Conlang Year: Week 9
The weeks start coming and they don't stop coming! This one ran a bit long. I'm going to reveal a secret - I don't actually do these daily; I do them once a week on Tuesday evenings after my RPG session. I went a bit wild this week and nearly doubled the number of words in my dictionary while working on Day 61, which meant the work spilled over into Wednesday hence the late post. I had a real bear of a time coming up with words to grammaticalize into the adpositions that I ended up with. It's done now, though, and I had fun!
Once again, the prompts are here.
Day 57 - Select any nominal inflections to provide in the dictionary
I'm going through the dictionary and adding inflections to all the nouns in all the cases I've provided. One thing that has surprised me is that I've decided that weather phenomenon like wind, rain, and thunder are animate and plants are inanimate.
Day 58 - Organize and clean up your dictionary
I did this as part of day 57. This is a pain in the neck but I'll be glad I have it in the future. There are definitely some words where unstressed syllables are getting deleted later in the process as I say them out loud, so I'm picking up some irregular forms here.
Day 59 - Update your dictionary to include all forms
I added these forms to my documentation when I created them, so no extra work here!
Day 60 - Explore ideas for more adpositions
These are important for a language. I'll start with some basics that I'll definitely want in Thekkish:
above/below
in/out
against/for
before/during/after
because
of
than
until
with
who/what/when/where/why/how
if
for (purpose)
therefore
Day 61 - Create sources for new adpositions
In the process of working on Day 61's words, I realized I'd completely left w out of my generation notes I was using to come up with word stems. I've added it back in now and I'm going to fit it in to a few of the words I came up with while working on these adpositions.
Here's today's new words! I've only included the post sound change versions of the roots rather than trying to copy six different forms of each word from my dictionary to the blog.
xɪɾ noun human, person
sɪn.ɢu adjective near
xmɛ.dwa adjective far
wað.bøn noun sun
daɪ.bɾu noun moon
sθɪ.wom noun mind/intellect
twɛ noun soul
ɣʒɪŋ noun spouse
ʃʌɾ noun sibling
dwʌq noun child
ɾɪm.ʃθoŋ noun kin, clan
nɛð noun truth
ɢyɾ noun beauty
ðax.ʃm noun fear
ɛɪɾ.ɸm noun morning
qyð.ɸm noun evening
ŋwɛʃ.xaɸ transitive verb to weigh
Here's the roots I chose for each adposition followed by the base word and how I chose to reduce it to use as an adposition
above - head | sɛɪ.byŋʃ -> sɛɪ
below - foot | Ʒðaɪ -> Ʒða
in - house | θypʌ -> θy
out - field | ŋaɪ -> ŋa
against - weapon | Ʌθɣy -> Ʌθ
for (support) - hand | ʃaɪ -> ʃa
before - to rain | saɪ.ʃaɪ -> saɪ
during - to flood | ɪx.qyʒ -> ɪx
after - to harvest | aɪt.βɾad -> aɪt
because - to hold | xɛɪ.pʌ.ɛɪ -> xɛɪp
of/with - near | sɪn.ɢu -> sɪn
than - to weigh | ŋwɛʃ.xaβ -> ŋwɛʃ
until - morning | ɛɪɾ.ɸʌm -> ɛɪɾ
who - person | xɪɾ.a -> xɪ
what - rock | ʃɪθ.βan -> ʃɪθ
when - sun | wað.byn -> waθ
where - hill | qaɪ.a -> qa
why - mind | sθɪ.wum -> sθɪ
how - to fight | aɸ.ʎaɢ -> aɸ
if - fear | ðax.ʃma -> ðaxʃ
for (purpose) - kin or clan | ɾɪm.ʃθuŋ -> ɾɪm
therefore - dog | xʃu -> ʃu
Day 62 - Consider how adpositions and case will interact
I've marked whether my adpositions came from transitive verbs or nouns. For the time being, that means that the noun versions will be used with the accusative case and the verb versions with the genitive.
I'm not going to bother having a preferred order of phrases since I don't see Thekkish as being supremely concerned with word order. The cases are doing a lot of the work that word order does in English and I like the idea of Thekkish poets being able to play around with word order in order to achieve the effects they're going for.
Day 63 - Write an introduction to adposition phrases
I've updated my documentation, moving a lot of the rules about sound changes, word order, class, and case from lose notes in empty cells on my IPA chart into their own separate document, to which I've added the rules for adpositions as well.
For the time being, I'm not going to change the meaning of adpositions based on the case of the word they're applied to, but that's something I could see changing my mind on in the future.