Lexitechnia

Unlike last time where I only managed to work with one word, this time I actually have a word and a half! At this rate I’ll be writing books in no time.

The Âdlantki word for a dog is soné /sɔ̀ne/. This comes from the same IE root as Greek κύων, Latin canis, English hound, and the like. It also happens to be a word with an irregular plural: instead of *sonos—which I think would be the usual plural ending—it’s sâmbos /sə̀mbÉ”s/. This happens because the -v- in the original plural ending -vos, in combination with the -n- of the stem, changed to a stop instead of dropping out as would be expected. And because the stem vowel ended up in a closed syllable which was unstressed at the time, it ended up reducing to schwa.

I decided this might be a word common enough in the plural that analogy hasn’t leveled it—yet, anyway. I’m pretty sure the irregularity drops out, one way or another, by the time of modern Atlantic.

To go along with the word for “dog”, I started work on a word for “to bark”, though I didn’t get as far as finalizing it today. It was probably, at one time, meant to be onomatopoeic; the root is **gar-. But already by the time of proto-Hadwan it had lost most of its barky quality: the basic forms, with first-person endings hyphenated out, are *žarÄ“y-ōmi (normal), *žežirās-m (aorist), and *žežarōk-ka (stative). But don’t quote me on those, yet. The proto-Hadwan verb is, from looking at these notes, considerably more byzantine than the prior entries in my vocab transform scratch file suggest.