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The Atlantic name for Rami.

I forget, sometimes, that those of my languages that share the same space ought to be influencing each other.  Atlantic, for example, is supposed to have many loanwords from Menashean (a later stage of Drake) but I have not put many in yet—mostly due to the woeful lack of progress in the latter. And so […]

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On Ibran orthography (a start)

Following my post in 2009 on describing writing systems, I’ve started working on a description of Ibran’s orthography: Ibran has a long written history, leading back to Old Ibran, which is first attested in the 10th century. Though the standard language did not vary among Ibran speakers, the orthography was highly variable; over the centuries, […]

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Kirumb word of the moment.

homíí|óm, hómííís|a, hómáyóók|a. (hÊŠmijijuːm) v. trans. To understand.  [Proto-Indo-European *som-HyeH₁- . Cf. Greek συνίημι.] Sometimes Kirumb words tend to get … interesting strings of vowels.  The ííí in the aorist hómííísa is probably one of the longer ones I’ve come across.  That’s three long is in a row, and as vowels in hiatus are broken up […]

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Reggio.

A short one — Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 24.1: Itaque Regio extemplo abscessum est. And so they left Reggio immediately. There are two cities in Italy called Reggio, or R(h)egium in Latin: Reggio nell’Emilia in the north and Reggio di Calabria in the south, at the toe of the Italian boot.  The latter is the one being referred […]

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Kirumb words of the moment.

Feels like it’s been a long time since I’ve worked on Kirumb, for some reason. So, one of my projects in it is to make sure I have a decent amount of vocabulary.  The official beginning of this is translations of all the NSM primes.   I already had words for ‘I’ and ‘you’, but […]

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Rami vowels, part 1.

So I started a stub page on FrathWiki about the Rami alphabet.  Not much in the way of detail yet; this is one of the areas where I have a lot of rudiments worked out, but not much finished polished product.  Didn’t even have any decent image files of the characters put together—so I’m taking […]

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Henaudute sentence of the moment.

Φαῖνε rule.1SG ῥάδαν land.ACC.SG μάνδαθη excellent.Γ ὕννε? not.1SG Ὕντε not.3PL μάδῑ woman.NOM.PL ῥάδανα country.INESS.SG νεῦνευ? 1S~EMPHATIC ‘Do I not rule an excellent land? Are there no women in my own country? (The label ‘Γ’ on μάνδαθη indicates the gender called γαρη “earth” in Henaudute; it is used chiefly for inanimate objects and parts of things that […]

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New Atlantic words.

AxayÉ›. (ɑ́.xÉ™.Ê’É›) adj. and n. Achaean. [Greek Ἀχαιός.] aʃɛ. (É‘Ì€.ʃə) n. An ill, a woe, a calamity, a trouble.  [Proto-Indo-European *agh-o-.] murÉ›. (mù.ɾə) adj. Countless, innumerable.  [Proto-Indo-European *muH-ro-.] AxayÉ› is a reborrowing from Greek. If it had been borrowed in the Kirumb era its Atlantic reflex would be *Ahvɛ—compare the Latin Achivus—but I don’t think […]

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Âdlantki word of the moment.

pruÅ¡ni. (prúʃ.ni) n. Offspring, progeny. A baby; an infant. [Proto-Indo-European *proHâ‚‚-ǵnH₁-o-.] As one of the glosses suggests, this is a near cognate to “progeny”, though the formation was meant to follow Sanskrit प्रजा prajā. It can be used both of descendants generally, or of infants—compare “child” in English—but I think the more usual sense is the latter. […]

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Cases in Drake.

The other day I was sitting down to work on Drake’s FrathWiki page and going through old notes on what to add.  I found the note: “cases: nom gen dat acc loc”. Ah wonderful, I says to myself, I haven’t had much grammar in this yet. I rummage through everything else, though, and am only […]

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