Lexitechnia

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 I was working on Rami, and found I had written that it had the same name both among the Rami people and by others.  Then I realized, that didn’t seem right — because I knew that Kirumb had a different name for the Rami people.  So I thought I’d better look it up and see how it turns out in Atlantic.

The Kirumb word for a Rami person is boró /vʊˈruː/, stem born- /vʊrn-/.  In Âdlantki the reflex of this is vorné /wɔ̀rne/, and in Atlantic vɔrne /vɔ̀rne/.

The basic adjective formed from this root in Kirumb is bornikos /vʊr.nɪˈkʊs/, which becomes vornki /wɔ́rnki/ in Âdlantki and vɔrnkɛ /vɔ́rnkɛ/ in Atlantic—and this last would also be the name of the language.  (The ending -kɛ is the same in Vɔrnkɛ as in the native name of Atlantic itself, Ədlantkɛ.)

I’m pretty sure the other languages of Nother will have their own names for Rami (and each other) as well; I’ll need to work them out at another date.

homíí|óm, hómííís|a, hómáyóók|a. (hʊmijijuːm) 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 with a glide, the word is pronounced [huːmijiˈjiːsÉ‘].   Each reflects a morpheme: the first -í- is the augment, the second -í- is the root—which is also -í- in the normal stem, and -yó- in the stative—and the last -í- is the suffix that gives the verb a durative sense.

It wasn’t about halfway through putting together this post that I’d realized I’d made a mistake in the headword; I’d put in homíáyóm as the headword, as if there were an Hâ‚‚ in the root, not H₁.  Always helps to take a second look at things!

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 I confirmed their declensions:

• Å¡oÅ‹, mos.(ˈʃʊŋ) pron. (acc.mi, abl.mit, dat.mai, loc.mi.)  I; the first-person singular pronoun.  [Proto-Indo-European *eǵHom.]
• tó, cos. (tuː) pron. (acc. ci, abl. cit, dat. cai, loc. ci.) You; the second-person singular pronoun. [Proto-Indo-European *tÅ« .]

The declension of tó actually shows a bit of analogical levelling; the genitive should actually be tos, but it becomes cos to match the rest of the stem, and the pattern in šoŋ.

The next word on the list is ‘someone’.  This is a tough one!  I had a firm idea it should not be something monomorphemic, like the Greek τις is.  I found Sanskrit कश्चन kaÅ›cana and decided to go with it.   For the first element I used the Proto-Indo-European *kÊ·is ‘who’; the affix is *kÊ·ene which denotes ‘Verallgemeinerung und Unbestimmtheit’ —so the  literal meaning would be ‘whoever’, I suppose, which is a meaning the final Kirumb word will also have.

I think I will use *kÊ·ene in a few places as a clitic particle that would go on the end of the declined form of the word (like Latin’s -cumque).  Because of this I needed to put together the whole declension of Kirumb’s reflex of *kÊ·is.

It’s ridiculously irregular. Luckily it all goes away with the rest of the case system in Âdlantki.

So there’s our word for ‘who’; we still need our word for ‘someone’.  The original *kÊ·ene comes out in Kirumb as -kin; the declension of kiskin ‘someone’ looks like this:

In most forms, due to the late loss of the original final -e, the stress is not in the place normally expected by Kirumb stress rules.  I have underlined the stressed syllables in these cases.  (It just happens that these are the same syllables accented in the unsuffixed forms of kis, but I’m not yet sure whether this will necessarily be the case whenever -kin is added.)

prušni. (prúʃ.ni) n.

1. Offspring, progeny.
2. A baby; an infant.

[Proto-Indo-European *proH₂-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.  It has a sort of baby-ness to it.

The image is what I think the word might look like in the Kirumb alphabet.  The font is pretty old, and I write /p/ differently nowadays, though I’m not sure if that was an intentional evolution in the character, or one of the innovations from writing English in it so much—the English mode would use different characters for u, š, and i as well.