Derivation of the Day: tëtúmot

For Kílta, tëtúmot sauce, via intensive reduplication of the verb tuëmo pound, and the object noun suffix -ot.

Korka vë tëtúmot në kwilë chesëtin no.
(wal)nut ATTR sauce TOP too salty be.PFV
The walnut sauce is too salty.

Korka is by default a walnut, but is used in other nut terms generically.

Quantitative Verse References

Over time I've collected a few references to quantitative verse forms from different poetic traditions. The primary feature of these systems is that syllable weight is the defining measure of verse, rather than patterns of stress or syllable counting.

• Greek Verse
• Vedic Metre in its Historical Development
• Poetries in Contact: Arabic, Persian, and Urdu (this is great!)
• Somali Prosodic Systems
• Metrical structure and sung rhythm of the Hausa Rajaz
• Introduction to Tamil Prosody
• The meter of Tashlhiyt Berber songs (added July 2020)

I'm sure there are some traditions I'm missing.

I've never successfully created a poetic system for one of my conlangs. Though Kílta has vowel length, it looks like syllable counting will be the way to go for it, but there are still plenty of experiments to work out.

Kílta

After several years of slow work, I think Kílta is far enough along that I don't mind other people seeing the documentation: Kílta (PDF via Dropbox).

The thing I'm most pleased with this is that the dictionary is so large, and has so many examples. I've been on a pro-examples kick for quite a few years, but this is the first language I've worked on where nearly every word has an example sentence, often more than one. As of the day I write this post, Kílta has:

• 1158 headwords
• 166 sub-headwords (idioms, light verb constructions, etc.)
• 1592 definitions on the above
• 1924 examples for everything

That said, there are still a handful of words I didn't bother to give examples to, but as I notice them and non-idiotic examples present themselves I'll add them. The main benefit to a good example is that it helps nail down the semantics more clearly. If I really cannot come up with an example that clarifies the meaning at least a little, I'm liable to skip it a bit, though some examples created for other words may end up in a definition, even if it isn't terribly clarifying.

A good chuck of Kílta's semantic development is created with a desire to avoid obviously compositional meaning. So, in addition to the many examples, a good number of "idioms," there are sections on conceptual metaphor, as well as the introduction of a small bit of vague supernaturalism which permits even more idiom construction. Check out the definition of virka stomach for an example of me having fun developing idioms. Once you create one or two of these, more suggest themselves over the years.

For most of Kílta's life I have kept a very short and almost always dull diary in the language. This is an amazing tool for grammar and lexical development. But you have to be prepared to write a lot of tedious things at the start, or you'll just overwhelm yourself. Talking about the weather can, with a little grammatical imagination, be a great testing ground for: conjunctions and other sequencing constructions, thinking about tense, thinking about coreference, thinking about those parts of discourse that expose a speaker's feelings about what they are saying, report clauses, counterexpectation, etc., etc.