#word derivation

[secular-jew]

Hebrew word for the day ;-)

[nyanconlang]

Re: Youkoso! ようこそ!

Considering this is a conlang blog, the first word I'm going to look at is ようこそ or welcome, and then derive the term in Old Nyango to work it into the modern version slowly.

ようこそ /jo:koso/ originally comes from 良く/jɘ.ku/ the adverbial form of 良い (originally 良し /jɘ.si) which can be pronounced either /i:/ or /jɘ.i/, plus the Old Japanese "emphatic particle" こそ /kɘ.sɘ/.

This later dropped the /k/ somewhere between 900 CE and sometime in the 1100's. In the standard dialect, the adverbial forms either retained the /k/ sound, or else regained them through a reading pronunciation. But several set phrases, like ようこそ came from the Kyoto dialect and never regained the /k/ in these forms. So, in ようこそ, /jɘ.ku/ became /jɘ.u/ and then /jo:/. That process can be written like this:

/jɘ.ku/ > /jɘ.u/ > /jo:/

こそ /kɘ.sɘ/ is simpler but also seems harder to pin down. It was a common emphatic particle which sometimes caused changes to how verbs were used in the sentence.

So ようこそ /jo:koso/ and its predecessors basically mean you're yelling "Good!" very emphatically. I think that's a very catlike way of welcoming someone (if you aren't disappointed for them being late or the like), and some folk stories about cat youkai have them living at court, which for a while moved but eventually settled in Kyoto.

So the equivalent of this word in Nyango is going to start out very similar to the original word in Old Japanese.

The Old Nyango version of ようこそ was simply /jɘ'.ku.kɘs/, and at the time would have been written, if at all, the same way ようこそ was. In Old Japanese, this would have likely used Man'yougana, which is its own post.

At that time, Old Japanese had 8 vowels instead of the 5 that are in standard Modern Japanese. These vowels are usually written <i1 i2 u e1 e2 o1 o2 a>. Of the doublets, i1, e1 and o2 were the most common, though e1 and e2 were both a bit rare. Due to different things I've read while researching about the Old Japanese sound system, I've decided to assume they had values similar to /i y u (j)e ɛ (w)o ɘ a/ and am going to base sound changes from Old Japanese to Old Nyango and onward to modern times.

----

In some languages, /ɘ/ - also called the schwa sound - is a fairly weak vowel, and easily drops out of words. In other languages, it acts like a full vowel. In Japanese, /ɘ/ became /o/ over time, but was never particularly weak, unlike the "high vowels" /i y and u/, which tend to "devoice" between unvoiced consonants. So I have decided as just a little twist that in certain cases, /ɘ/ will drop out causing sound changes not found in Japanese. At the time of Old Japanese, these changes won't be huge, but they will cause others over time.

[olilonien]

So, I made a little word family chart in Laefêvëši. The words are derived from the verb þívij “to eat”, or rather, the root þí- which means “eat” or something along those lines. The chart is not exhaustive by far - there’s more than a hundred words endng in -þínt (“-eater”) but it’d be too much to post them all here (including the corresponding adjectives); and more.

Maybe I’ll do more of these in the future.