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Protected: Night Oil – a story for Patreon
Mapping the Bitrani Territory
To Lilfluff’s Prompt: this is set in the immediate post-war era in my Reiassan setting. The Calenyena have, after centuries of war, finally conquered the Bitrani.
And now they need to deal with that conquered land.
“What did I do to offend the gods, the engineers, and the Empress?” Tetatelai Mapmaker grumbled at her goat, her partner, and the world in general. “Whose boots did I piss in, whose tent did I stumble against, what city did I misspell?”
“You know,” Openpennait Sword-bearer raised his aristocratic eyebrows at her. “Some people would take this as an honor. You are in charge of adding new territories to the Empress’ maps. That’s an impressive duty.” Continue reading
Looking for Themed Edally Filler/Guest Stories: The Winter Festival
Hello all,
I’m thinking of having a Winter Festival on Edally – that is, a week (or two) of guest fic covering Tienaabaa’s festival, the festival that takes place in midwinter.
Tienaabaa is the deity of the blue – mind, water, sky, cold. They are the deity of invention, of thinking, of philosophy. Their festival is at the coldest time of the year, and often involves showing off new creations or inventions, ice sculptures, snow castles (depending on your climate~) and feasting on stored foods, especially those that will only store through half the winter and not all of it (They’re practical people, the Calenyena). Gifts are hand-made in some way, never bought.
Is anyone interesting in writing a/several guest fics? Wordcount should be between 100 and 5,000 words, it should be set in Reiassan in the Edally era, and it should involve the Festival of Tienaabaa (Tienebrah).
We’ll probably make this concurrent with our festival of winter, feasting, and cold, so the last week of December.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1205294.html. You can comment here or there.
Random Conlang: “Thanks” in Calenyen
Okay, so, because of reasons, I want to have an idiomatic “thank you” for Calenyen.
And, because thank you is such a loaded concept, I wanted it to mean, essentially, “good shot.”
Like, the thing you say when your buddy just caught the enemy/the giant cat that was about to kill you with a well-aimed spear. It’s a thanks for assistance, without acknowledging debt owed.
So we have “shot” in the sense of an aimed attack with a distance weapon: vettu
And then we have good, a modifier meaning skilled and accurate: -one (like the end of loan)
Vettutone, “good shot”: “Thanks for the assist.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1189408.html. You can comment here or there.
Conlang all year round – SeNTAXember in September
Oh no, September is syntactical rules and I’ve already covered the easy bit, sentence order… wait, have I?
I covered Old Tongue’s in JuLECTURary, but not Calenyen’s.
Calenyen is Subject-Object-Verb, with most modifiers being tacked on to the end of words. Tense is added to the beginning of verbs (Goat-red food-low pasttense-Is-Loudly bleating-at).
Old Tongue Also normally adds modifiers after the subject of the modifier, a holdover from their system of diacritical marks in the original ideography.
I think Old Tongue does some funky things with tense, but I’m not sure what yet, or how. And I just learned about Anaphora and think Old Tongue uses this heavily.
Short post! But it doesn’t take many words to say S-O-V, V-S-O. 🙂
Morphambruary 1
Febmanteau 1
Polysemarch 1
DisMayCourse
Juneme 1
Julectury 1
Augovernust 1
Morphambruary 2
Febmanteau 2
Polysemarch/Juneme2
Juneme 2/2.5
AugGOVERNust 2
JuLECTURy 2
✒️
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1173456.html. You can comment here or there.
Conlang all year round – JuLECTURy in September
I’m going through 365 Conlang thingies beyond #Lexember one month a day (or so) until I get bored.
Here is the Julectury (“Write a lecture, lesson or 140 letter pedagogical tweet each day explaining how your language works”) which I wrote last week.
Calenyen is an agglutinating language with a habit of dropping syllables and an immensely casual attitude towards parts of speech (nouning verbs and so on).
It is also a language — like the culture itself — full of borrowing and thus loan-words, which, like most of the things the Calenyena borrows, it puts its own spin and flavor on.
So, for example, learnis see-do, dok, get, doket.
Child is Leroo; plural Leroone.
That makes school Learn-kids, doket-Leroone (and sometimes doket-oone
Or:
heleva is a Bitrani word from the Tabersi goddess Heleviaria, Deity of lines and boundaries. It means a meet and proper boundary, usually a property line, but also the lines between countries.
Teleba is the Calenyen word with the similar concept, agreed-upon border; but tol-tyeleba, toleba, is a border dispute over a bad border, something not allowable in the original Bitrani word.
Sentence Structure.
Old Tongue plays fast and use with sentence structure poetically, although in scholarly documents it tends to stick to one structure for the body of the text.
Most common is [Verb] [Subject] [Object], with modifiers coming directly after the modified object.
