Lexember 2023

[äreo]

Lexember is a tradition that goes back at least a decade. Every day of December, we coin a new word or family of words in our conlangs and post them in this thread. Including etymological or additional semantic info is encouraged. A glossed sentence or two containing the new word also makes a great addition.

Feel free to participate to whatever degree you want or can. If you miss a day, you can make an additional word to make up for it, but no one is going to kick you out of this thread if you don't.

The month is usually divided into weeks with different themes for inspiration. I've tried to strike a balance, making these themes both broad and potentially a bit challenging, and I took cues from both what people have said in this thread and Mark Rosenfelder's Lexipedia.

As with the other rules, the themes are not a hard requirement for participation. They're meant to inspire and encourage you. Feel free to deviate from them if you're on a roll with some other semantic category. And since 31 days divided by 4 weeks gives us a 3-day remainder, I'm declaring the first three days a free-for-all anyway.

December 1st-3rd: Anything Goes
Coin words for whatever you want. Insects? Parts of the body? Puns in your language? It's up to you. Feel free to make this a back-extension of Music Week if you want—this is what I may end up doing.
December 4th-10th: Music
Instruments, singing or playing techniques, musical genres, intervals, scales, chord progressions, &c.
December 11th-17th: Food and Drink
Coffee, tea, sandwiches, alcohol, shellfish, feasting and fasting, &c.
December 18th-24th: Gifts and Containers
Boxes, bags, pockets, trinkets, gags, &c.
December 25th-31st: Time/The Old Year and the New
Calendars, telling time, cleaning house, traditions, youth and age, &c.

If you have any questions about Lexember or want to suggest other themes, go for it.

[Man in Space]

If I have the energy to be somewhat consistent about it, sure.

[keenir]

Would anyone be interested in participating in a Lexember thread this year?

I'll try;

[foxcatdog]

Can we start suggesting themes?

[äreo]

Can we start suggesting themes?

Yeah, go for it! I think music would be a fun one.

We can do the usual five "weeks": the 1st through the 3rd, 4-10, 11-17, 18-24, and 25-31.

[Raholeun]

I think music would be a fun one.

I've been wanting to do ideophones of jazz for ages now, so it might be about time to break my conlang hiatus.

[äreo]

I think music would be a fun one.

I've been wanting to do ideophones of jazz for ages now, so it might be about time to break my conlang hiatus.

Sounds great! Any specific terms you have in mind? I'd like to at least develop my main language's words for musical intervals and maybe some other theory terms.

[Raholeun]

Well, not to use up my ammunition here, nor to out myself as a person with absolutely no knowledge of musical theory, but something like boobap 'vocalizing lively, in a syncopated and improvised style' [ideo].

[sasasha]

I'm in!

Perhaps I'll do it thus: a definition of an Almean musical term or concept each day.

[äreo]

Alright, I'm putting together a list of themes. As always, feel free to do whatever you want instead. If anyone has any other suggestions, go for it!

So far, I've got:

Music (instruments, styles, techniques, intervals, chords, melody, and so on)
Gifts and Containers (boxes, bags, baskets, candy, trinkets, whatever)
Time (the calendar, hours of the day, youth and age, and so on)

[foxcatdog]

Tea or Shellfish are the only two themes i could think of so far after a minute of pondering. (Also probably Coffee is more appropriate for Amarin).

[AwfullyAmateur]

Maybe insects or sandwiches or wordplay or cleaning?

[Raholeun]

So what is the comme il faut here? Lexember entries are posted in this thread, or a new thread is to be made for each language by each participant?

[äreo]

So what is the comme il faut here? Lexember entries are posted in this thread, or a new thread is to be made for each language by each participant?

Yes, this is the thread for all. Everyone can post here and we can comment on each other's words or take inspiration from each other. I added a bit of clarification to the OP. You're also more than welcome to make words for more than one language, or to make Lexember-related additions to your own thread.

