What have you accomplished today?

[WeepingElf]

After reading this highly interesting book, I found the Old Albic word for 'bird': phintá (< Proto-Hesperic *p'etnah < PIE *petnos (root *pet- 'to fly'). The idea came from chapter 5, which discusses a suffix -annos found in several Celtic bird names, for which it gives PIE *petnos (the loss of *p is regular in Celtic) as a possible etymology. I decided that Celtic got it from Hesperic, and with the sound changes I have in mind for Old Albic, I got phintá, which also sounds very fitting to me.

I like the sound of it too. As it happens, one of Msérsca's words for bird (basically passerine) is pín

Thank you for liking it! Of course, the Elves are no different from us in considering a passerine bird a prototypical bird.

[rotting bones]

Like in Latin pinna, wing/feather?

[WeepingElf]

Like in Latin pinna, wing/feather?

Yes, that's the same root.

[rotting bones]

Thanks.

[Raphael]

Not directly conworlding-related, and not very artistic or creative, but I wrote a brief non-fiction post that might double as a conworlding resource under certain circumstances over in Ephemera:

https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?t=1701

[Skookum]

Got the sound changes working for an IE lang I’ve been messing with. Now onto the hard part, the morphology...

Some example words (stress always on initial syllable): xetʃe "father", me:tʃe "mother", bɯratʃa "brother", sɯwasa "sister", duktʃa "daughter", su:nu "son", ɯrtɯ "bear", ɯla "salmon", y:xy "horse", u:lxu "wolf".

And the numbers:
ʃɯn "one"
tɯwa "two"
tʃije "three"
ki:ty: "four"
xi:ŋi: "five"
sɯwɯ: "six"
ʃɯxtan "seven"
axta "eight"
ɲu:n "nine"
tʃɯxmɯ "ten"
kɯmtɯn "hundred"

Although looking at it I feel like there’s too much /ɯ/...

[Emily]

Got the sound changes working for an IE lang I’ve been messing with. Now onto the hard part, the morphology...

Some example words (stress always on initial syllable): xetʃe "father", me:tʃe "mother", bɯratʃa "brother", sɯwasa "sister", duktʃa "daughter", su:nu "son", ɯrtɯ "bear", ɯla "salmon", y:xy "horse", u:lxu "wolf".

And the numbers:
ʃɯn "one"
tɯwa "two"
tʃije "three"
ki:ty: "four"
xi:ŋi: "five"
sɯwɯ: "six"
ʃɯxtan "seven"
axta "eight"
ɲu:n "nine"
tʃɯxmɯ "ten"
kɯmtɯn "hundred"

Although looking at it I feel like there’s too much /ɯ/...

if there's too much in the lang in general, probably revisit your sound changes. but if there's just too much in the numbers, that's easily solvable by having the numbers influence the ones next to them in sequence (much like proto-germanic 4 became "fedwor" instead of "hwedwor" by the influence of neighboring "fimf"). i could easily see tʃije influencing tɯwa to become tʃiwa, and axta leading ʃɯxtan to become ʃaxta(n?). something to consider

[Skookum]

I realized I did the sound changes wrong for "one", should be ʃen, so that takes care of one instance. I really like your idea of axta influencing *ʃɯxtan to become ʃaxtan. For two, tʃiwa would violate the vowel harmony rules of the language, so I’ll leave that one as is.

[WeepingElf]

Posted Proto-Hesperic verb inflection paradigms to the Other Place.

[lëtzeshark]

Played around with a few things.

More: show

[þeprussianfrog]

Made the present and imperfect copula conjugation for Fevornian.

[Emily]

tried to work on negative particles in modern gothic, gave up for the time being because the sound changes mean that the gothic words for "yes" and "know" completely merge working instead on a complex of nouns related to "road", "path", "trail", etc. also did some good research the other day on gothic prepositions, still need to work on putting it into action though

[malloc]

tried to work on negative particles in modern gothic, gave up for the time being because the sound changes mean that the gothic words for "yes" and "know" completely merge

Why is that a problem? English completely merges "no" and "know" after all.

