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
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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

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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.

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
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This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1166549.html. You can comment here or there.

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
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Polysemarch 2/ Juneme 2

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We’re back to Morphambuary for another two bound morphemes!

I’ve just started playing with bullet journaling, so today’s going to be a Day Name for Calenyen.

From an earlier post, I have:

From the god/dess Alivetta/Alibetto comes alittao, the art of instrumental music in Bitrani; in Calenyena, this becomes Litvaano, music (as played), and Libbaano, music as sung.

Foremost among them is the name of the first day of the week:
bikbaano, Song-Day.

bik- by the way, is a shortening of bikdie, day; bik is used in all situations where the day is modified (holiday, song-day, birthday)

For Old Tongue, I’m going to pick another of those add-ons that are often marked by a single diacritical mark. This one, noen, means “now”, but only as attached to a verb: Stand Now, come now, destroy now.

Classically, it is marked by three lines |/ to the top right of the ideogram it is modifying. In texts using letters instead of ideograms, noen is sometimes written out and sometimes marked at the end of the word, as if the word was an ideogram.

Morphambruary 1
Febmanteau 1
Polysemarch
DisMayCourse
Juneme
Julectury
Augovernust
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Febmanteau 2

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1164210.html. You can comment here or there.

I continue on my I-missed-Conlanging adventure. Today is Julectury: Write a lecture, lesson or 140 letter pedagogical tweet each day explaining how your language works.

What I’m trying to create here would be two laypeople’s introductions to the languages, because man would it be cool if I could get enough vocabulary that someone could speak either of these languages. I’ll start with one small section of each language:

Gender:
Calenyen marks three genders:
useful (bon)
useless (byon)
and beyond-use (obon)

These are marked by the initial letter of the word:
a non-palatalized consonant for useful
a palatalized consonant for useless
a vowel for beyond-use

And they are described thus:
Useful nouns fulfil a needed function or are desirable: an engineer, a wrench, a weasel
Most people’s names begin this way.
Useless nouns are unneeded or actively get in the way, or are just less desirable: a bad unskilled worker, a broken pipe, a vermin-creature
There are some people who name more-children-than-needed this way.
Beyond Use are parts of the world that are too large to be measured in such terms: the earth, the ocean, the mountains, the river, the sun, the stars.
People who can trace their ancestry to an emperor are named with a vowel, okol*, at the beginning.

*Okol is the royal vowel; a vowel in general is kol

A new word can be coined by changing the original vowel. So, a useful rat, a useless Engineer, and so on. Changing a person’s name thus is considered extremely insulting.

(I’m much less far along on Old Tongue, as I’m sure you’ve noticed…)

Use

Old Tongue could be considered a dead language, in that, up until the second generation of Addergoole, it has had no native speakers on Earth; however, it has been in use as a scholarly/academic language for Ellehemaei for centuries, and is often used as a code language between non-academically minded Ellehemaei.

Alphabet

Its writing system is an alphabet with modifying diacritical marks.

It began as a ideogramic system, the diacritical marks serving as changes to the meaning of the symbol (showing time, movement, and so on); many scholars continue to use the ideogrammic meaning of the letters to convey a secondary meaning. For instance, a clever scribe might began a page on half-breeds with an illuminated letter whose ideogrammic meaning is “bastard child”.

Morphambruary
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Augovernust
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Julectury 2

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