[äreo]

Lexember begins! These first three days have no set theme. My Msérsca word for today is mantar, which can translate several verbs in English. It has the following meanings, in rough order of commonness:

to wear (clothing)
to ride (an animal or vehicle)
to drive (a car)
to be covered by, to hide behind
to uphold, to represent, to stand for

These multiple meanings allow us to make puns like this:

Cávi mantam.
[ˈkoːvi ˈmantam]
horse.PL wear.PRES.PL
[They] ride horses. or The horses wear [something].

Cávi sdo mantasso?
[ˈkoːvi zdu ˈmantasːu]
horse.PL what wear.PRES.INT
What do the horses wear?

Mantaira!
[ˈmantaira]
wear.AGT.PL
Riders!

To go further with horses, cáf horse is also the word for the knight in chess. If a player blocks check with his knight, we might say Wrem cáf manta, meaning The king is protected by the horse, but also sounding like The king is riding a horse.

[sasasha]

I am going to use this to develop some Proto-Aretian vocab. I know little about the morphosyntax of this language (though some of its descendents are worked out well enough that there's both something to go off, and lots of room to absorb new ideas). Hence I can't really provide sentences as yet. I also can't attest to whether or not these terms will actually turn out to have existed, or whether I'll just do 31 sketches that help me ‘find’ the language a little more.

I'm going to provide some attested descendents occasionally. For this post, PAR = Proto-Aretian. WEN = Wengal, an early literary language of the Jakka (Red Aretian) branch.

Lexember 1

PAR: *amiuŝq̆ut
[a.mɪ.ʊɕ.'k̠ʷut]

< prepare-string-SUB

n. insight, perception, intuition, instinct; preparation, readiness; aim

WEN: eveuqúts
n. instinct

[Raholeun]

As nothing has yet been shared yet about Le Pad Sataw, let us start this Lexember with some introductory remarks.

So a week or two ago I woke up from a year long fugue in which I had forgotten my interest in conlanging. But inspiration has come and Lexember seems a nice way to get back into the conlanging groove. The language which will be fleshed out a bit more in the coming month was first conceived December 2022. It has only been outlined in a basic form so far. I've given it the provisional name Le Pad Sataw that I'll stick to for now, though this might evolve in the future.

The language is intertwined with a fictional narrative I'm developing that involves three groups of people in Brussels, Belgium that all in their own way have encounters with humanoid entities. One plot line for instance is about a group of spiritists that, after having dealt with the impracticalities of changing hosts and dismissive flatmates when hosting their séances, finally find a steady host in the failing Thai restaurant "Le Pad Sataw" at walking distance from the metro stop Clemenceau in the Anderlecht quarter of Brussels. More locals with an interest in spiritsm, the teachings of Kardec or a general fascination for the occult joined and, more importantly, a timid teenager gets introduced as the new group medium. This teenage girl channels the voice of an entity, communicating in a strange language. For practical reasons it was necessary to give a name to the language. For now, a truncated form of the name of the aphotic, bystreet Thai restaurant where the group meets on Tuesday evenings will do: Le Pad Sataw and sometimes LPS or Sataw for short.

I'm not entirely sold on the name. Primarily, because the term lacks intrinsic relation to the language; the name has no significance in the language itself. Besides that, my only other developed conlang is simply named Sataw. You can see how this can become confusing. Especially since the two have little in common; the original Sataw was me having loads of fun with Proto-Austronesian historical linguistics and the new conlang is crafted without any deep historical processes in mind (other than making its vowel system more plausible). Moreover, it is not as definitively tied to a specific real world geographical location as Sataw is.
There are also some structural similarities between LPS and Sataw:

1. Both exhibit a reduplication pattern on the main verb to signify the perfective aspect.
2. They incorporate ergatoid prefixes on the main verb to indicate focus or voice.
3. The lexicon is derived from (proto-)Austronesian, or inspired by it.

