Hey, so, every once in a while I see someone new has followed this blog, and remember that it exists. So, just so it's clear for everyone, I'm no longer really in Homestuck fandom and am no longer working on this conlang. However, I am working on a different conlang currently, and it occurred to me that there might be some people following this blog who would be interested in that, too. It's for an original world, and the gimmick/conceit of this one is that it's an in-universe artificial language intended to be an intertemporal auxlang for a community of time travelers. The information on it, including the grammar and writing system, are in this github repo: https://github.com/faiuwle/qucheanya
So I figured, since this blog is still around, I might just start using it as a general-purpose conlanging blog and start posting about this new language on here, and I might eventually develop some natlangs in the same world as well. Are you current followers interested in that at all?
Are you interested in my new conlang?
I'm interested, but I also follow your main blog
I'm interested, and I don't follow your main blog
No, I'm only interested in Homestuck or other fandom conlangs
So, Iâve successfully backed up this blog in light of recent events (there arenât many images on here, but there are a few, and Iâve seen screenshots of a post with the IPA vowel chart in it getting flagged, so...) Anyway, my plan is to reformulate the contents of this blog into nice âchaptersâ with nice formatting for posting on AO3 (hey, itâs fanwork, right?). I also might continue working on some things and maybe producing more content in the future, but it will all be over there. My AO3 account is paradoxcase, in case you didnât know.
longroadstonowhere replied to your post: âAlright, time to do a partial survey of the canon troll slang. TheseâŠâ:
also what if rumble sphere is like something trolls vibrate when they want to scare off potential threats? like a rattlesnakeâs rattle, only itâs internal
I donât know about internal, because I think it would be awesome to have some like exoskeletal clicking thing going on. Maybe that could be loosely approximated as ârumbleâ? And they rumble at each other when angry or maybe even just excited, which makes Meenahâs whole âclam your rumble spheresâ stuff work. If itâs in the abdomen, it could maybe be the same thing used for grub echolocation?
ooooo, i like that idea, like they have rumblespheres where we have our belly buttons, so when the humans and trolls meet up there is a lot of confused poking at bellies (âwhy do you have a divot where your rumble spheres should be?â âwhatâs with these circular bulges around your stomach?â)
thatâd actually be especially interesting in regards to kanaya - since her abdomen got blasted out by eridanâs wand, she couldâve lost her rumble spheres, which would give her another thing that really weirds out the other trolls (kanaya doesnât even rumble when sheâs mad anymore, itâs like sheâs not a troll at all) (except she revs her chainsaw when it really matters so social weirdness is occasionally averted)
also the abdomen on an adult troll is basically where the grub body ends, right? so it could actually be like a rattlesnakeâs rattle on a grub, only with the dual purpose of echolocation, and then when they pupate the rumble bits shift to accommodate the new legs
Looking back at this post about grubs, it looks like we can probably imagine any kind of transformation from grub to troll we want because of metamorphosis, so we could always say that the rumble spheres move during that process, but that all sounds good. I like the Kanaya-lost-her-rumble-and-is-now-eerily-silent idea.
I canât find the post about grub brains. Dammit. I definitely remember one.
it took far more hunting than i thought it would, but i think this post is what youâre remembering - in the nervous system section, isozyme talks about the grub brain hanging out in the abdomen area
longroadstonowhere replied to your post: âlongroadstonowhere replied to your post: âAlright, time to do a...â:
huh, i always finish that phrase as 'blink of an eye' not 'blink of an eyelash' - and yeah, it might make more sense to redefine things as, like, 'verb-doer' ('arm-bender' for elbow? things like that i guess)
Yeah, actually, I think you're probably right.
Arm-bender might work, but arm itself might be something to do with grasping (since we currently have the same word for hand and arm). But if "arm" were part of it, we could do the same thing for knee. So we might get some long words out of it, but I think that's in keeping with the language so far.
