Today’s Valya word is hlabu /ɬa.bu/, meaning “gay” or “non-binary!”
The exact meaning of the word is a bit hard to pin down with respect to modern real-world identities and terms. Suffice it to say that there is something of a third category of gender identity on the island Dzu, which is increasingly recognized as being internally diverse as well. There are in fact four different third-person singular pronouns for people in Valya: dyu is “she,” vi is “he,” nga is a singular “they” used in generalizations and when a person’s gender isn’t relevant, and gwi is a specifically non-binary pronoun. How this set of pronouns came about is a story for another post.
The etymology of hlabu is obscure. Though some have tried to tie it to hla “woman,” this is almost certainly incorrect. For one thing, there’s no obvious source for the second part of the presumed compound. As two words, hla bu would mean “a fourth woman,” but there’s no explanation for why that noun phrase would get this meaning. There’s also the spellings to deal with: hla “woman” is spelled as a ligature of si and la, while the first syllable of hlabu is a ligature of li and ha. There are in fact six different ways to write the syllable hla in Valya, and spellings can change: though mba “sun” is spelled with a ligature of the glyphs for mi and ba, it was once ŋuba. But the earliest written evidence shows hla as sila and hlabu as lihabu, which lines up with the modern spellings.
Anyway, that’s all to say: happy International Non-Binary People’s day from the island of Dzu, and check out the live conlanging stream Let’s Have a Bouba (aka LHAB or /ɬab/) every Tuesday!
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