Štarekeǎgmǎt n. anim. In folklore, a spirit which lures travelers out into the open ocean, away from land, esp. during a storm. Literally, ‘one who carries it out to sea.’
[ˈʃtæ.ɹ̥e.ˌkeɜʁ.mɜtʰ]
šta - rekeǎg - mǎ - t
into.hidden.place - carry - 3p - COMP
The directional prefix šta- like many others has a dual purpose meaning. One is the general sense of from the open into a concealed or hidden place, while the other is out into the open sea (as opposed to out onto the water generally). Perhaps the connection here is something to do with the way one is concealed from the shoreline when they are far out in the water. This is supported by the fact that a speaker can never use a verb with this prefix in the first person (i.e. ‘I am going out to open sea, am going into a concealed place’).
Eksaintlǎlpekket n. inam. Prow, of a boat. Literally ‘it that wrinkles water’
[ek.ˈsaɪnt.l̥ɜl.ˌpek.ketʰ]
ek - saint - lǎlpek - ke - t
INC:IND - INC:water - wrinkle - IND - COMP
While the verb stem -lǎlpe(k)- is not seen outside this example and a few other fully lexicalized incorporating verbs, -saint- here is derived from the general word for water saiþn [saɪ.θn̩].
Wow! That was some stretch without posting. This last year has been full of changes for me, and not left a lot of room for conlanging, let alone blogging about it. This month has cleared up a little for me, though, so I’ve decided to try and participate in lexember to get me back in the flow of things.
The one thing I have achieved in the meantime is an overhaul of the historical sound changes for kōskeve, meaning that a lot of my words have changed, slightly. The end result is distributionally similar, though not quite the same. I’m happier with the sound changes, though, and think they’re a little more realistic. Even if it was sad to lose a few of my more favorite sounding words (alas).
So, so much dictionary editing. Adding etymological histories for every word, for my convenience in creating new words and deriving alternate stems for words. This has been extremely tedious (dictionary progress here)
Adding vocabulary using my existing roots—mostly proto-language derivations, which is the only period in the language where compound constructions are a major source of words. A small list of examples:
ǎfjurǎn, “ant-hill” from proto-k biu-þoen, ‘island-ant’
feltǎšukš “gable, tent peak” from proto-k pil-diok ‘back-roof’
tšukudun “water well, well house” from proto-k diok-ren, ‘roof-spring’
Picking sentences I definitely cannot translate yet, and seeing where attempting to translate them takes me. I asked my girlfriend for a short Shakespeare quote, and she gave me one which I almost definitely cannot translate without a lot of work, but it did lead me down another, morbid translation route:
“to die, to sleep no more, and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to?”
Here’s how far I got:
railu, vekveǎšu kentāvuk,
perish-UNT, sleep-UNT entirely,
Not so hot—but, then, I’m easily distracted from the task at hand...
Coming up with words for “to die” led me into an interesting rabbit hole—after some poking around into how other languages have derived words for dying, I decided that the usual way to express something like “he died” would be tepfiustǎt ankeþiummǎ kinne, or the incorporated form entempǎnkeþeviummǎ kinne. Literally “s/he passed through life”(life-ABL walk-through-PST-3p COMP / INCORP-life-walk-through-APPL-PST-3p COMP)
However, this doesn’t make for very good Shakespeare. So I created a secondary term rail- ‘to depart, vanish, die’, which was borrowed from Kōskeve’s sister language, and stems from their common root for departure, and by extension death—also the origin of the modern Kōskeve term for death dolǎt.
The present completive/perfect form of the first expression gave me some pause, in trying to think of a sentence it might be useful for. The best I could do was:
Close to 100 (144 duodecimal) men die every day in the kingdom.
Why 100? Because I haven’t invented a number over five yet, and didn’t want to decide how to derive the higher numbers, particularly since thinking about anything duodecimally is a personal hell of mine (which begs the question, why did I decide to give this language a duodecimal system?)
But! The fun thing here was coming up with how to express “about 100 men”. My first decision was that “100 men” would be expressed as a noun phrase— “100″ being the head, and “men (man)” taking a subordinating case. Because it’s referring to an animate noun, “100″ is also treated as an animate noun, so takes the accusative case rather than absolutive.
