Re: thanks and name

En réponse à Aidan Grey <grey@...>:

>
>    How do you folks name your languages, and what do they mean?
>
Well, it depends :)) . Azak was named like that only because I thought it
fitted the language (and fitted the phonotactics :)) ). Astou is the same.
Those names don't have a meaning AFAIK. Moten is special. The word itself seems
like it should have a meaning, but this meaning is unknown, probably because
the referent is unknown. Moreover, this word is actually used in the language
only twice as first part of the compounds motenku|lu (the name of the language
in Moten itself. Ku|lu means "language" and is normally used with names of
people, nations or tribes to make the name of the language. So we could infer
from that that Moten would be the name of a people actually) and motenva (va
means 'colour'. Moten doesn't have single terms for colours. All colour names
are actually compounds of the word va. And motenva corresponds to the colour
purple. This compound is absolutely not a help in pinning down the meaning of
the word moten!). Notya means language (tya) of No. No describes a kind of
force, energy, chi, or whatever it may be, that some people are able to control
and use (a little like the force, but without this dualism between light and
dark). Most of those people are grouped in a secret organisation which uses a
secret language which happens to be Notya. Reman is a Romance language, so the
name is self-explanatory :)) . Tj'a-ts'a~n just means "the Language" and is a
short form of the actual name of the language (which is a monster of more than
20 syllables meaning basically: the language of the Sky People). Chasmäöcho
means "the good enough one" and is named this way because I intended to make it
a personal language "good enough for me" :)) . O is named this way because I
couldn't (and still cannot) remember when I first designed this language. When
I found notes about this language, written with my handwriting, but that I
can't remember ever writing, I decided to call the language (which didn't seem
to have a name) O, to refer to the state of my mind towards it :)) . Itakian
was actually named before it existed. Someone on the list made a typo, writing
Itakian for Italian, and followed a small discussion on how nice a language
would be with that name. And I decided to make this language :)) . This name is
only the English name for it (I still don't know the native name of this
language) and it comes from an Itakian exclamation meaning "big mouth" (the
first thing Itakians said to the first white man, a French missionary, who met
them. They said that because he was trying to have himself understood by them,
and thus spoke in all the dialects and languages he knew, very clearly and
slowly, opening wide his mouth to be sure they would hear the sounds he meant.
They really found it pretty amusing :)) ). Narbonósc (Narbonese in English) is
the official language of Gaulhe, the Southern part of France in Ill Bethisad.
Its name comes from the Latin word Narbonensis, describing a Roman province
where the dialect of Vulgar Latin that was to become Narbonósc was first spoken.

So, plenty of pretty different origins for the names of the languages, mostly
depending on the origin of the language itself :)) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.