I'll have to come back to this later because I'm way too tired right now.
longroadstonowhere replied to your post: âAlright, time to do a partial survey of the canon troll slang. TheseâŠâ:
also what if rumble sphere is like something trolls vibrate when they want to scare off potential threats? like a rattlesnakeâs rattle, only itâs internal
I donât know about internal, because I think it would be awesome to have some like exoskeletal clicking thing going on. Maybe that could be loosely approximated as ârumbleâ? And they rumble at each other when angry or maybe even just excited, which makes Meenahâs whole âclam your rumble spheresâ stuff work. If itâs in the abdomen, it could maybe be the same thing used for grub echolocation?
ooooo, i like that idea, like they have rumblespheres where we have our belly buttons, so when the humans and trolls meet up there is a lot of confused poking at bellies (âwhy do you have a divot where your rumble spheres should be?â âwhatâs with these circular bulges around your stomach?â)
thatâd actually be especially interesting in regards to kanaya - since her abdomen got blasted out by eridanâs wand, she couldâve lost her rumble spheres, which would give her another thing that really weirds out the other trolls (kanaya doesnât even rumble when sheâs mad anymore, itâs like sheâs not a troll at all) (except she revs her chainsaw when it really matters so social weirdness is occasionally averted)
also the abdomen on an adult troll is basically where the grub body ends, right? so it could actually be like a rattlesnakeâs rattle on a grub, only with the dual purpose of echolocation, and then when they pupate the rumble bits shift to accommodate the new legs
Looking back at this post about grubs, it looks like we can probably imagine any kind of transformation from grub to troll we want because of metamorphosis, so we could always say that the rumble spheres move during that process, but that all sounds good. I like the Kanaya-lost-her-rumble-and-is-now-eerily-silent idea.
I can't find the post about grub brains. Dammit. I definitely remember one.
longroadstonowhere replied to your post: âAlright, time to do a partial survey of the canon troll slang. These...â:
also what if rumble sphere is like something trolls vibrate when they want to scare off potential threats? like a rattlesnake's rattle, only it's internal
I don't know about internal, because I think it would be awesome to have some like exoskeletal clicking thing going on. Maybe that could be loosely approximated as "rumble"? And they rumble at each other when angry or maybe even just excited, which makes Meenah's whole "clam your rumble spheres" stuff work. If it's in the abdomen, it could maybe be the same thing used for grub echolocation?
longroadstonowhere replied to your post: âAlright, time to do a partial survey of the canon troll slang. These...â:
glance nugget sounds like it could be related to eyeball (like it could just be 'eyeball' or it could be 'pupil', or something along those lines)
Glance nugget was from
CCG: OK, WHY DO YOU HAVE TO GO FROM ZERO TO DOUCHE LIKE IN THE BLINK OF A FUCKING GLANCE NUGGET.
FCG: THE BLINK OF A GLANCE NUGGET?? I'VE BEEN AT THIS FOR TEN MINUTES ALREADY. AND COUNTING!
So probably meant to be eyelash, but it does seem odd with that morphology.
A lot of these go back and define body parts in relation to their function, sort of like the animals are defined. I'm wondering if we shouldn't actually go back and redefine some of those terms that way instead of using atomic roots? It would be strange, but it wouldn't be the only strange thing we've done, and I'm pretty sure doing common animals that way is strange too, and this is a verby language so it might be merited.
Cluckbeast fits with the way we named dogs and cats. Trunkbeast, woolbeast, nut creature, and marchbug fit with the Xbeast pattern. We have two possibilities for mouse: cheese critter and nibble vermin. I think nibble vermin is more likely, because I'm pretty sure mice will actually eat anything, but nibbling (or at least, that cute way they eat, the "nibble" morpheme may have more to do with some other aspect of it) is perpetual. I'm not sure what the morphemes of cholerbear are supposed to indicate - choleric bear? Dirt noodle is funny, and I think noodlebug might be a fun thing to do. Fiend in gobblefiend could be analogous to sqùī, again with onomatopoeia.
There are also these, which may or may not refer to real creatures:
bark gnome
barkfiend
I think we should have an animal root in the Lime class for fantastic animals. Trolls also have elves as fantastic creatures, because Karkat said that John looked like one in the ectosuit and immediately knew they were talking about fantastic creatures. I don't think they would be animals, though. What are troll elves like? We will have to decide.
There's a lot of anatomy here, much of it redundant. For example, let us count all the ways trolls have referred to throats:
Of course, we already have a word (xÄe), and the phrases that refer to food are not useful to us anyway, because the throat is not connected to the digestive system.
These are all the body parts that a) are probably not genitalia and b) we don't already have defined:
gallspincter (???)
glance nugget
lobe stem
nub (???)
nugbone (unless it means head)
phlegm lobe (???)
porous cranial plates
rumble sphere
sponge/think pan
It's not clear what some of these mean. Gallsphincter looks like it could be a regular human word, but most hits on google are for Homestuck. I think we could have both sponge and think pan - isozyme originally talked about a think pan versus a grub brain in the abdomen, I think we could have fun with that. I hate troll boobs, but we could probably do something else with rumble sphere - I think it would be great if we made it mean something completely different.
