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#WIPWorldBuilders / #WorldBuildingWednesday – The Bear Empire

I’ve discovered (thanks to @jessmahler ) this Twitter community called #WIPWorldBuilders.

I picked a world to work on this month as so: 

* a Verse I’m currently writing in.
* not an Urban Fantasy world, one that’s in a completely different world
* Obv. not a fanfic setting

(though, let’s be honest, in most of my fanfic I’ve done enough worldbuilding that I could probably do this – however, they’re all urban fantasy, woe)

Which led me to Bear Empire (I’m writing Found Down Below in the Bear Empire Cyber Era.)

So here’s a tidied-up first seven days of that, with an attempt to get it into categories that’ll be useful down the road.

The calendar: https://twitter.com/pepperdaphoenix/status/1212074023926083588 Continue reading

Hello, in Calenyen

So I’ve been playing with this #WIPWorldBuilders worldbuilding challenge on Twitter, and thinking about doing my own for Mastodon/The Fediverse, so when @DMoonfire greeted me this morning, I asked him how one greeted someone in (one of) his conlang(s).

Then I realized I had no way to say hello in Calenyen!

So I fixed that.

Hello

kettaar /kɛt.tɑɹ/ (from ket hey, and taar, you), Hello.

kettaarte /kɛt.tɑɹ.tɛ/ Hello (to you two)

kettaarbe /kɛt.tɑɹ.bɛ/ Hello (to a group/herd)

kettaarne /kɛt.tɑɹ.njɛ/ Hello (to an unknown group, as in greeting an audience)

Conlang, Calenyen

I wanted to write the Calenyen classic blessing-on-parting, “smooth roads, clear skies.”

Turns out I had almost none of the words! Well, I had 2 out of 4 if you don’t consider the implied “May you always have” or “let there always be”.

What I had:

the word for under-clothes comes from the word lur, meaning smooth, easy: from kiprat-lur to kiplur and eventually down to kur.

eetan – sky

Subject-verb agreement
-unu beyond use (the sun, the moon, the stars)

ah- makes a verb be “always”

Plurals:
ootun beyond use , plural
-ak useful, singular
-anan useful, plural

Two: -te or -tye
herd: -be or -bye
Many, unknown: -ne or -nye

New words:
kaab – to be

tidzieg – a path, a road
tidziegnye – Many roads
gud – clear

Which brings us to

ahkaabanan todziegnye lur
(Smooth Roads, or “may your roads always be smooth.”

ahkaabootun eetan gud.
(Clear skies, or “may your skies always be clear.”)

ahkaabanan todziegnye lur
(Smooth Roads)

 

 

Lexember – Technology

Time for verbs!

Or just a single verb…

We’re going to start with the concept of to count, to sum up.

This is a very old word, first recorded as someone counting their sheep.

fuap is the root word.

fuaplu began as “one who counts.”  Now it means, well, “computer.”  That is, a machine.

BUT from there we go in two directions.

boe (bowie) comes from an ancient word meaning small and now means tiny.  That would be boefu – a microcomputer.

On the other hand, you have the really big, massive things used to grind huge amounts of information.  We have noen (No-en, like noel), from an ancient word meaning great.  So a Noenfu is a megacomputer.

Bonus: noenbeajue, megacorp.

oh, and “tek”, technology, which comes from gaoz, “craft,” and –mɛdio, the study of.  and now is back to Gaoz meaning “technology, things someone can technomance, things that use electricity.”

Speaking of, I have enough words left on this monster to contemplate electricity.

We start with the ancient word – a loan-word at that, peumbas, -as being the ending for “forces that are not quite known.”

This word originally meant bright light, as far as we know.  It is now the root word for all things electrical.

Lexember Day Three – Mama Bear

Mother Bear is our concept for today.

We’re going to start with bear, the actual word for it, which is nonggo

You can find this word in only a couple places in modern Bear or even in Old Bear: the Mountains in the far north were originally Nonggofa and now nonggofa means “northern cold” or “inhospitable and cold” or “angry and cold.”

The other place you can find it is in the name of the Mother Bear.

 

Prɘrta Nonggo, Mother Bear.  Neither of these words are used when talking to your actual mother or an actual bear; and actual bear would be called

Kruimjabrown-sharp, from kruimma (brown, obs., used only in formations now) and mimja, sharp

This is a way of describing things that are not sacred but near the sacred; that’s how even kruimma became a word not used directly. Now one says nuruw, which was once a word for dead leaves,

nurniew, leafs, and –nuruw, dead.

 

Prɘrta means, in closest translation, mother-est, the most mother, mother above all.  Your own mother would be Prer or prepre. 

This one came out kind of short.

Lexember Day “Two” – Comfortable?

Today we’re going to move on to COMFORTABLE.

