#nasibommo

[letshaveabouba]

We're going to end our Bratcember Lexember with another full translation, but we couldn't have got here without all of you who have joined us at Let's Have a Bouba this year. We have produced something which depended on the contributions of so many people. First and foremost - Jonathan @mindutme! We depended on you a lot and the amazing font work you did get us through this Lexember far more easily than last year. Also thank you to our Patrons who mean that we aren't worrying about being able to pay for the software we use to stream. Your support means the world to us.

So, for a final final word, thank you! (or as Miles would say, yinz). Gnátannyo refers to leaning to one side due to the burden of favour owed to the person being thanked, in the way obrigado/a in Portuguese refers to the thanker rather than the thankee. We owe all of you a lot, so come with us as we continue with N'asibómmó next year.

[letshaveabouba]

Let's start (if you are reading this in sentence order rather than post order) with the conlanging bit of the translation.

When we were trying to come up with a word for 'confusing' the idea of 'saljejǐ' first came up. To negatively or involuntarily keep thinking about something. Lexember falls at a time when for many queer folk, and as such for many conlangers, tensions can get quite high. Lexember is a real push, but it also shows us that we are part of this wider conlanging family.

You'll notice a lot of 'kpa' and this is by design. In going through which sounds had come up and which hadn't (particular when showing off Sutan, our script) we realised kp hadn't featured yet. Its root *kwa means day, and deriving a word for 'time' from this gave us a lot of kpa in a short text.

kpaɡî - day.COLL - all the time

mil'ón'akún kpammon - running out of time - here kpa is in the genitive case. The system of nominalisation to work in place of subordinate clauses has been interesting and marked a subtle change from the Yaatláw system.

kpashá - this is a modal adverb indicating a possible negative event in the future. It probably needs defining better, but in its original sense it refers to a future storm, ready to wreak havoc when it comes.

Running out of time - of course it's not the same getting to the end of Lexember as having a baby but we feel you Charli! We almost didn't have time to squeeze in this last song from brat, but Jake couldn't let this one pass. It's no club classic, but it speaks to getting older and realizing that there are some experiences the people around us are having that we simply can't know without experiencing them ourselves.

At LHAB '[we're] exactly the same but [we're] different now' - we've been in Conlang Conflict, the YouTube relay (so many views!) and we have Patrons who keep us accountable in our conlanging and content creation. LHAB is recently employed, booked and busy, but excited to go into 2025 with a new relay, big plans for Bouba Babble and who knows what else.

[letshaveabouba]

For the first time since 2005 today (read "yesterday") marks both Christmas and the first day of Channukah which while both starting on fixed days in their own calendars do not usually coincide.

To represent Channukah we went with a word for oil, one of the key parts of the symbolism of Channukah's eight days and nights. It is derived from the root for olive and a new liquid classifier, -qul, which comes from a word for water. It makes bouba class nouns, as liquids laterally form bouba shapes in most instances.

For Christmas we went with the idea of giving. We're presenting two forms derived from a root qarî 'to give' coined in honour of Mariah Carey herself. The first is qarínyo, taking a modifier describing movement out and away, derived from 'to sail' as we are leaning into the seafaring idea in these. The second is qarítun, which uses a companion modifier to -hâ as in knur'â from Day 22. Hâ from 'to sink' was clearly quite negative in association, so we coined the companion 'tun' from 'to dive'. It was almost 'ton' for Tom Daley but it might have been a little too on the nose. It can serve simply as a directional but also as an intensifier, as in some slang usage of 'down'. Qarínyo is thus to give something away, but qarítun is to give a lot, to be generous, to be giving.

Finally, just to say that we know that today won't be one of light and gifts for everyone, and we hope anyone reading this knows that LHAB is a place for everyone in a big conlanging family.

[letshaveabouba]

Picture You is a curious song in which the subject of the song is never quite clear. Is she singing about lighting candles for herself or another person?

Candles are obviously made from wax, and it's established if anyone is familiar with the relay from earlier this year that bees are a part of the Boubaverse. As a result, we went with deriving 'wax' from 'bee'. Wax as a semisolid substance doesn't really lend itself to form based classifiers, but cute little round bees can take a nice -bo marker as borrowed from Kongwa. As a result wax is 'za'ón' and bee is 'za'ómbó'. (Za'ómbó papi za'ómbó)

To make 'candle' we added a kiki diminutive class marker as candles have a kiki shape and voilá: za'ónngá.

[letshaveabouba]

It's back to the one and only Midwest Princess this week! And someone (Miles) wrecked the schedule with their birthday. In 'My Kink is Karma' Chappell is enjoying watching someone 'ruin' their life, using the more metaphorical sense of the term. We decided to go with the sense of a shipwreck, using a downward directional derived from 'to sink'. The association with sinking suggests this might be another place where we get positive and negative versions of affixes, although that might be another step too close to a non-boubinary system.

[letshaveabouba]

When we were thinking of translating whole lines from each song, Mean Girls was one of the ones we weren't sure about - the song is so culturally specific! We went with 'intelligent', basing it on the genitive form of ócha 'intelligence', from an augmentative form of cha 'brain'

[letshaveabouba]

While Charli is making a reference to DJing here, as we thought about how to put this into N’asibómmó it was clear (at least to Jake) we should take the literal route.

The phrase isat'ón l'anisat'ón demonstrates the case stacking in N'asibómmó, as isat'ón is simply the word for 'back' in the instrumental case, while l'anisat'ón stacks the instrumental and the comitative, to suggest that the backs of the two people are against each other.

[letshaveabouba]

Brace yourselves because while you might be thinking ‘apple’ isn’t going to have too much going on, much like an onion, there are layers under the surface.

While we are thinking about Mediterranean climates for the N’asibómmó culture, apples come in our world from somewhere around Central Asia, and as such we thought apple was ripe for a loanword. Earlier this year LHAB ran a little proto-language game where inspired by Northwest Mekeo (or at least Juliette Blevins’ analysis of it) we didn’t include any alveolar sounds. Partly this is as an antidote to the alveolar heavy system we have developed.

Miles created the word jehû [dʒeɣû] in their daughter language in this project, which got loaned into N’asibómmó as je'û, maintaining the voicing of the intervocalic fricative. For those interested, in Kxêstǔ (Jake’s daughter language) it would be a kfǔ. Adding to this, Tethys (@archipithecus) made it nengýý [nʲẽŋỹ́ː] in her language Kóisio Líí. We clearly went in very different directions.