i have about 6 language projects in works, 3 more active than the others, ill use these tags to differentiate them:
#nyanya - ɲaɲa, a cursed conlang i made for ccc3, its not great, its also not being developed and is pretty much "finished", you can watch my video on it in a link below the cut
#french2 - fantasy conlang ill elaborate on later, actively developing
#bst - another fantasy conlang, this one involves animal noises, actively developing
#mdr - 3rd fantasy lang, like a logical language except the logic only makes sense to me, actively developing
#hababa - my petname for my first conlang - toakeliti, based on hawaiian but kinda stuck in development since i wanna rework most of it
#3bp - the last (so far) fantasy lang, only exists in concept land but i might wanna talk about it so it gets a tag
I don't much care for place names in this language but they are neat and add some life to the language so I'll work on them anyway.
Idea #1 Place names (as well as personal names) should have some sort of particle that denotes them as a Proper Noun.
Idea #2 I am going to keep it simple derivation/special consideration wise anything else gets hit with another fancy coverb/adposition. All the special girls who might get the princess treatment: mountains, lakes, rivers, streams, cities, volcanoes, fishing spots and islands.
Idea #3 I hate my perfectionism, how is idea #2 keeping it simple
Idea #4 When it comes to the sea I wanna work in the concept of belts which are just stretches of water between things
Again some of these days feel like way more work than others. I need like 50 probably more words to cover this, prepare for a long ass post. I'll split it into section with ascending duration. Starting with:
Times of day
A day starts and ends with a sunrise. Therefore a day encompasses the entire daytime and night time. So lets go through one day:
kao ari lāke rei lae aēlo - first light of the day (lit. the first light of the sun touching the sky) The beginning of a day, moments before the sunrise
kao lākīo - sunrise (from lee "sun" and giyo "to surface"). The first moments of the day, where the sun appears at the horizon, after the sunrise comes:
a lā maoli - the first half of the day before noon (lit. "climbing sun"), which breaks down into two parts:
koa ekināri ("early sea urchin") - the time where the sun is low in the sky
a lātiki - ("burning sun") the part of the day when the sun is at its most intense, it starts in the morning goes to noon and into the afternoon. It also gives me a fun little saying: (any verb relating to work) ēne lātikike poa which means: working yourself to death :3 And in the middle of a lātiki there is of course
a ēila nei - (lit. middle sun) noon, sun highest in the sky. And after noon comes the
a lā luna - (lit. diving sun) the second half of the day after noon. Which contains within the second half of a lātiki as well as:
a lārei - ("hot sun") - the part of the day when sun starts going down, shadows become longer and the sunlight becomes more bearable. After which comes:
koa ārora - evening, nothing much different than the english definition of the word. The evening ends with:
koa māorine- from mao "sky" and arine "red", sunset
thus ends ēila ("day") and begins auna ("night")
Which can be loosely split into
koa aunaeri - early night ("early night")
koa auna rāishī - midnight ("deep night")
koa maohēna - some hours before sunrise ("pale sky")
Okay you pressed keep reading which means its time to enjoy the days of the week. All 30 of them. With each set of 10 also having its own name. I hate what I make myself do, but it does give me a great excuse to build up my lexicon at least. Days are based on phases of the moon ('ahina). The first week (pāhaei (gen. kimetahaei)) is koa amuloa ("growing wheel"):
koa hina ("to shine")
koa loania ("sprout")
koa haonae ("little plant")
koa ho'ōnui ("shaving")
koa haoki ("fingernail")
a lia'āroa ("close to no creatures")
a nā'āroa ("bring no creature")
a hēa'āroa ("have no creatures")
a līōa'āroa ("still no creatures")
a hēa'ato ("have some creatures")
Then the next week: koa 'ahina 'ēinenai "blooming moon"
In that whole thing I got some new derivation strategies -ei- for comparative adjectives h(o)- for "results of an action". I also polished up sound changes
i just wanted to know how pre-colonian Hawaiians measured time, reading this feels like having a stroke. I found what I was looking for here. So timekeeping in hababa will be similar: no hours, no as I'd say absolute time just periods of time within the day based on sun position, 12 30 day months plus a 5 day weirdthingy around the winter solstice. Generally a relaxed approach to time
So I already have degree adverbs and I could add more but I don't think I have any that feel necessary to add
However discourse adverbs are interesting. I was tempted to add topic marking but honestly the more that I read about it, the more I struggle to see how it would work with the language unless I restrict it somehow, but I don't think that's very adverby so I'll leave it for later.
I also wanted to have some sort of emotion markers but they don't feel very adverby either so I think I'll be skipping over these
So I want genuinely as little adverbs as I can get away with, well not exactly true I could technically do no adverbs. I just want adverbs to be a small closed class, rest being handled by adpositions.
So a few temporal adverbs I mentioned before, spacial adverbs probably limited to here, and manner adverbs limited to very and a little.
Actually lets make it a list:
in a long time, same word as very
soon, same word as little
just now, immediately
sometime
then, at that time
before
here
I have discovered a truly marvelous way to use adpositions for this, which this post is too narrow to contain