The word in Old Bear come from two words:

Tcha – this word, used almost entirely as a prefix by the time of Old Bear, means “Like, as, or with.”

Spes –

Spes comes from the Before Words word spezzi, which meant the best way to be; as a matter of fact, a few remaining records show that this was considered to be one of the major tenents of the faith of the Sunrise People*

Tcha-spes, like the proper way to be … Chaspis, comfort.

But wait, we don’t want comfort, we want to be comfortable

so we want to add a –fa to the end.  The -fa just means – is this way, or -is capable of being this way.

EXCEPT sfa is sort of an awkward way ot talking

so in words ending in s

it shifts,

thus, we end up with

chaspissa. 

now, as for pronounciation

first syllable rhymes with chap

second one sounds like piss, but with a zzzz’d out s

and then the third is nearly ‘za, like the end of pizza.

 

 

* Once again, our terms are limited by the Bear-centric historical records.  What we can tell – much of this is from hidden Elk records or from mentions in other nations’ histories – is that the Sunrise people were a people either before the spirits choce tribes, or before the spirits were known to people at all.  The Sunrise People were one of three groups – the other two being the  Moonlight People and the Earth People – known to speak the Before Words.

 

 

#Lexember – Day One (shhh) – “Keep Me Safe.”

Leave me a prompt here – http://www.lynthornealder.com/2018/11/30/lexember-is-coming/ 

We’re going to start with Safe!

This comes from something that is referred to, when linguists talk about it at all, as the Before Words. It’s a common ancestor to several languages, including those that fall under “Bear” – Bear, Cat, and Fox – those that fall under “The Leege” – Deklegion and Haloran, Thuthion and Roasti – and two other sets.

Interestingly, while Elk falls under this, it does so only very remotely and there is a great deal of argument therein.

But back to safe.

ðeckk

ðeckk is from the Before Words, meaning “to look over, observe.”

This became thechk in Oldest Bear*, which means “guard.”

This word split: theach became “protect”, while theek became “observe, study.”

(in both cases, the central vowels are pronounced as two separate vowel sounds)

Old Bear uses toa before a verb to implore or command a non-specific target, such as if one was asking the world to rain.

It uses ro before a verb to suggest it is happening to oneself or one’s group, where one’s “group” is a close-knit – a marriage or siblings or a small team.”

(there is also a personal pronoun for only-I, but it is generally considered rather antisocial to use it, and it is only used in magery/wizardry in situations where one wishes to remove oneself from the group around one and cut off all connections.)

Thus keep me/we safe

toa ro theach

except that we need agreement.

Again, this is asking the world.  So (world) guard me, is toa ro theachow.  

 

*Old Bear is considered the root language of Bear, Cat, and Fox languages, which it is.  What it is not, linguistically, is any closer to modern Bear than it is to modern Cat or Fox, nor was it begun by the Bear people any more than any other of the two.  Oldest Bear is an older form of that language

 

#Lexember is coming!

I decided the Bear Empire needed Ancient Bear, a tongue used in magery, rituals, religion, and medicine that looks nice to chant.

And here is Lexember.

I’m gonna do this backwards: I’m gonna start making up a few words, and then work the language around them.  I have a couple ideas for phoneme and morpheme sets, but since this one is for flavor in books, I might steal the grammar of Latin wholesale.

First, I need words.

So I’m taking prompts for words.  I will TRY to do a noun and a verb every day, but I’m not going to stress about this.

And past experience has shown that if you ask me for the word for cheese, I end up with the whole dairy system.

BUT

Don’t ask me for the word for cheese, please.

Instead, think about a spell (If you’re reading Running in the Bear Empire or if you’re Eseme and reading OTStrange, you’ve seen some spells).

Then think about the words you might use for that spell.

Or just suggest a spell and I’ll go from there.

Go!

 

  1.  the spell for making your sleeping space safe and comfortable
  2. Does how you would address the Mother Bear count?
  3. Vermin. As in the spell to get rid of vermin from your house.

A Last Conlang Word going in to April (written for Patreon)

Since the theme for this month is Libraries and Librarians, and I got a new pen I want to try out (image coming tomorrow), today’s post is the Calenyen words around Libraries. From  December 16, 2015-

inventrix asked for books, which got handled a while back:

turnie, noun, book
turniete, 2 books
turniebe, a shelf of books
turnine, some books

So I figured I’d handle shelf and library!

Library, first, is a book-place, Turnietan. This originally referred to any depository of books. Now, a bookseller is a Liezturnie, Seller, of book and a library is a Turnietapon, a book place, scholarly.

And in the library there are shelves!

A shelf is a birtun, from a word which originally meant ledge; a bookshelf is a birtunturnie.

A collective plural of shelves is usually considered a bookcase, unit of shelves. If you collectivize that, birtunbebe, you end up with a slang word for a large gathering of shelves, a storeroom.