Thursday, December 17, 2020

Kílta Lexember 17: líkkis si salko "feed"

Today is another phrasal creation, made up of words that already exist.

In the existing Kílta corpus there are already a very small uses of the word sanëlo, which is just the causative of sano eat, for feed, but I don't like it. I've decided that sanëlo is confined to industrial or mechanical feeding, as well as experimental settings where we might say we're feeding (culturing) bacteria or whatnot. Force-feeding a prisoner, or as a form of torture, would also use sanëlo. For normal feeding:

líkkis si salko feed < líkkis food + salko put, place; with the dative for the recipient

Ton në ké mautur kë líkkis si salko tul?
2SG TOP already cat.PL DAT food ACC put Q
Have you fed the cats yet?

Every once in a while, you have to do this sort of lexical retconning when something that seemed like a good idea at the time turns out later to not be what you want. The light verb expression here is more in the spirit of the language.

Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Kílta Lexember 16: máchumórama "the middle of nowhere"

There was a recent /r/conlangs post about different language's ways of saying something like "the middle of nowhere." Some are a bit vulgar, and a lot involve animal, or the devil.

My old work office had a very boring view, but due to how the lighting worked at the building, I always had a few spider webs there, to catch the bugs attracted to the evening lighting. So, I had a very close view to the work of the spiders, and their battle with the wasps. I kept track of the spiders a bit in my conlang diary, as something to talk about other than the weather. In part because of this, Kílta has a proverb, a close translation of the Latin lupus est homo homini, man is wolf to man, that is, people prey on other people. In the Kílta, I've simply put spiders into the role of the wolf, kor në kor kë mácha no.

With spiders as wolves in mind, I decided my "middle of nowhere" phrase would involve them:

máchumórama /maː.tʃu.moːˈræ.ma/ (the) middle of nowhere < mácha spider + móro sing + -ama location derivation

So, "where the spiders sing." It is nicely alliterative.

Símur në ta si máchumórama nen vuttë onno?
3PL TOP this ACC middle.of.nowhere LOC why build.PFV
Why did they build this in the middle of nowhere?

An alternate, fuller, phrasing has even more alliteration:

Máchur mórátin ummul
spider.PL sing.PCPL.IPFV forest
the forest where the spiders sing

Kílta has contextually-oriented participles, which can take on a locative sense with place words.

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