Conlang Exchange

I have decided to use this language for the Conlang Exchange. Creating something proved to be easy. I bought some cards from the stationary warehouse and played around with creating a rose window design on them. This fits in with the Amenite festival of Rose Moon, this year on the solstice full moon at the 21st December. Now the challenge is creating a text to accompany the card. More difficult than I originally thought. I haven't discovered the words for the astrological bodies yet: sun, moon, and stars. This rules out talking about solstice and full moon in the Amenite religion

There are other gaps in the lexicon, like how to say renew the vows of priesthood. I shall probably find more gaps as I work through my cards' blurb.

I could go through the books that I haven't used to add words to the language because they didn't fit into the criteria with which I was researching the language initially. At this stage that feels like cheating. It would feel like I'm cherry picking words from those books just to fill a gap I have at this time. It could prove that part of the culture of this language is that it has gaps that I need to discover and fill after I've finished this stage of language creation. Maybe there should be gaps in the language. For instance I'm intrigued to discover that the language has titles for nobles, and a verb for electing, yet at this stage no word is listed in my lexicon I'm making for president or prime minister.

There is still more work to do before I feel that this language is a presentable working corpus. I want to have the cards posted in the next couple of days. So tonight I shall spend some time piecing together a festive text. Hmmmmm.....

Lexicon

I have completed my notes for a lexicon from my file on verbs. So I will move on and fill in the lists from the substantives file. My favorite part of this lexicon at the moment is to discover that I have eight words that describe vehicles. They know about flying machines, which they call aweríon; and they have wheeled vehicles, makkina and know about buses and trucks: otobus and grushowik. I don't know what I am going to do with otobus. It is an international word and should be retained. They know about trains, trenon and have a stem for bikes kikl. They appear to have an advanced material culture with technology and machines.

Not dead but re-lexing

Just popped in to say this blog hasn't died. I got distracted by creating a complete lexicon for this language. Everything is being sorted out and placed into a list of words based on Rick Harrison's lexicon. I have an old copy of it on my computer under the heading UWL for Universal Word Lexicon. I have had to add a section for words that come outside the lists in the collection.

In the time that I have been silent I have not yet managed to complete working through my list of verbs. Currently I have reached a section from Bengali about verbs which mark the agent with the instrumental preposition in the past tense, and those which don't. It adds a curious restriction on the language as many of them are common verbs.

Afterwards I shall move on to including my notes on Substantives, Pronouns and Chuvmey (mostly particles). You may hear from me soon.