But why the accusative? Because the actual subject of this phrase, and the larger sentence, is an unpronounced third person which appears on the verb nǎluodetvum, which translates to something like “they being near to...” (the final -m being the important bit). So the entirety—nǎluodetvum knato dikude entempǎnkeþtukem kinne—reads more like “They, being close to a hundred men, die.” I don’t know if that’s the most clear way to explain it, but hopefully everyone can mostly follow along.
Which reminds me—does anyone have any ideas as to what I can call this untensed mood which appears in a few of these examples (nǎluodetvum, railu, vekveǎšu). I’ve just either been calling it untensed, or irrealis, or nominalizing. It basically creates a verb which can be used subordinately, or else adjectivally, or nominally—though I think it will also be important when I get around to conditional statements, or any sort of irrealis expressions. Importantly, it cannot be combined with verb tense (either the indicative/present, or past). Can’t really decide what’s the best way to sum all of those purposes up into one term, so any suggestions are appreciated?
Not the promised phonology follow-up, but I thought I’d post the beginnings of a dictionary I’m compiling in LaTeX. Only bare-bones for now, and missing entries R through X, but still highly pleasing to me.
(PS: if anyone has any tips on how to put the number super-scripts on entries ‘kōs’ in the center margin, help would be appreciated!)
She catches many fish, until her boat is full and heavy. From her side, she picks up her oars and dips them into the water. But as soon as they are in, the sky turns dark and a strange wind begins to blow northward.
Cliff-hanger ending for this part, I know. But maybe you have a guess as to what happens next...
There’s not really anything to discuss vis a vis the story, this time (unless you want a tangent into traditional fishing boats—if so, imagine somewhere between a dory and a shetland yoal), so let’s get right to grammar stuff...
1) So this is a thing I’m quite proud of—not because it’s very clever or fancy, but it’s one of the first little ideas/details I’ve had for implementing in this language that really feels unique—that I’ve thought up spontaneously, and not based on research of other languages. First, let me show you how a line is negated in Kōskeve:
ōs keǎþtrkauve ōs (o) keǎþtrkauve sviso
food-ABS eat-IND-1p food-ABS (NEG) eat-IND-1p NEG
And with an incorporated object...
enōskeǎþtrkauve honōskeǎþtrkauve sviso
INC-food-eat-IND-1p NEG.INC-food-eat-IND-1p NEG
Historically, the negative was formed with the obligatory ‘o’ occuring before the verb. An emphatic negative had two parts—’o’ before the verb and ‘sviso’ (a hair) after it, i.e. ‘I didn’t eat’ vs ‘I didn’t even eat a hair’. The ‘o’ has almost entirely disappeared, except in very formal situations, however before it did so it fused into the incorporating prefix on verbs with incorporated objects, giving us the ‘hon-’ in the final example.
Now let me show you how to make a Kōskeve sentence into a question:
ōs keǎþtrkauve ōs keǎþtrkauve kvǎ?
food-ABS eat-IND-1p food-ABS eat-IND-1p Q.PART
enōskeǎþtrkauve kvǎmōskeǎþtrkauve kvǎ?
INC-food-eat-IND-1p Q.INC-food-eat-IND-1p Q.PART
Look kind of similar? In this case, the question particle ‘kvǎ’ was originally placed before the verb, as with ‘o’. Under influence from that pesky northern sister-language, hoever, the particle bumped down to the end of the clause. So far so good—however, as with the negative, the interrogative had fused with the incorporating affix on verbs with incorporated objects—the ‘kvǎm-’. So we end up with the same pattern as for the negative—a clause final particle, and a verb prefix which only shows up on incorporating verbs.
Okay, now my favorite part—here’s the line from the story above:
konotšqaunkaintǎm kinne
COMP.INC-pike-hunt-IND-PL-3p COMP
She caught many pike
This looks familiar by now—a particle influencing the mood of the verb, complemented by a specialized prefix on an incorporating verb. But this time, there was no historical particle which sourced either of the two, instead the form developed entirely by analogy. First, ‘kinne’ (an eroded form of ‘kilned’ a piece) was used as a negative complement, like ‘sviso’, in order to show completion, i.e. ‘not a piece, but entirely’. But maybe because the positive meaning seemed opposed to a negative verb, it soon became unpopular to use the negative particle with ‘kinne’. Flash forward a few hundred years, when the paired verb-prefix becomes a thing in the language, and we have a verb-mood modifier without a prefix! That must have felt wrong to speakers, because pretty soon the prefix ‘kon-’ shows up. Partly influenced by ‘hon’, or else by the alliteration in the ‘kvǎm-, kvǎ’ combo, we get ‘kon-, kinne’.
