Conlang Year: Week 24

2025-07-30

I'm back for one more round before Gen Con! This is a week I've been looking forward to as I start to dive into naming. The entire reason I came to be interested in conlangs in the first place are how bad and inconsistent fantasy names often are. As always, the prompts are here.

Day 162 - Organize your notes and make a list of time words

While Thekkish might have expressions that can convey time like the suggested "the sun is tall," the basic words for timekeeping are going to be nouns. Based on what I wrote last week, I think I'll end up making words for the following:

As in the real ancient world, hours are not a set amount of time - they're one twelfth of the time between sunset and sunrise, which will vary by season.

Day 163 - Create time-based words in your conlang

I find myself wanting to use my ordinal numbers as lexical sources for the hour and five minute units, but I'm not sure that Thekkish would render fractions by using the ordinal numbers the same way English does. After looking at how French, Spanish, German, and Russian make fractions, it appears this is a pretty common method, but I think I'm going to do it more like Japanese or Turkish. To that end, I've created the verb "to divide," tuɸ. Fractions are created by a phrase using the past tense of divide, the nominative case of the numerator, and the genitive case of the denominator.

1/12 = ʒɛʎ.tuɸ ʎa qɛb.ɛɪt

Here's the eight time words I'm working with:

Day 164 - Enter time words into your dictionary

Fortunately I did this as I went along, so no more work to do here, especially considering the time I spent researching how various languages form fractions.

Day 165 - Brainstorm options for naming places

Thekkish originated in a system of rivers much like Mesopotamia or the Gangetic Plain. Words for flowing water, islands, swamps, fords, bridges, ferries and the like will be common in place names. Thekkish itself comes from a group that migrated to the other side of a mountain range and that terrain means there will also be many features like hill, mountain, valley, or canyon.

Day 166 - Plan the forms you need for creating place names

Forms for naming places will use uninflected nouns. This form can also be turned into an adjective using the particle -sɪn. Names including a preposition phrase will also be common - above, below, in, on, nearer than, further than, etc.

Day 167 - Create the lexical forms you need for naming places

Thekkish already has words for stream, pond, wetland, rapids, and hill. I'm going to create words for island, ford, bridge, ferry, mountain, valley, and canyon and also formalize the preposition forms of near and far.

Here's what I came up with:

Day 168 - Create area-based place names

Here's a few of my early place names:

Alright, I'll be back on the other side of Gen Con!