Archive | January 2018
Conlang (Extra Lexember?) – The Village, Part II
Post 1: http://www.lynthornealder.com/2017/12/25/lexember/
Post 2: http://www.lynthornealder.com/2018/01/05/conlang-extra-lexember-syllabary/
Post 3: http://www.lynthornealder.com/2018/01/08/conlang3/
Post 4: http://www.lynthornealder.com/2018/01/15/conlang3-2/
Post 5: http://www.lynthornealder.com/2018/01/18/conlang/
Today’s topic is… Village
Within a village, there are usually several people of importance:
You have the head person, mayor or dispute-reckoner.
Oh! Fight, a fight is rrig. To fight is thus rrog and fight-attitude is rreg.
Okay, so Jirregji. The head-of-village.
And you have the wise-folk: zindi (both Is are as in in)
And the clever-folk: ridi.
di itself means thought, mind.
In this case: the wise folk are usually older people who have proven themselves to have a great deal of knowledge to share.
And the clever folk are generally past adolescence and into an age of innovation.
Oh! Plurals.
=da, -sa, -ya, -kwa
-more-than-one, indeterminate
-two
-a triad
-too many to count
so the wise-folk and the clever-folk are usualy zindiya, ridiya.
There is the Hunt-leader, redi. Like the jirregji, there is only one of them at once.
And the farm-leader, ledi.
And there is the diplomat, (the foreigner-leader), jijidi, of which there is usually be one, but might be several.
People of the village are likfrikwa
(fri is a person)
(Yes, village-people).
(well, TECHNICALLY, people of the green)
A larger village will have a child-leader as well, zizdi, one who thinks about the children. But in a smaller village, this is handled by the wise-ones.
This is a level just barely beyond subsistence farming. Some people focus on root- or seed-crops, some focus on hunting, some on the animals. Some make things from the things they can hunt or harvest – wooden things or foods or stone things or things made from bones, and so on.
And some people gather specifically those things that are unique to their own area, for trade with other areas.
Last Night’s Writing
Last night, I was feeling like I was running on one cylinder and running out of gas, but I play this writing game, 4theWords, and I really wanted to move up one step on the leaderboards for battles.
Which meant 4 130-word (or so) battles.
So I asked for suggestions on Mastodon, and this is what came of it.
Well, technically, two of these weren’t even from suggestions…
But anyway! Words!
📝
Filling the Boots
He woke and shook out the cards. Continue reading
Exploit
Okay, content warning, I creeped myself out.
🤖
“Kelly, he’s a person, he’s not a robot, you can’t just – Kelly, what are you doing?”
“So there’s this line of – okay, they’re not robots, but they’re programmed, aren’t they? They’re the Zero-One-Seven line out of Detroit, and they’re, ah, They’re beautiful, for one.” Kelly gestured at the man in question, a handsome, tall, twenty-something dressed in a simple tunic and pants that looked too sterile and antiseptic for the city street. He smiled back, a wooden expression that did not reach his eyes. “And they have an exploit in them.”
“Kelly,” Susan repeated, “he’s a person. People don’t have – they don’t have – really?”
“Really. And the thing is, he wasn’t purchased – there’s this loophole, you can’t actually buy a person, even someone from on of the programmed lines.”
“Good! Good, Kelly, that’s awful.”
“But indentures are still legal.” Kelly stroked the back of the man’s neck affectionately. He did not move, except his eyes, which half-closed. “And what’s more, there’s this clause in the programming that is suppose to ensure obedience. But what it ends up doing—”
“I’m going to be sick,” Susan muttered.
“Oh come on. They sell these Programmables, they’re supposed to be — well, programmed. It’s what they’re sold for. They volunteer. Anyway. There’s this thing where they’re supposed to imprint on the person to wake them up, who is supposed to be their indenture-holder.”
“:That’s pretty horrible.”
“They’re programmables, Susan,” Kelly repeated. “It’s not like they have feelings until they’re programmed in. Anyway. That means that whoever wakes them up essentially holds their indenture. They can’t be re-imprinted without a full factory reset.
“You stole a programmable human? A person. Kelly. How did you?”