We’ll see if any other moods join this pattern, as they arise...
So I was also going to talk about some other grammar stuff in this section (particularly what’s going on with ‘but’, and possession), but I feel like this is pretty long already, so I’ll save those for next time.
To cooperate with the rather non-linear approach I’ve taken to developing this conlang, my most recent effort at expanding on grammar and vocabulary has ben to just sit down and write something...
This is a story about Sasqǎvā. For her part, she is a great and auspicious woman.
So, one day, Sasqǎvā takes her boat to sea to go pike fishing. The day is clear, and the sea is still in every direction.
If you bear with me, I’ll explain some of the grammar a little further on.
First—Sasqǎvā is the first sort of folk-figure I’ve conceived of for the speakers of this language. Every sea-faring culture needs an explorer to take a fantastic journey, and Sasqǎvā (~trans. travels-northward) is that for Kōskeve. As to what that journey entails, I suppose you’ll have to wait until I write more. What I can mention is that she hails from the far north of Kōskeve speaking lands, lands which previously were the meeting place of Kōskeve and its sister-language. Thus, her name properly is Saqsaua, before it passed into the central and southern dialects of the language.
Now, grammar? There’s a lot of things going on in this little piece, so I’ll only mention a few.
One thing I’m particularly proud of shows up both in Sasqǎvā and in the verb rošqekeþsukem. That is—directional suffixes which attach to verbs. Languages like Karuk (famously), Central Pomo, Chumash, etc. etc. have vast or modest lists of these which qualify the path of movement expressed in the verb. Into a container, in a circle, eastwards, across a river or path.
In Kōskeve there is a robust list of these, mostly derived from proto-language verbs, much reduced, and they attach immediately after the root verb—I’m imagining they began in a sort-of serial verb position.
The other big hurdle was putting together sentences with multiple clauses. I’m still ironing that one out, but in this passage I get to use the simplest methods.
First, the coordination of intransitive VPs which share a subject
Kedux suošekem lenkekem ǎl
woman-EMPH be.great-IND-3p be.auspicious-IND-3p AND
Simple enough, but not really multiple clauses, syntactically.
Here, the subject of both phrases is the same (Sasqǎvā), but the object changes, and there is also a sense that the events are ordered in time; first she carries her boat to sea, then she hunts pike.
Both verbs are in the indicative tense (which reinforces the time-ordered reading), and thus they’re linked by the conjunct ǎlān (~and so).
If instead, you wanted a sense more like, she carries her boat to sea, in order that she may hunt pike, then we get to use what I’m calling the untensed verb form (though perhaps something more like non-finite would make sense? I can’t decide, because it has a lot of different applications—let me know if you have an opinion).
Doesn’t look that different, and not a hugely different sense—perhaps a touch of atelicity (it’s not implied whether she actually does hunt for pike or not, which the previous sentence does—just that that is the intention).
Final note—the tense! Everything is in the indicative, rather than the past as we usually expect for stories in English. I don’t have a strong reason for that, just a stylistic choice. Kōskeve is pretty free and easy with tense (there being no real future tense), and the past is more often used as a relative tense in order to place an event before the time expressed in the main narrative/utterance, rather than any event that happened before the present time.
Thanks for reading (if you have), and more to come.
Well, we’re well past the New Year, but all the same here are some Kōskeve greetings of the season for you:
taistl vǎnotr kūxe ǎl vǎlusiu faixe
taistl vǎn-otr kū-xe ǎl vǎl-u-siu fai-xe
oil yellow-PART be.there-IRR CONJ rest-IRR-LOC be.deep-IRR
“May you have clear oil and deep sleep”
lit. "May there be yellow oil and may the resting be deep."
li, vleǎn ekkūxes so kūvkǎnǎstl
li vleǎn ekkūx-e-s so kūvkǎn-ǎstl
seed milk fill-IRR-REF fat be.there-IRR-COMP-OBL
"May grain and milk fill your stores"
lit. "May grain and milk fill the lard-place."
palǎt seǎkn ǎksinǎšeǎxke
palǎt seǎk-0-n ǎk-0-sinǎ-šeǎx-ke
year turn-IRR-COMP 1p.OBL-1p.S-DES-push-IND
"Let’s break into the new year"
lit."I want to push the new year with you."