[Emily]

that was a typo lol, that's what i get for staying up late. what i meant was that "yes" and "no" merge. which is. not exactly tenable

[Emily]

all right, here are the road words:

More: show

so gothic has several words for road, street, path, way, etc. and it's not necessarily possible to understand the nuance in meaning between most of them given the limited corpus. the words are: gatwo, plapja, staiga, wigs, and fauradauri. on wiktionary i looked at the english glosses for each of them; on wulfila.be i looked at the german gloss and how the word was rendered in the kjv translation provided. i broke down multiple meanings/definitions:
1. trail, trace, tracks; evidence left behind of someone or something's presence
2. rut, groove, furrow
3. footpath, unpaved walkway, hiking trail, etc.
4. route, path, course, track, way
5. path (in the metaphorical sense)
6. road (general term)
7. road (paved)
8. highway (road between two settlements)
9. street (road within a settlement)
A. driveway
B. alley
(the last two don't really appear in the gothic corpus, but they're meanings i knew i'd need for later stages of the conlang)

in addition to the five attested gothic words above, i also derived two further words from proto-germanic: *faurhs "furrow, grove" and *spaur "track, trace, trail". mapping the meanings above to all these words i got this as a starting point:

• gatwo: 6789
• plapja: 6789
• staiga: 345
• wigs: 34568
• fauradauri: 69
• *faurhs: 2
• *spaur: 1

these evolve into middle gothic:

• gadwo /gádvo/: 679
• blabja /blábja/: 679
• staiga /stɛ́ʊɣa/: 345
• wugs /vúxs/: 4568
• fauradaurij /fɔ́raðɔʝɛ/: 9
• *faurhs /fɔ́rɣz/: 12
• *spaur /spɔ́r/: 1

then early modern gothic:

• gawu /gávʊ/: 679
• earlier "blabja" lost
• stewȝe /stévhɛ/: 34
• wuhs /vúxs/: 568
• forluje /fɔrlújɛ/: B
• forȝz /fórhz/: 12
• spor /spór/: "clue, hint"

then finally modern gothic:

• gawus /gáuvəs/: 679
• stewȝes /stébhɨs/: 34
• wuȝs /vúks/: 58
• forlujes /fɔrlójɨs/: AB
• forȝs /fórxz/: 12
• spors /spórs/: "clue, hint; (in plural) evidence"

that's it for now but i'll try to get anthologica updated with this info soon. i'm extremely sleep rtight now so if there are any errors i'll fix them in the morning

[Travis B.]

I have started to work on the page for Reháľa Kâp. Note that there is currently no vocabulary page.

[malloc]

that was a typo lol, that's what i get for staying up late. what i meant was that "yes" and "no" merge. which is. not exactly tenable

Fair enough, although they could always switch to alternative words. There are plenty of synonyms for "yes" and "no" in English after all, stuff like "indeed" and "totally" or "nuh-uh" and "balderdash".

[Travis B.]

that was a typo lol, that's what i get for staying up late. what i meant was that "yes" and "no" merge. which is. not exactly tenable

Fair enough, although they could always switch to alternative words. There are plenty of synonyms for "yes" and "no" in English after all, stuff like "indeed" and "totally" or "nuh-uh" and "balderdash".

You could derive a new 'yes' from "yes it is" or "yes it does" or just "it is" or "it does" or a new 'no' from "no it is not" or "no it does not" or just "it is not" or "it does not".

[Emily]

yeah i'll probably go with one of those routes (i was looking at "clearly" for yes or "not a crumb" for not but they produced words that were too long and i said fuck it i'll try again some other time and decided to sort out the road situation instead)

[Emily]

the other thing i've been mulling over is the verbs: do i want them to be influenced by russian and delete the copula? and secondarily would i also want to have the copula deletion lead to the (copulaless) past participle replacing the existing preterite like russian does? could be fun. also reinspecting the reduplicating verbs to see if there's a way i could keep them around without modifying the sound changes that annihilate them (since i otherwise like the effects those sound changes have). on the back burner is the morphological passive forms, which are a fun feature to have but which currently disappear, again due to the sound changes iirc