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#Lexember post Seven Conlanging objects in the Cālenyan world – PLUNDER!

Dec11

This was going to be about butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers, but I decided plunder was more fun.

The Cālenyana have a very bellicose culture, and one of their oldest words and concepts is plunder, spoils of war: dīkiz.

It comes with its paired word dyukez, souvenirs, or useless trinkets brought home from war.

And a similar word: dezhiz – temporary gains, or land claimed in a battle, but not won in the war. And useless gains, or Pyrrhic gains: dyuzh

Spoils of war aren’t just things or land, either: dīkizātē is a person who has been taken – what Rin refers to as a “war-bride” or a “war-groom.” And an udenīkiz is an idea – a large idea, some big concept – that is grabbed from another culture. The Cālenyana have a lot of those.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/429246.html. You can comment here or there.

#Lexember post Six Conlanging objects in the Cālenyan world – Art and needle-art (also maps)

Dec10

The Cālenyena have had a uncertain relationship with art all along.

Their original word for drawing and their word for map indicate this fairly clearly:

Drawing is tyek, with the grammatical beginning meaning “without use.”

Map is tenek, a very similar word but with the beginning indicating “with use.”

“Lately,” in the era of the Rin/Girey story and later, art has begun to be more often “tek,” often with a prefix or suffix meaning some sort of art. But the words that have evolved from “tyek” still have the y sound in them.

For instance: benyentyek, bentyek, art-with-a-needle, embroidery.

(and if that isn’t a tidy way to pull together a request for “map” and “embroidery,” I don’t know what is. 🙂

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/428747.html. You can comment here or there.

#Lexember post Five – Conlanging objects in the Calenyan world – Meals

Dec8

So, we’re back on food today!

To start with, in the comments of the last post, I came up with the word for table:
geten-upēk becomes getupēk, food-blanket, table.

And then, a bit more history.

The proto-Cālenyena were a semi-nomadic culture, which ate mostly gathered foods and goat products (meat, milk, cheese, yogurt).

The story they tell about their primary starch crop, a parsnip-like root vegetable that is a stem-tuber, in style like a potato, is that their goats found it growing along the banks of a river.

More likely, considering the name, was that a proto-Bitrani captive found the plants, realized they were edible, and began cultivating them.

The name, belenuza, likely comes from the proto-Bitrani osani á sibellan, earth-around-apple, although there are scholars that argue parallel linguistic construction, and those that argue it came from cazenbelun, a {west coast} word for a type of celery, with a declension meaning “down.” However, nobody’s ever heard anyone in the {west Coast} discuss “down celery.”

… That aside, the Cālenyen word for “meal” is one that seems to be their own word. Lōk and pēku seem to have originally referred to “food that requires something done to it” (originally lyōk) and “food you can eat right away;” some culinary awareness must have seeped in over the years.

Possibly with the belenuza.

getupēk, food-blanket, table.
belenuza, potato-parsnip (or earth-apple)
Lōk, meal

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/427975.html. You can comment here or there.

Meme Time

Dec7

The last time I did this one, I was still writing with E.

Pick a character I’ve written and I will give and explain the top five ideas/concepts/etc I keep in mind while writing that character that I believe are essential to accurately depicting them.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/427089.html. You can comment here or there.

#Lexember post Four- Conlanging objects in the Calenyan world – Eating

Dec6

People wanted to know what the Cālenyena ate with, on, and at.

Cālenyen eating words evolved from sitting-around-a-cookfire eating to sitting-around-a-large-platter eating. Original tools for eating were small knives sharpened on one side, zēzupēk, zēpēk, food-knife.

They discovered the concept of a forked stick for picking up larger amounts of food; this became a pūtupēk, pūpēk, food-spear.

(most of the Cālenyen innovations were originally stolen from another culture.)

“Today,” in the reign of Emperor Alessely (I think this should probably be spelled Alesulē), a properly set eating arrangement will involve:

zēpēk, in a pair
pūpēk, only one
gazē (From the Bitrani savia), a deep-bowled spoon
tōrēk, from tōrupēk, “food-field (of battle),” a wide round platter on which dishes are arranged to be shared.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/426961.html. You can comment here or there.

Are you her? A drabble of Cya/Boom

Dec6

After Find Me a Boy, between Year 40 & 41 of the Addergoole School

“Come on, kid. You’re coming home with me for a while.”

