Skip to main content

Let's Make a Language: Day 15, Temporal and Spatial "Adverbs"

In Munya, words for spaces and for times often share the same word, such as with the word [tʲi5] which can mean either "by/beside" or "co-occuring/at the same time as", the meaning must be implied by context or through the use of helper words. Its spatial and temporal "adverbs" are no different. I say "adverbs" because it mostly uses postpositional phrases in the place of adverbs in a similar way as a few entries ago when we created the phrase [tʲo so tʲi5] literally "by the foot" to mean "this".

In this vein, I've created two new phrases. The first expresses "here/now" Bal so tyi [pʰal so tʲi5] which would literally mean "by/along the path", drawing a connection between being off the path as "here and now" whereas its counterpart Bal so hi [pʰal so xi], "on the path", meaning "then/there". We were on the path, traveling, but now we are talking so we are here, off to the side.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Let's Make a Language: Day 1, Setting Goals

 Hot off the heels of my previous conlanging endeavor, Synkatokopa (Kopa), I want to create something brand new. For this project I will be (loosely) following along with Quothalinguist 's "conlang year" series. In that vein, day 1 will be all about intentions and goals. This is the most important part when starting a new project, any project not just a conlang, in my opinion. Setting a good foundation will not only springboard your progress on your journey faster and farther, but it will let you know when it's time to wrap up. So, no matter how excited I am, or you are, to start your own conlang, right now is the moment to ask a few important questions. Question #1 and the most important one, in my opinion, is "why do I want to create this language?". My answer? I want to create another language for a worldbuilding and ttrpg project I've been working on since 2018, one that will slot in next to Kopa. More specifically, I want to create a strictly CV str...
Post a Comment
Read more

Let's Make a Language: Day 12, How I Make Conscripts/Writing Systems Part I

When creating a conscript I always begin with researching real life scripts. I scan through a large selection of them, figure out how they work, their major visual motifs, and especially how they conform to the language they describe. A good question to ask yourself at this stage is "did the speakers of this language create this script, or did they borrow it?". If they created the script, its graphemes will usually match up really well, or even one to one with its phonemes. This is especially so in more recent scripts. For examples of this, take a look at Hangul or the many new Sub-Saharan writing systems. East Africa in particular is a treasure trove of these kinds of scripts. As a general rule the newer the script, the closer it will adhere to the language it was made for. If they did not create the script, its orthography will probably be more complex than that of the former, and the system will have more difficulty succinctly mapping graphemes to phonemes. English is the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Let's Make a Language: Day 14, Numbers, Numbers, Numbers

Happy Valentines day! Today is a super quick one, we're working on numbers some more. Nouns in Munya appear in their singular form when co-occuring with number, so instead of English's "one apple, two apples, three apples..." a Munya speaker would say "one apple, two apple, three apple..." Pa ba, nai ba, tsa ba... Now, what if a Munya speaker wanted to say "the first apple, the second apple, the third apple..."? They would use the superlative suffix -dyi to create a series of ordinal numbers. Padyi ba, naidyi ba, tsadyi ba...  I also want a way to make adverbial numbers like English's "once, twice, thrice...". I decided that a Munya speaker would simply have to put the number into the genitive case to create this distinction. Pa fa, nai fa, tsa fa... Right now a Munya speaker has no way to count above ten, so let's create some compound numbers. All numbers from 11 to 19 will follow the same pattern of "10 by x", for exam...
Post a Comment
Read more