What did you accomplish today? [2011–2019]

[Khemehekis]

Yesterday

I added over 280 new words to my Kankonian dictionary.

First, I went over the girl's name and boy's name appendices to the LCV and created words like these:

ateal: abigail, lady's maid
shflitzas (pl.): tawdry lace
tzaroopis sabavik: Becky (less attractive woman who gets sex) (lit. "toothless Stacy")
swedakhor na khenil: Cassandra (lit. "prophet of sand")
halite-he-maimais: Lolita complex (lit. "everyone-as-pedophile")
hakkik: madonna (skateboard trick)
oorpouzmid: erinaceid (oor, like + pouzmid, hedgehog)
Firentzik: Florentine (Firentze, Florence + -ik, -ian)
halwalomis: irenicism (hal-, all + walomis, pacifism)
shipwirfar: Magdalene (ex-prostitute)
Santamanika: Santa Monica (borrowed from Earth, obviously)
iul na Arafni: Ophelia syndrome (iul, syndrome; na, of; Arafni, Kankonian fictional character)
phiopal: phyllid
yiem na Asuo: Robin Hood tax (yiem, tax; na; Asuo, name of khemehekis from Kankonia's Culture War era who promoted redistribution of incomes)
hasegla: selenite
borbophslip: selenide (borboph, selenium + -slip, -ide)
kaipol: rose of Sharon, Korean rose (native name in some old Kankonian language)
kheress: sherry (borrowed from Spanish)
bankisoda yughela: Tiffany problem (lit. "ancient suffragette")
bospha dres: Aaron's rod, great mullein (lit. "common mullein")
abrahamizh: Abrahamic (the name Abraham + -izh, used in making adjectives from people's names)
hamdzheyi: smart-alecky (hamdzhea, smart aleck + -i, adjective ending)
vashmarya: Byronic locks
shafarah: Douglas fir, Oregon pine (To think that I've created thousands of words for animal and plants species of the human bioswath, and up until 60,000+ words, I had overlooked a plant so familiar as the Douglas fir!)
dilanizh: Dylanesque
Yeilik: Eli, Yalie (I also added some words for students of Kankonian colleges, to balance it out)
frankowizh: Francoist
franziskizh: Franciscan
naoyebanid: eugenic (na + oyebanid, eugenics)
ashvidago: Glennia pylotis
kopoi: Graham's number (from a Keitelese name)
heki dres: Grant's zebra (heki, zebra + dres, common)
heki: jerry-built (This was right next to "heki dres" in my spreadsheet file, but bears no etymological relation to Grant's zebra at all! I swear, it's a 60,000-to-1 coincidence. This word comes from heka, shack + -i).
helzekisid: to jimmy (hel-, prefix for with + zekisid, crowbar)
gripfaswel: johnnycake
samarzha: Johnny-go-to-bed-at-noon, meadow salsify, showy goat's-beard, meadow goat's-beard (Tragopogon pratensis)
levizh: Levite
hokeb: loganberry (hybrid of hokul, raspberry + okeb, blackberry)
noahizh: Noachian
algo: richie (slang for a rich kid) (algas, rich, shortened with the suffix -o for slangy apocopations)
khowiy: Russell Man, dinosauroid
gibishpi: Solomonic (~ column)
ampispa: spencer (jacket)
trayas*asi: stannish (trayas*ass, stan, which literally translates as "must know", + -i)
hhaurizba: St. Stephen's wort, enchanter's nightshade
iul na Rako: Timothy syndrome
Troya: Troy (city) (borrowed from Earth)
ziyen na zadoergeter: John Wayne syndrome (lit. "problem of the Zadoer-soldier"; Zadoer was a ninth-century Hegheosik historian who first described the symptoms of PTSD in empire soldiers)
iuiyas: willies, heebie-jeebies
bipflip: silly Billy, silly billy goo-goo
zeivirizh: Xaverian

My next task was to go through all the sapient species and all the inhabited planets in the Lehola Galaxy and make sure I had the five fields for each species in my dictionary:

1. Species name (e.g. human)
2. Nature of species (e.g. human nature)
3. Noun for study of species (e.g. anthropology)
4. Noun for student of species (e.g. anthropologist)
5. Adjective for study of species (e.g. anthropological)

I did this for all the species I had named, and discovered that the words for some fields were still missing for some species, and other species I hadn't added at all (such as turogh)! I also named species that had long been lacking anything more than a planet-inhabitant name (the equivalent of having a word for "Terran" but not for "human").

The inhabitants of Psittacotia are now parrotpeople; of Cetonia are now wama; of Pluos are now homa; of Chatony are now nilas (sing. nila); of Syprian are now tamepo; of Nepentha are now sapioferns; of Saaben are now apiil; of Doyatl are now glomas (sing. glomos); of Amantar and Balkuna now albhikars (sing. albhikar); of Nexon now kektes (sing. kektas); of Ptasiklo now klaeptou (sing. klaeps); of Natwri now pynas (sing. pyna); and of Mysticoidea now kyuphi.

