Monday, November 26, 2012

Chairs, Rebels, and Closing on 600.

Nevashi finally has a word for "chair," deviya, so I will no longer be able to joke that it has a word for "non-dualism" but not one for "chair".  This new word is dev (to be located/stand/sit) + iya. It is modeled on meriya, bed, which is from mer, to sleep.  Neither of these words fits especially well with the general meaning of -iya, which normally turns a verb into a noun that is the usual object of that verb: nash (eat) + iya = nashiya (food). I think this must be some sort of furniture-related exception. I had thought that perhaps it should be "devvi," since -vi indicates a tool or instrument, but that doesn't really seem to fit with the idea of furniture in my mind either. I like these words the way they are, so that's what they will be.

Another recent word I am especially fond of is fafari, rebellious or mutinous. I would say that it is derived from faru, to be opposed to, but that's not actually how it happened. "Faru" was reverse engineered from "fafari".  File that under "Confessions of a Conlanger."

There are fewer than 10 words left until Nevashi hits the 600 word mark. It's at 592 right now. There's a flurry of new words coming soon that will put me well into the 600's.

After some conversation with Peter Bleackley (@PeteBleackley) on Twitter, a new word-building event was born: Lexember (link is to his blog post about it). That's a word a day for the 31 days of December. I am working on my list. I think I may do three words a day: one for Nevashi, one for ea-luna, and one for my embryonic personal auxiliary language, which I am currently calling "Maus"-- from "Mia Auxlang" and my crazy, enduring love of rodents.  I'll be tweeting new words and posting them here as well. I hope to see plenty of #Lexember tweets, or posts elsewhere, with lots of interesting words to look at.

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