It is written from left to right.
Morphambruary 1
Febmanteau 1
Polysemarch 1
DisMayCourse
Juneme 1
Julectury
Augovernust 1
Morphambruary 2
Febmanteau 2
Polysemarch/Juneme2
Juneme 2/2.5
AugGOVERNust 2
✒️
SeNTAXember
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1172726.html. You can comment here or there.
Conlang all year round – Juneme in August
I’m going through 365 Conlang thingies beyond #Lexember (which is missing October…) one month a day (or so) up to September.(?) I’m skipping DismayCourse, shhh.
So I’m in Juneme again… Document or add to your phonetic inventory a phoneme a day, or add a rule to your phonotactics a day, or a Sandhi rule a day
Calenyen Phonatactics:
There will never be two vowel sounds in a row.
When borrowing words from other languages, the Calenyena almost always put another consonant between two vowels: Reiassan becomes reisassan. (ray-uh-san, rey-suh-san). Generally, when doing so, they will repeat a previous or following consonant; Calenyen loves repetition.
Old Tongue Phoneme:
Eron, (e) as in shed
This sound is a minor glyph, one that is often written down on the text line. Its original meaning is remaining, left-behind, and it is often used to indicate those fae that did not leave for Ellehem in the great departure.
Morphambruary 1
Febmanteau 1
Polysemarch 1
DisMayCourse
Juneme 1
Julectury
Augovernust 1
Morphambruary 2
Febmanteau 2
Polysemarch/Juneme2
✒️
Augovernust 2
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1169538.html. You can comment here or there.
Conlang all year round – Polysemarch/Juneme in August
I’m going through 365 Conlang thingies beyond #Lexember (which is missing October…) one month a day (or so) up to August. We’re back around to Polysemarch…
…Today I get to go in circles!
The entry for the Thorne-Alder has this section on the Arran/West Coast name for the taxonomic definition:
The Alder belongs to the family of spear-leaf trees, adavijamin, where adavi is “spear-blade” and “jamin” is “leaf”. In that family, they belong to the mainer sub-family, “mainer” meaning “grove” or “family group, tribe.”
In typical calenyen fashion, the word mainer has been borrowed and mutilated into Calenyen – raimain.
(it is a common practice, when the letters in a loan word do not quite work for Calenyen, to move letters about or repeat letters. In this case, it likely started as “ramainer” and was shortened).
So… raimain is “grove”.
And it has also come to mean those that stick together clannishly. A raimain is a clique, a tight-knit group that acts similarly.
Okay, I give up on trying to do another one of these for Old Tongue quite yet, and I want to hold off on doing something with DisMayCourse, so ON TO JUNE(me) it is.
(Sh), shenera, which can be down with the modifier -eleg (a curved shape like a sideways lower-case “c”, down on the bottom of the writing to become savera, (s).
The glyph for shenera can also mean child, as the word does, and with the modifier, savera means bastard child.
Linguists theorize that the word savera came from the word savo, birth.
Morphambruary 1
Febmanteau 1
Polysemarch
DisMayCourse
Juneme
Julectury
Augovernust
Morphambruary 2
Febmanteau 2
✒️
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1166549.html. You can comment here or there.
Conlang all year round – Febumantau in August again
I’m going through 365 Conlang thingies beyond #Lexember (which is missing October…) one month a day up to August.
And now we’re on to Febumantau for a second round…
and that means I can do another day! Yay!
If bikbaano is Song-Day, then the second day of the week comes from a deity we haven’t visited yet.
Which means we get to see a new deity.
This one is an old deity, one of the early Ideztozhyuha gods, Oonetoonen, from the roots Oonet, The Mountain, and noonen, climb (or oonen, a sacred climb): Oonetoonen is the deity of climbing mountains, of escape, of necessary things that are hard and painful.
And Oonetoonen’s day is the second day of the week, biknoonen
For Old Tongue I’m going to start with a compound word in English, bondroll –
okay, this one requires a bit of background.
If one is Kept (a magical type of submission), the praise from one’s Keeper (they who Keep you), is heady, pleasurable.
If your Keeper wants, they can get their Kept essentially drunk on praise – roll them with the Keeper-Kept bond…. thus bond-roll.
And in another calque…
Bond is tish, a lock, a seal.
Roll ends up being Otef – ote means wooziness; -ef verbs the noun.
Bond-Roll, translated directly ends up tishotef
(and never mind that there was already a word for that concept in Old Tongue…)
Morphambruary 1
Febmanteau 1
Polysemarch 1
DisMayCourse
Juneme 1
Julectury
Augovernust
Morphambruary 2
✒️
Polysemarch 2/ Juneme 2
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1165372.html. You can comment here or there.