use it with adjective roots, and any other root you want basically: redhaí 'of good, strong taste' > redhnas 'good/tasty cheese' dunal 'garlic' > dunalnas 'cheese [eaten/garnished with] garlic' tar 'wheel' > tarnas 'wheel-shaped cheese' / 'a wheel of cheese'
One of my earlier versions of Terpish had the word xisle (pronounced with a voiced uvular implosive stop as the first consonant) that meant "the loss of motivation to restart a project that occurs after having invested a great deal of time in that project only for an accident to ruin the whole thing before completion".
"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."
Words that are important to me in some way? Hmm. Well, the Bengedian word dons "thing" was the very first Bengedian noun I ever came up with. It's always held some sort of special importance to me because of that.
As far as unusual words like some examples above, I can't really say that Bengedian has that many.
At, casteda dus des ometh coisen at tusta o diédem thum čisbugan. Ai, thiosa če sane búem mos sil, ne?
Also, I broke all your metal ropes and used them to feed the cheeseburgers. Yes, today just keeps getting better, doesn't it?
Eddy wrote:One of my earlier versions of Terpish had the word xisle (pronounced with a voiced uvular implosive stop as the first consonant) that meant "the loss of motivation to restart a project that occurs after having invested a great deal of time in that project only for an accident to ruin the whole thing before completion".
Would that be used if, for instance, you were writing a long post on the ZBB (or a long blog post, or something like that, only for your finger to accidentally move the hypersensitive mouse pad up to the X in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen, then to click thinking you're clicking somewhere else, with the "WARNING: YOU ARE CLOSING MULTIPLE TABS" warning disabled "for convenience," thus closing out of the browser window thus losing your post?
bulbaquil wrote:
Would that be used if, for instance, you were writing a long post on the ZBB (or a long blog post, or something like that, only for your finger to accidentally move the hypersensitive mouse pad up to the X in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen, then to click thinking you're clicking somewhere else, with the "WARNING: YOU ARE CLOSING MULTIPLE TABS" warning disabled "for convenience," thus closing out of the browser window thus losing your post?
Yeah, I've felt that feeling before.
Definitely.
"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."
Here's mine, from Aidisese (copied from an old thread from CBB):
The word is agnamusa, which originally was derived as a shortcut way of saying the idiom "hoida o da agnamusa". Basically, both mean this:
"to feel the feeling of endlessly yearning for, going to, and reaching towards something wonderful that is hard to describe and that is both unreachable and hard to understand, and the simultaneous experiencing of various emotions, including but not limited to frustration, bliss, and other overwhelming sensations, from this eternal longing for something that is impossible yet, potentially, possibly possible"
Agnamusa literally translates to something like "strive-eternally", and is a nonsensical compounding of the words "agna" (which is a verb meaning either to try, strive, proceed towards, journey to, struggle towards or for, etc., and itself doesn't have an exact English equivalent, as you can tell) and "musa", which means eternal or eternally. The idiom it was based on, as well as its later usage as a standalone word, was originally devised by an Aidisese writer and poet, whose name I have not thought of yet, but he's basically the Aidisese equivalent of Shakespeare, particularly with the making up new words category. As I said in the idiom thread, the closest real-world equivalents would probably be either the German Sehnsucht, the Portuguese Saudade, or the Greek Pothos.
Personally myself I associate this kind of concept with Scarborough Fair (the song), but I think that explaining that would make no sense to anybody here.
Motivated by silly arguments I get into with my friends since we all stay up until like 3am at college, all of the conlangs I have ever created (and subsequently abandoned, except for my current one) divides up words concerning days differently.
Example in Amòssi (possibly abandoned, not sure yet):
*vřiëndann - within the next 24 hours ("today" and "tomorrow")
*ovvlar - sometime after the next time the speaker sleeps ("tomorrow")
*qluëndann - within the past 24 hours ("today" and "yesterday")
*ëndann - any period of 24 hours ("day)
*corrkal - the time between sunset and sunrise ("night")
*esôssķal - the time between sunrise and sunset ("day")
The verb tlác in South Eresian has an extremely wide semantic field; it means "write,"
"draw," "make patterns," "plant (a garden, crops)," "clean..." Basically, it refers to any sort of pattern- or order-making.
And then the word nóhos would seem to be exactly equivalent to cybrxkhan's agnamusa, with áunaxos being the unknowable object of the longing.
