When I was in my mid/late twenties, I transitioned from writing stories that used he and she to writing stories where I referred to everyone with le. It was extreme, and I was told that it was difficult, but it was the best way — or so I thought at the time — to drop readers into the…
Category: Uncategorized
Writing-wise, 2017 was an interesting year. This is the part where I talk about a variety of projects related to writing and constructed languages and what happened over last calendar year (and into January 2018). In 2017 (and January 2018 — I didn’t finish editing a novella until midway through the month), here’s what I…
I have a lot of lexember stuff below, most of it from Twitter. Since I have more than 280 characters here, I’ve significantly expanded some chunks, such as December 24th’s entry, where I describe how more complicated types of counting work in Tveshi (e.g., how you say you have three bowls of soup instead of…
First off, Happy Winter Solstice to everyone! ☀️🌃 In Tveshi, that would be Keshehio Oinnuporåsėo mesah! — You.DAT Winter Solstice.CAUS solidarity/hello/salutations. Indirect objects come before direct objects. In Narahji, Ku tsukgenahaitsi raerås domozmbe. A/the Winter Solstice memorable have.IMPERATIVE you.PL. Second, I published a poem in Eternal Haunted Summer called “What Remains in the Ruins.” There’s a lot of great…
Lexember has been going well, and one of its biggest benefits is that I’ve started rendering things in IPA. Going forward on my podcast, I think I will actually just render Tveshi and Narahji words in IPA for my script version — it’ll be a lot easier to minimize my American vowel accent that way. This…
I only have one LaTeX page of my incredibly poor late-teens-early-twenties dictionary decision to go in the A section. Then, I can move on to the remainder of the alphabet. ‘Tis the Season Lexember has been nice because I’ve spent a lot of time building up derivative words and ensuring that semantic drift is elegant…
When I was reading the 56 Hikol piece about Tehjen, I did not render Narahji in the IPA — although retrospectively, that would have been easier. I would have needed way fewer takes than I had to do to get this right! That piece is written in pre-reform Narahji, which you can tell because the…
I spent about an hour and a half working on my Tveshi dictionary and wrote up about 10-15 entries, which included derivative words based on prefixes, suffixes, and compounds. I have a group of “unclaimed” words that I am using to fill out roots that I don’t have yet and that don’t make sense as…
I wanted to translate “lexember” into Tveshi. It would have been an ideal Day One, but yesterday, I participated in running an internal conference about data + society — so, needless to say, it was overambitious given that I had to be at work early. So I started yesterday by fixing the next entry on…
This is (another) partial repost from Tumblr, but it’s relevant to the past few Epiphany episodes — a proverb came up there that is extremely important to how the Tveshi view class and social position. Tveshi is spoken in a society that is highly traditionalist and that values the family above all else. However, the society…