Today

Then, once I had gotten more of a sense of the pynas who live on Natwri (as I mentioned before, they're from the tuban phylum like the Domeheads of Bodus, except from a class with hair), I created an writing system for my first Natwrian language. The language's name is Varutitá. This language, from a people whose religion is obsessed with powers of two, has 32 phonemes: 16 vowels (8 monophthongs and 8 diphthongs) and 16 consonants (8 plosives, 2 nasals, 2 fricatives, and 4 approximants). Their script is an abjad with featural consonants; the vowel marks are called osons. The Varutitá abjad also has a dibœná, a diacritic for unexpected accents which looks just like an accent aigu.

The Varutitá have a base of eight in their number system, as pynas have eight fingers and eight toes. I also created an octal point, plus sign, minus sign, multiplication sign, division sign, exponent sign, parentheses, equals sign, less-than sign, and greater-than sign.

Then some punctuation: period, comma, question mark, exclamation point, quotation marks, parentheses, colon, semicolon/dash, irony mark, and swung dash/fill-in-the-blank.

I also worked Kankonian's number word system up to atrasha. Go to http://khemehekis.angelfire.com/basic.htm and search for "quintillion" on the page to find my number list.

Tonight

I should get a lot of sleep tonight.

[loglorn]

I finished figuring out the affixes and the verb template in Yashuhay, and made a few example sentences:

thokóoh
thu-aka-Ø-º?-°:h
2s.SUBJ-know-"ERG"-VOL-IPFV
'you know'

kokákukooh
ko-ka-aka-Ø-°t-º?-°:h
g9.OBJ-NEG-know-"ERG"-2s.SUBJ-VOL-IPFV
'you don't know [it.g9]'

eshángenge henyáathuupya umú eshóma
e-shangenge hang-yáathu-Ø-º?-°pya umú e-shoma
LOC-last.year 1s-be.at-ITR-VOL-PFV on LOC-dry.forest
'Last year I was in the coastal dry forest for a while.'

º and °, which i admit look basically the same in this font, are used to mark a floating roundness+backing, and VOL is just glossed as º? because honestly it's very hard to pinpoint a "base form" for that morpheme.

[Vlürch]

Some new words for the as-of-yet-unnamed vaguely Ural-Altaic conlang that uses Chinese characters. The most important thing is that I now have two words meaning "cute", one that's only used in reference to humans and one that can be used in reference to anything. The latter is derived from a Proto-Uralic word meaning some kind of female animal (*kewe) because it's a phonetically similar word to Japanese 可愛い (kawaii) and Mandarin 可愛 (kě'ài).

I have the sound change /we/ -> /o/, so I had to prevent that somehow. The way I went is adding an adjectival suffix that gets dropped entirely because it's a commonly used word that may also be used as a diminutive (and compounds already drop a lot of stuff), which may not be 100% realistic but well. Obviously, it uses those same characters as the Japanese and Chinese terms as well, so now I have 可愛 (kebe) meaning "cute" as an adjective, 可愛 (keo) as a noun meaning "cute thing" and 可愛動 (keoma) as a noun meaning "being cute, acting cute", which is pretty funny since Keoma is a really epic Finnish prog metal band. There's also the adverb 可愛然 (keben), meaning "cutely", and of course 可愛女 (keoninge) and 可愛男 (keburu) meaning "cute girl" and "cute guy" respectively, and of course more derivations can be made. The /kebe/ -> /keo/ in 可愛女 is due to syllable simplification in compounds. There's a lot of that to keep things concise and cute...

Obviously, these words for cuteness-related stuff were the most important step in the conlang's development so far.

Also, not today, but I didn't post about it at the time so I'll post about it now since I think it's kinda cool: I coined a 75% Uralic word for Earth that sounds almost the same as the Finnish word for Earth (maapallo), even though the pallo in Finnish is a Germanic loanword so they'd be false cognates. The word is a compound of 地 (maga) /mɑgɑ/ ("earth, ground"), derived from Proto-Uralic *maɣe ("land, earth"), which in compounds becomes /mɑː/, followed by 球 (pugel), a mash-up coinage from Proto-Uralic *peŋe(-rä) ("circle; to turn round, rotate") and Proto-Yeniseian *puʔl ("round, to twirl") to originally mean "circle" but repurposed to mean "sphere" when it was discovered that the Earth isn't flat, and because that becomes /boːl/ in compounds after a vowel, the word for Earth is 地球 (mābōl).

I know aesthetically and irregularly mashing words together like that is amateurish conlanging, but I think it's fun and an easy way to create vaguely Transeurasian words, and also looking up words for this purpose has led to some interesting "discoveries" of words that could maybe possibly actually be cognates... but eh, if I think some words are cognates in real life, they're almost guaranteed to not be cognates. Well, whatever, at least I'm having some fun conlanging and on the side it helps a little with memorisation of vocabulary in languages I'm trying to learn.

I've also decided that the language has gone through several orthographic reforms, but that's just to handwave things like all of the above.

Edit: Continued in this thread. -Aevas, 2020-05-07