“I hacked a Programmable, using a really obvious exploit in their system. And those training screens they use? They have no security at all. I hacked him, Susan. And now he’s mine.”
She stroked his hair again, paying no attention to the way his jaw twitched at her touch.
🤖
Written to yesterday’s Thimbleful Thursday’s prompt: Zero Hour.
Want More?
Conlang (Extra Lexember?) – The Village
Post 1: http://www.lynthornealder.com/2017/12/25/lexember/
Post 2: http://www.lynthornealder.com/2018/01/05/conlang-extra-lexember-syllabary/
Post 3: http://www.lynthornealder.com/2018/01/08/conlang3/
Post 4: http://www.lynthornealder.com/2018/01/15/conlang3-2/
Today’s topic is… Village
Village!
We have a rertivel, the house-bowl with a central green – liklek, in a style they often use (It’s a green-green)
And wid, originally a meadow or other wide stretch of land, becomes a field for planting crops in.
We have the thit, a cattle-like creature (and thet, bovine, usually used to mean lazy and sleepy, and thot, to act in a bovine matter).
The thit and the yin, an egg-laying creature (ducklike) are kept in kid, a corrale (ked, square, kidden, square, kod, to corralle).
And the food is often cooked in a central area, which is usually a kidden, the word square, moved out to mean a central cooking-place.
Those who cook are didden. (okay, technically, that’s One-who-cooks. Must do plurals next) Continue reading
The Hidden Mall: Circles 🔘
First: The Hidden Mall – a beginning of something
Previous: Normal
The Hidden Mall has a landing page here: http://www.lynthornealder.com/verses/the-hidden-mall/
🔘
“One minute. Just one minute, and then we can run.” She was being ridiculous, and she knew it. No, she was being suicidal. But she had to know.
She pulled the bag from the skeletal hand and passed it to her Liv, who took it as it it was on fire, holding it with two fingers by the end of a strap. Then she pushed aside a bunch of the vines in one rough shove.
The vines wanted to crawl back in, pulling back around the body, pulling back around Abby, but she grabbed what she was looking for – the chain of the necklace around the corpse’s neck – and pulled hard. Continue reading
Protected: Chapter Nineteen: Nobody Up
Purchased
First: http://www.lynthornealder.com/2017/12/03/negotiation/
Previous: http://www.lynthornealder.com/2018/01/07/purchase-agreement/
There was paperwork, or at least the sort that involved moving small pieces of green paper between people. It wasn’t like this place wanted a trail.
And then there was the woman who had trapped him originally passing his ownership over, and then there was the matter of removing the shackles, the leather belt, the ankle restraints, and the thick steel collar. The woman paused for a moment, raised her eyebrows. Continue reading
X-Factor
“We’ve studied one million samples.” Professor Georges was very solemn. It didn’t keep Professor Osborne from scoffing at him.
“There aren’t a million people in this part of the world anymore.”
“We have been studying for a long time. At approximately fifty thousand people a year for the first one hundred fifty years, and then a much reduced rate. The last five years, we took samples from merely a thousand people.”
“So your rate of testing decreased over time.”
“The population decreased over time, and the methods became, by necessity, more circumspect: we could no longer use blood tests overtly. Also, our own population was badly hit by the Disaster.”
“Yes, of course it was. What did you determine?” Continue reading
Conlang (Extra Lexember?) – Society
Post 1: http://www.lynthornealder.com/2017/12/25/lexember/
Post 2: http://www.lynthornealder.com/2018/01/05/conlang-extra-lexember-syllabary/
Post 3: http://www.lynthornealder.com/2018/01/08/conlang3/
Today’s topic is… Society
Right now, I’m building vocabulary based on a very pre-industrial society. It’s sort of an experiment (which might end up being an in-world experiment, too; I have Ideas); I’m picturing them at a beginning-to-farm level as well as having pictured them at a hunter-gatherer level and going outwards from that.
So what we have are people living mostly in tiltek, sturdy rock homes built on high outcroppings, generally up against each other and in horseshoe shapes to stand against the cold winds that come in from the coast. Continue reading