Hereâs the index of all the Homestuck troll slang. The format is
term page # example ... example from same pesterlog page # example from new pesterlog
Terms are listed alphabetically. Only dialog and POV from people who are at least partly trolls count, with the exception of Dirk, Roxy, and Dirkâs robots, who are in there with **stars.
Thereâs one word I didnât wind up getting, because by the time it occurred to me that I should be tracking it I was too far in to go back and add it: âcoccoonâ used to mean âbedâ. I also did track: very common words like âhiveâ, troll romance terminology, puns, jargon specific to fiduspawn, flarp, seadwellers, etc. (though thereâs some bee computing stuff and some things that are probably specific to Tereziâs roleplaying). An exception is âbrinesuckerâ because I thought the juxtoposition of the two examples was funny. I also did not document every time that âpupaâ was used to refer to either Pupa Pan or Tavros, because there were just too many instances of that.
Openbound sometimes had terms that were talked about in multiple conversations in the same flash. In those cases Iâve just listed each conversation separately, but using the same page number.
I probably missed some things. Let me know if I did; I can edit this paste.
Notes:
ânubâ: So there is âcartilage nubâ (nose?) and âfrond nubâ (something to do with trees?) and a whole lot of other uses of ânubâ that donât seem to have to do with either, so I just put everything that was ânubâ under plain old ânubâ.
âgrubtubeâ: These two examples are obviously not the same thing.
âspongeâ predates âthink panâ as a word for brain/mind.
No one has talked about bulges since Kanaya: Return to the Core.
Itâs not âblood pusherâ, itâs âpump biscuitâ. I had forgotten that was fanon.
Hussie kept coming up with new troll slang right up until the end. The second-to-last piece of troll slang was a never-before-seen phrase for âbellâ (despite the fact that there was already a term for âbellâ).
âfour wheel deviceâ: used to refer to both wheelchairs and skateboards.
I think âshithive maggotsâ may have been a self-coining neologism. The first time we see it, Karkat on the meteor uses it in a conversation with early-SGRUB-playing Kanaya, who expresses confusion about it, but by the end of the pesterlog Kanaya is using it too. Iâm imagining a scenario where Kanya uses it because future Karkat uses it, and then everyone else (including future Karkat) adopts it because Kanaya uses it.
There are a number of cases where it looks like âbone bulgeâ might actually have meant âskullâ at one point.
Hey guys, those of you who contributed stuff that are still around (is there anyone other than longroadstonowhere?) - do you mind if at some point I post this stuff to the Zompist BB? I've been thinking about posting it there and getting more serious feedback and then maybe making some changes in response. I'll credit non-vocabulary contributions, although in some cases that's hard because people have chnaged their urls...
Something else that occurs to me re: cleaning up the dictionary: VrÇskĂĄ isn't legal, because sk isn't legal. The k should really be a q, which means kĂĄ should be qĂĄ, which would help distinguish it from the preposition kĂĄ.
Right, so here is the plan for my blogs when Homestuck ends:
I am going to reread the entire thing, because Iâve forgotten way too much of it. Iâll probably talk about it, but it wonât really be a liveblog or anything like that.
As I go, Iâm going to make note of all the troll neologisms, with context. This will get posted on nowordsforsnow, so we can use it to continue to spruce up the troll conlang vocabulary.
When I finish it, having refreshed my knowledge of canon, I will do an Ask Me About Troll Homestuck Fandom period! Honestly, THF was the most fun Iâve had with Homestuck, so I want another go at it. But I canât do it with my current knowledge of canon. Iâll probably do some more THF stuff later, as well.
The troll conlang will be on hold until this is finished. After this, Iâll go back to working on it and we can make use of that list of words!
When Hiveswap comes out, Iâll stop whatever Iâm doing and play it. Iâll take a ton of notes, and everything will be worldbuilding and nothing will hurt! I want to play it as soon as it comes out so I donât get spoiled. Donât worry, Iâll tag/hide all my own spoilers.
In June, two things are happening:
I graduate! Since I moved, graduation is on the other side of the country, so Iâll be gone for a week or so.
Obduction comes out! So Iâll be playing it and everything will be Obduction for a while. I donât expect rampant Obduction spoilers all over tumblr, though, so Iâll probably prioritize Homestuck stuff.
