Saturday, May 4, 2013

Nev, Tef, and Zel (Talking to myself in public)

I have three words in my lexicon-spreadsheet-thing that are undefined: nev, tef, and zel. These would all probably be verbs, just looking at them. A lot of Nevashi verbs are CVC in their most basic form, and then add other bits to become other parts of speech.

Nev is the first element in "Nevash," the name of the island where the Nevashi people are from. The ash part means "land," but after all these years, I still don't know what the nev part means. No idea.

Tef is a possible verb form that might be behind the word tefya, "zero". I think it might have to do with absence or not-being. There are a lot of possibilities in running this through the different verb types: ma tef, "I am absent", or as a movement verb: ka tef, "I leave"... I will have to meditate on how that works.

I've tentatively defined zel as "to write poetry," backformed from zelea, "poem,"  but at some level, I know that's not exactly what that means. I'd like to find a way to make this work for writing poetry, composing music, and maybe for doing visual arts as well. And I wonder what it would mean as a verb of movement-- I have a word that means "to dance," but there's nothing wrong with having two ways to say that, I suppose.