Spring conlanging
From: | Amanda Babcock <ababcock@...> |
Date: | Friday, April 16, 2004, 18:52 |
I've had the first Spontaneous Conlanging of Spring.
This generally happens Spring and Fall on particularly inspirational
days. I'd say 60-75 degrees (F; maybe 15-25 degrees C) is the optimal
temperature for Spontaneous Conlanging.
Today, it is the word "gompiliheyyonal". I know it's polysynthetic and
means something good about Spring, and that the "gom" is a "gon-" that
assimilated to "pili", and "heyyo" is "heyo" with gemination applied to
the second consonant. The gemination would supply either the "come" or
"out" directional components to the gloss of "come out".
It's tentatively broken down as:
gon- nominalizer meaning "when, where"
-pili- leaf
-heyyo- come out
-nal impersonal 3rd person, like English "there is",
or maybe a verb mood or form for "it happens"
I'm not sure how well I like this analysis. It has an incorporated
subject. I prefer incorporated objects. I thought of it being an
incorporated absolutive, but I don't know how that would play out
with the language I want to make.
Also, I'm missing an explicit agreement morpheme for person. Maybe
that's because it's nominalized?
I then tried constructing a parallel word for "winter": gonsopipadranal.
This time, the "padra" is "pada" with an r attached to the second
consonant (modification of the second consonant would seem to be the
way to express various directional subtleties on verbs). It breaks
down as
gon-
-sopi- snow
-padra- fall down
-nal
"padra" might be better as "parda", I'm not sure.
Theoretically, we would then have a word for autumn: gompilipadranal.
Except perhaps the snow is falling *toward* us and the leaves are falling
*away* from the trees. So maybe "pada" means "fall", and -r- means
"toward"[1] (cislocative?), and we need a translocative, expressed, say,
by inverting the first syllable of the verb, for falling away:
gompili'apdanal. Epenthetic consonant could be something other than
a glottal stop - gompilihapdanal? gompilinapdanal? gompilikapdanal?
(Or, if it doesn't play havoc with my morphology, gompilyapdanal - but
that also looks like the first word is "piya" with an -l- infix.
However, if infixation only applies to the main verb stem in a word,
this ambiguity would be resolved.)
[1]If -r- means "toward", then "heyo" must not mean "come", but I'm pretty
sure the gemination of "heyyo" refers to the _out_ part of coming out,
so I'm not sure what that leaves for "heyo". To appear? Then heyyo is
"to appear by coming out", and heyro (perhaps metasthesized to heryo)
is "to appear by coming toward". Too bad "ehyo" wouldn't make any sense,
then. I'd have liked the sound of that.
I like this. But a lot of spring conlang sketches never make it to the
summer. Maybe this'll just end up another pebble on the Dead Conlang
Sketch Beach.
Amanda