This week, how dark it is outside really hit me. The library where I work is in a basement, and the window in the pit courtyard has been taken away due to a construction site. We won’t get it back until at least midsummer. At this time of the year given that windowless existence, the…
Tag: conlangs
Updates from Days 8-14 of #Lexember. This includes more content than Twitter for #eamarubhe. Specifically, despite no cats being on Ameisa, I make a word for cat and use it to show y’all how plurals work in Day 12 because none of the plants on Ameisa would be as meaningful.
ɛ͡ɒ̈.ˈmɑ.ˌðy.βɛbh = βr = /ɾ/ in all places but before /u/, /ɒ̈/, and /ɑ/, where it is /ð/ ɛ͡ɒ̈.m is a root for empire, and Eama, great empire, is a global power. ɛ͡ɒ̈.ˈmɑ.ðy (Eamaru) means esteemed imperial language, and ɛ͡ɒ̈.ˈmɑ.ˌðy.βɛ (Eamarubhe) is just a more pretentious way of saying the language of the Eama. This is a language spoken…
I’ve worked from maps for science fiction stories since I was in my mid- to late teens. According to writers on the Early Internet, a good map grounded a science fiction world in reliable possibilities. There was a lot about geology I didn’t know, though, until I became a geology librarian and started going to…
I’m moving a few older posts from Tumblr to my main conlang blog. This is a sketch of a language used in The Seven Papers for naming/cultural purposes — done in under an hour, the document flexible and malleable as I worked my way through what I needed. Over the course of writing, I expanded…
I saw a question on Twitter that was posted on Metafilter about words for librarian in “geek languages,” which was retweeted with a #conlang hashtag. Right now, I’m not sure if the original poster intended this to be mentioned in the conlang communities. I mean, there are popular geek conlangs, and then there is the…
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…
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…