Things Decided for Stupid Reasons

[bbbosborne]

i changed spelling /ʃ/ as <ss> to <sh> so the future marker wasn't pissmi

[vegfarandi]

I'm having an issue right now with Duriac (fka Azdûgan) where the first person verb index is n- and a very common animate and inanimate index is g-, and the perfective TAM marker is -i-, leading to a lot of verbs meaning "I did something to X" starting with the syllable nig- and it's triggering a deep discomfort in me seeing that syllable so often. I'm wondering what to do about this – should I change the first person index? The very common g- index? Add a layer of morphophonemics that change g- to something else, perhaps j-? Or do I get over it?

[mèþru]

There is no right answer. Personally, I would try to get over it, but you should do whatever makes you feel most comfortable.

[Pabappa]

Aww, I liked the name Azdûgan. Though possible also for not such a good reason .... it sounds like Tolkien and I like Tolkien even though my own conlangs are wholly different from anything Tolkien ever made.

There are many words in my conlangs that mean something unpleasant in other languages. even now my sig has /pupu/ in it near the beginning. (/pupupavo/ means "I see (that) it's fake", fwiw). And my word for sun in both Poswa and Pabappa (and their parent language) is pipi.

There's a Nīgana River on my map, although I'll have the choice of about a dozen other names to use as an exonym because it changes hands so many times. And /nìga/ (not a cognate, ...the tone is important) ... is the word for "two" in some of my minor conlangs, including the parent language of most of the major ones. When I write up history I commonly respell words to make them stand out less .... e.g. another place name I have in the tropics is ġʷohʷōho, which I plan to just call "Gofōho" ... i like diacritics but I try to mostly restrict them to vowels when i spell out placenames after the first mention in a long text. And often I just translate things, e.g. an earlier conlang name, /ġʷidiʕìləs/, which i decided to just call "Gold".

I would never censor something within the language itself, and I dont think I'd even censor it in a writeup, but t hats just me .... I can only offer ideas. So if youre uncomfortable, i'd only suggest changing the orthography, not changing the language itself.

edit: it was the Nīgana River, not Nĭga...apparently i only remembered the most eye-catching part of the name

[Xwtek]

Reminds me of an anecdote that a Japanese man gets trouble for saying that the food is bitter in America (bitter = 苦い(nigai))

[Kuchigakatai]

I have similarly heard people here in Vancouver joke that Chinese people are pretty racist, because if you pay attention when they speak, you can hear them say "nigga" all the time.

In reality it's just the Mandarin distal demonstrative 那个 nèige [nei̯˥˩gə˩] 'that [person/thing], that one'. It's also used as a filler word (like "y'know" or "like")...

[FlamyobatRudki]

Nah their secretely ellected the 大那尕[Grand Nagas] of the Chinese West Indies Trading Company,