#ulithoid

[annotated-catastrophe]

Someone asked me a question today and I answered in four different languages before settling on one.

[dont-look-me-in-the-eye]

[dont-look-me-in-the-eye]

@pteren i'm absorbing knowledge

[pteren]

Ino'su bo 😙

U net'la blog u :3

I think that's right...

ino' su buk!!

u net'la blog u i had my blog

here's some words:

makt' - v. to make blip' - v. to find kulo - adj. new

welcome back :)

[pteren]

hiiiii how do pronouns work in your conlang and how would i say im lucien my pronouns are they/she

pronouns are super simple. there are three base pronouns u/su/o which are modified by suffixes to convey relevant information.

u - 1st person (i, me, us) su - 2nd person (you, y'all) o - 3rd person (they, them, she, he, it)

if a person has a gender, you add a suffix for that! there's a few which come with the language:

-m - male -k - female -d - a child -l - nonbinary/agender but wants to specify

...but you can also invent your own or just omit gender entirely. omitting the gender particle can mean a person isnt attached to gender, or their gender is ambiguous/not being specified. personally i don't use a gender particle for myself most of the time, but i use -d when im feeling especially childlike.

and finally if you're talking about multiple people, you add the suffix -ni meaning "many".*

u - me uni - us om - him omni - those guys

that's it! ulithoid pronouns aren't marked for case like they are in english- "i" and "me" are the same word "u". "she" and "her" are both "ok".**

"i am Lucien" would be "u e' Lucien". ulithoid doesn't currently have a word for "pronoun", but fortunately we don't need one- because ulithoid can apply gender to ANY pronoun, not just 3rd person ones. so when you introduce yourself you can tack the gender onto the "i":

uk e' Lucien

you don't have to say "my pronouns are..." you can just USE one of the pronouns.

mentioning multiple sets of pronouns can be tricky. you could follow up the sentence with another statement and use a different gender there:

uk e' Lucien! u messi' ikt'ze.

or you could just repeat the pronoun using the second gender after a little pause:

uk, u e' Lucien

...to indicate that people can use -k for you if they want, but aren't required to. ^^

*there are also other "number" suffixes other than the simple plural, such as -nam meaning "enough", -nik meaning "too many", and six for the numbers 0-5. **there's really no reason for english to distinguish between nominative and accusative tense because the sentence structure carries that information for free. like, if someone said "me kicked he" you wouldn't parse the case information and think the speaker had been kicked- you'd just think they were using the wrong pronouns.

[pteren]

for a while ive been annoyed because i wrote down the word for mouth as "om" and absolutely loved it- it's short, it's catchy, saying the word forces your mouth to close, "the mouth eats" translates to "om nom'"... it's perfect-

...and then realized om is already the 3RD PERSON SINGULAR MALE PRONOUN. i got so mad.

i tried changing the 3rd person pronoun to a instead of o, but it just didn't stick. this was months ago.

and then just now on the bus i was having a dialogue with myself:

pteren: it's not that bad for a word to have multiple meanings. it's fine.

pteren: but om is an important pronoun! that'd be like if "you" was also a word for "foot" or "i" was a word for... "eye" goddammit

pteren: gottem ;)

so long story short om for mouth can stay. I GUESS >:(

[pteren]

ulithoid language discord server??

hey mirza emily (@dont-look-me-in-the-eye @gloriousvermin) other nerds: if i made a discord server about my weird conlang would you want to help learn it with me?? i want to develop the language enough and gain enough fluency that i can use it in a tree game campaign about the civilization which speaks it

[dont-look-me-in-the-eye]

thought: if -i is a tense modifier (imperf. duration), then -uq has to be a different modifier. gonna go dig through ulithoid samples to find what its purpose is, but tentatively it's may/might