The language is intended to be naturalistic, or at least appear so. It does have a preposterous vowel system - a creative wildcard courtesy of GlebTM's ingenuity. I also plan to experiment with a linguistic universal or two, but unfortunately the notes are not at hand to give more details what the supposed universal actually is. Additionally, it productively uses flamboyant patterns of reduplication and sound symbolism (so admittedly the fascination with Austronesian did not shake off completely). Additionally, there's a personal inclination toward favoring agglutination, and I want to explore whether and how I can break away from this tendency.

Next post will be a basic sketch of the sound system.

[Travis B.]

Lexember begins! These first three days have no set theme. My Msérsca word for today is mantar, which can translate several verbs in English. It has the following meanings, in rough order of commonness:

to wear (clothing)
to ride (an animal or vehicle)
to drive (a car)
to be covered by, to hide behind
to uphold, to represent, to stand for

Inspired by this, as I found that the Tshyak languages have no word meaning wear, I came up with

wear, be ridden, be covered:

In Proto-Tshyak: gətet (pfv.), gətit (ipfv.)
In Old Zlang: têt (pfv.), tît (ipfv.)

These can be used in fashions like:

May tît źe ndray.
[mɛj teˤʔ ʑe ɳdʐɛj]
1S wear.IPFV EGO cloth
I am wearing the clothes.

Khye têt the proi yo.
[kʰje tɛˤʔ tʰe pʂø jo]
horse ride.PFV DIR INV 3S
(I saw that) he/she rode the horse.

[Imralu]

01/12/2023
paŋovaž "(be a) line of storms", from:

— paŋ "(be a) wall" (both in the sense of a partition between rooms and in the sense of a "stone fence", also applied to extensive cliff faces, essentially just meaning a vertical surface that is generally wider than tall and metaphorically may mean an impassable barrier)

— -o- glossed as "LK1", a linking element that indicates that the head (preceding) and the modifier (following) refer to the same entity. This contrasts with -e- (LK2), indicating that the head and the modifier refer to different entities. For example, a paŋevaž would be a "storm wall" in the sense of a wall to protect one against storms.

— važ "(be a thunder)storm".

More: show

It's just occurred to me that I should probably explain that storm means thunderstorm in my dialect, not just a large, windy weather system as it seems to be in other dialects. I remember struggling to understand Sturm in German because dictionaries give it as storm, but then it seemed to just get applied to windy weather or to an entire low pressure system, and whenever I talked about storms, I always got told to call them Gewitter, and then realised that Sturm corresponds quite well to storm in other dialects. (Which explains also why "storm" is one of the levels of the Beaufort scale. I always found that weird. Not every storm is windy!) This is I guess what happens when a language from a temperate area gets used closer to the equator. I've got no use for "evening" either except to distinguish the greeting "good evening" from "good night". When I moved to Germany, where the sun slowly slides diagonally into the horizon and day takes hours to turn to night, I finally understood what the point of the word "evening" is.

Anyway, it's "wall of (thunder)storms" rather than "line" as in English because, when seen on satellite imagery or radar, a line of storms looks like a line, but from the ground, when you see one approaching, it's more like a wall, particularly if the rain forms an unbroken, opaque front. (Also, I don't have a word for "line" yet.)
_____________________________

02/12/2023
nohitewab "masturbate" (of a woman), from:
— nohitewa "27"
— b "use one's hand(s)"

Twenty-seven is formed from the elements:
— wo = 16 (pinky finger of dominant hand extended)
— ti = 8 (ring finger of dominant hand extended)
— he = 2 (index finger of dominant hand extended)
— na = 1 (thumb of dominant hand extended)

Consonants line up from smallest value to biggest. Vowels line up from biggest to smallest value.
→ nohitewa

In the commonly used sign language throughout the same range, 27 is represented by the dominant hand showing all fingers except the middle finger extended. Using -b as a suffix on numbers indicates using one's hand(s) in that configuration.

[Raholeun]

In Turkish, the number 31 is associated with masturbation.