A long time ago there were some things here that I wanted to fix, but I've honestly forgotten what they all were, and rereading the blog hasn't made anything really stand out to me. But there are a couple things that need to be fixed in the dictionary:
jÇoqÇÄvÇqĂ ("cuttlefish") - we used the wrong diminutive, it was i, should have been Ă
jraojrĂČl ("tree") - compound was head-last
ĂącrĂąqÄuzĂŹrÄ ("scorpion") - contained illegal consonant cluster
Next, I think we ought to iron out the rÄ nominalizations, since we have a few of them now. How many of you followers are still here?
just to keep us aware, so far -rÄ has been used for 'lqĂšrÄ' [bathing] and 'eĂČvrÇcrÄ' [rest, recuperation], as well as (probably coincidentally) 'jrÄ' [before (temporal)], 'rĂ»vrÄ' [neck], and 'ĂącrqÄuzĂŹrÄ' [scorpion; literally "stingbeast"], as well as theoretically all the weather verbs
Yeah, I looked through the dictionary for those, too, though now that I look at it ĂącrqÄuzĂŹrÄ has an illegal consonant cluster in it (crq), so that would have to be changed eventually. "Sting" itself definitely might be a -rÄ noun, although the word for scorpion would still be Cerulean because the head of the compound is Ăącr. jrÄ and rĂ»vrÄ are going to be coincidental.
so i know youâve definitely been taking a break from this stuff, and it might be a dead project, but i still like thinking about it every once in a while, so i decided to try tackling weather expressions
i donât know about the tendencies of head-initial languages in regards to weather expressions, actually - i will definitely look into that, though (my instinct says that makes sense as well, but never hurts to check and itâs always fun to learn)
the interesting thing about languages and weather expressions is that they usually donât have only one way of describing the weather (like how english can say both âitâs snowingâ and âsnow fallsâ), so at some point we could add another grammatical expression and decide for ourselves which one is more common
since you like those words, iâm gonna go ahead and toss them in the dictionary (though not immediately - real life has a hold on me, as well)
fun idea i had - since lime noun class currently includes philosophical abstractions, itâd be fun to toss at least a few arbitrary grammar things in there, as well (so -rÄ would end up creating lime nouns)
also, no worries on the wait - real life can be a real bugger sometimes, and itâs not like this is a time critical project or anything
so i know youâve definitely been taking a break from this stuff, and it might be a dead project, but i still like thinking about it every once in a while, so i decided to try tackling weather expressions
Itâs definitely not a dead project - I think I might go back and change some things, and it definitely needs more googlesite documentation, but once I get a chance to do that Iâll try to get back on this thing - maybe this summer. Sorry I left this in the inbox for a few days, Iâve just been pretty stressed about IRL things. I know thereâs some words languishing in the google spreadsheet too, Iâll get to those eventually.
bit of info dump first - in earth languages, weather expressions are handled in one of three ways:
predicate-based weather expressions, where all of the relevant information comes from the predicate and the arguments are usually semantically empty (like englishâs âitâs snowingâ - all the information about the weather is in the verb)
argument-based weather expressions, which is basically the opposite of predicate-based (which would be like if in english, instead of saying âitâs snowingâ, we usually said âsnow fallsâ, ârain fallsâ, âhail fallsâ, etc.)
argument-predicate-based weather expressions, where both the argument and the predicate have information about the weather (âsnow is snowingâ, ârain is rainingâ, etc.)
based on the grammar of lÇzĂšrĂłl thus far, iâd say using primarily predicate-based expressions would make the most sense
I think so too, but tell me, since I know youâve been researching this lately - is it actually cross-linguistically more common for head-initial (or maybe head-marking) languages to use predicates? That would be my intuition, but I donât have data.
i think what would work best is if we have verbs for each of the meteorological conditions (rain, snow, etc.), and we use the nominalization morpheme -rÄ for the nouns of each expression
here are some words:
zƫkrà a - rain
srÄÄ - snow
rÄqoÄ« - hail
jĂŽov - wind
koĂł - lightning
lĂȘÄxr - storm (can either sit on its own or be compounded to be a more specific kind of storm)
grammatically, i think it should work that these verbs are functionally intransitive and they take the brown absolutive marker (since brown class includes weather), so the way you say âitâs rainingâ in lÇzĂšrĂłl would be jÇzukrĂ a
what do you think?
I like it. I think weâve been using -rÄ as an action nominalization too, so that works. The funny thing is that the nouns (zĆ«krĂ arÄ, etc.) might not wind up being Brown themselves (even though that was what I originally intended when I put âweather effectsâ in the class description) because I donât think weâve decided what class to (probably arbitrarily) place products of that nominalization in. The jÇ- probably refers to something like âthe weatherâ though.
