Re: Naming the conlang

Scotto Hlad wrote:

> My question is how have others named their languages? Dare I ask what
> the derivation of the names of various languages is. The first conlang I
> ever developed (sometime in the last millenium) was called "Kadingu"
> which meant "the tongue."  I understand as well that at least some of
> the aboriginal languages of North American are simply derived from the
> word for "people." I believe that Dene is an example: Dene just means
> "the people."
My current language family is `Føtisk' (in English), which I suppose is
pronounced either FAYtisk, FOtisk or FURRtisk depending on your dialect
of English's habits. I'm pretending this is a Danishisation of _Fœtisk_
(the native name, /f2:tisk/ in Old F., /WetS/ in Modern F.) because I
started calling it Føtisk before I'd finished what was necessary to get
the name, but I didn't want to change the name once I had. _Fœtisk_, in
turn, comes from Ancient Føtisk _foietisc_ /f2:tisk/ (which I also
sometimes use for AF). _foietisc_ clearly comes from _foiet_ but the
derivation of that is uncertain. A commonly-given origin is Germanic
*theudo ('people' and therefore cognate to Dutch/Deutsch). Problems with
this:
   - _foiet_, the name of the people, is an i-stem noun, but *theudo-
     was o-stem. Of course, this could simply be that most names of
     ethnicities were i-stem.
   - _foiet_ and _foietisc_, if they came from *theudo and *theudiskaz,
     should have been *foied and *foiedisc or *foievisc, respectively.

Early references to the Føt (in AF) refer to _oangulfoeuti_ or
_ouangolfoeuti_, apparently compounds of Angle (the Germanic people) and
Føt.

(The short answer is I made another mistake when concocting the name.)

Unmaintained:

Finnstek: Finns (the name of the people, anglicised as 'Fince') + tek
(language)

Finnzsa /"finnZa/: Modification of `Finns' (a dialect of Finnstek)

Etábnanni /rA_Lm&_Ln/: From Middle Etábnanni _e-_ (some prefix whose
meaning I've forgotten) _tab_ (the name of the people, anglicised as
'Thaff', and pronounced much the same) _-nanni_ (some suffix whose
meaning I've forgotten. In Modern Etábnanni, the _e--nanni_ had been
re-analysed as an outfix meanning 'language of', so the language of the
neighboring Fince, f'rins', was known as _Epínnnanni_ /pi_Ln&_Ln/.

Pidse /wiDa/: A conlang based on the auxlang Ygyde, designed to take all
the best features of Christophe Grandsire's Maggel and combine them with
all the best features of Ygyde in the hope that maybe the promoter of
the auxlang would just maybe perhaps take a hint and stop promoting his
auxlang here. The name of it derives from Ygyde, except that when I
named it I inaccurately assumed the value of <y> was /y/. Nevertheless,
the spelling of _pidse_ is entirely regular within the highly irregular
orthography, a co-incidence shared with Maggel. (The name is also a pun,
the way I pronounce it and the word 'wither' are identical.)

--
Tristan.                 |       To be nobody-but-yourself in a world
kesuari at yahoo!.com.au |  which is doing its best to, night and day,
                          |                 to make you everybody else---
                          |          means to fight the hardest battle
                          |            which any human being can fight;
                          |                    and never stop fighting.
                          |      --- E. E. Cummings, "A Miscellany"

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