It surprised Cya less than it ought to when the boy got up and grabbed his bags without question or argument, when he followed her to her car – the solar panels on the roof were mostly for show, but it ran pretty well, whatever the method – and got in, buckled himself in, even. It did surprise her how little luggage he had – one bag, and one small suitcase. And it surprised her when he started talking.

“So, you’ll take me away from here?”

He waited until she was buckled in to ask it. It sounded a bit strange, to her ear, like he was quoting a formula she didn’t know.

If he hadn’t already been in the car, she might have ducked in to ask her old Mentor. Since he was there, she went with honesty.

“If you agree to be mine, yes.”

This was not the script. This was not how things normally went. She hadn’t even lain down the first of the mind control Workings yet.

“So if I agree to Belong to you, you’ll take me home?”

“To my home.” He wasn’t running away. What the hell?

“Then I’m yours.” Okay, this was the weirdest thing yet. And he didn’t sound angry, more resigned.

“Yes, you are.” She flipped three levers and turned two dials, and got the car moving down the road. She could do this in her sleep, after all these years. Once, she’d been told afterwards, she had done a bit of it in her sleep.

She was falling into that long-drive trance, eyes on the long stretch of road and her mind running over the supplies at the Ranch, when he finally spoke again.

“Are you her?”

That could mean a lot of things. “Depends on who she is.”

“The Valkyrie. The chooser of the dead.”

“Oh.” She laughed a little bit. “No, that’s my niece.”

“Oh.” He didn’t sound relieved, maybe a little disappointed. She’d have to tell Ruki she had a reputation. “Then are you the other one?”

“Maybe. Who’s she?”

“They say every year, a pretty redhead shows up and chooses one guy, and takes him away from it all.”

“Oh. Well, that’s me.” She glanced over at him. “And you came anyway?”

“I lost it all.” His shoulders slumped forward a bit. “He challenged me, and he took it all.”

“Aah.” That explained some of it, then. She lapsed into silence, and so did he.

Her dash clock told her forty-five minutes had passed before he spoke again. “When you kill me… would you bury me somewhere warm? Cremate me, maybe?”

“When I… what?”

“That’s what they say. You take them, and then when you’re done with them, you kill them. Us.”

“And you came anyway?”

“I lost everything,” he repeated. She supposed it was a kind of answer.

“Sorry to disappoint.” What the hell were they saying about her? The last time someone had called her a serial killer, the world had still had large police forces. “But I’m not going to kill you.”

“Oh.”

And he was, she thought, the first person to ever look unhappy when she told them she wasn’t going to kill them.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/426249.html. You can comment here or there.

Find me the Boy, a drabble of Cynara

Dec5

Between Year 40 & 41 of the Addergoole School – about 2 years before the story I just posted.

In a year or two, Cya’s grandkids were going to start attending Addergoole. In a year or two, the cycle was going to start all over again; she would pack them up with hawthorne in their pockets and rowan between their clothes. In a year or two, she would think about not doing this anymore. Not when the boys were younger than her grandchildren.

It had become, she thought, a bit of an addiction. Not even the sex – half of them didn’t like girls anyway – not even the control – she’d gone a year with nothing more than the base orders, just to see if she could, with the last one. But something about the routine. New year, new boy.

She dropped her Masks, safe in the boundaries of the Village, and let her power loose. Find me the boy, she told it. Find me the one that can benefit from this. The one I can hook. The one who won’t hate it all. The one we won’t hate.

Before she’d finished, practically before she’d started vocalizing, she could feel the tug. She followed the pull, combed her fingers through her hair, wondered if she should have put on make-up. She didn’t look any older… but this boy… this boy would be…

He wasn’t at Maureen’s. Cya was never sure if that was a good sign or not. Wandering around looking lost, hanging over Maureen’s fence… this one was sitting on the ground outside the tavern, looking like he’d lost his only friend.

Cya stopped in her tracks. At first, all she could see was the blonde hair, the antlers – just budding, little velvety stubs – the pose. Not him. No, no.

Him, her power insisted. That one. She’d never felt it this strongly.

It was like he could feel it. He looked up at her, and the spell broke. He was so pretty, for a moment she thought he might be a girl. His hair was fairer than Leo’s, nearly white. And his chin was a point you could use to cut cheese.

Saying the right thing wasn’t her power. And part of her mind was screaming No, no. We don’t *do* boys with antlers. We don’t do that again. But she found herself opening her mouth anyway.

“Come on, kid. You’re coming home with me for a while.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/426019.html. You can comment here or there.