#Lexember post Eight – Conlanging objects in the Cālenyan world – Waste

Dec12

Last night, I asked my spousal unit what everyday object I should cover next for Lexember.

“Urine,” said he.

So, today we have the crude words for urine and excrement, with vomit thrown in for good measure. These are the equivalent of “piss,” “shit,” and “puke;” because I have yet to figure out where the Cālenyana eventually get their “scientific” sorts of words. They don’t have Latin to pull from.

Back to the topic at… hand?

These are the noun forms; I’m not doing verbs right now.

dyen – piss
pyemen – shit
tyep – puke

I was asked yesterday where the pronunciation guide is – it’s here.

There’s an audioboo of my vowels here, and one of Cālenyan vocabulary here

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/429879.html. You can comment here or there.

Foundations, a drabble in response to many others.

Dec12

Continuation Piece, Addergoole. After this, after this, and so on.

“I was a kid when I built my first house.”

Most of what Luke was doing was Workings. Pulling the stones out of the ground, stacking them without mortar so that they were one fused foundation. That first house still stood, actually. He visited it, when he was feeling maudlin.

“Maybe twenty? We’d just won the war, and I was feeling flush and full of myself. Very full of myself.” He’d been young and arrogant, back then. He liked to think they’d both mellowed with time. “And I was in love. She was human. I thought that made me a better person.”

He couldn’t look at Myst while he told this story. Anywhere but.

“I’d grown up with the idea that being away from fae was the way to do it. My mother joined a tribe of the People. Some of her friends slipped into the colonies and lived right alongside the colonists. You know, ‘living with the people.'” This time, he allowed himself a scornful face. They’d been arrogant, thinking they were slumming it. “So I married her. And we had a son together.”

He used the excuse of Working the stones properly to not say anything for a while. Over two centuries later. He shouldn’t still be ashamed. He shouldn’t still be hurt.

“She was human, I said. And she had a human lifespan. And he…” Luke shrugged, glad right now that he couldn’t see Myst’s face. “He was human, too. I didn’t know what to do.” It startled him that he could still shed tears, now, so much later, for the boy who had died so young. He pressed his face against the stone, and wondered if he was doing her a disservice, watering the foundation of their home with his old regrets.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/429574.html. You can comment here or there.

Themes du Giraffe (et Fishie)

Dec11

[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith has open in her journal a call for fishbowl themes.

Which led me to think about my upcoming Giraffe call, and those coming through 2013 – and realize I was running a bit dry on themes myself.

I sort of have “the future is now” as a theme for this coming Giraffe Call, but I don’t even know if I like that one, and I don’t have anything for the upcoming year.

So after you go give Ysabet some ideas, stop back and give me some?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/429504.html. You can comment here or there.

#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.

And Then

Dec9

This is mostly an intro to an idea (or a ship). Yoshi and Viddie are Cynara’s children; Kishmish is Shiva’s daughter by Nikita, Sigruko is Viddie’s half-sister on their father (Leo)’s side, and Ariel and Amy are 2 of Zita’s daughters.

Even the Boom family tree requires diagrams!

Yoshi was not certain what to think about Ce’Rilla sh’Orlaith.

He had, on meeting her, thought she was the sort of slightly stuck-up girl that he didn’t really need to bother with. But she was fiercely protective of her “younger brother,” Sam, a quality Yoshi could appreciate, and she navigated her first year with a grace he could envy.

Of course, that was her first year. He’d noticed her get Kept but not paid much attention, noticed her get released some time later, and noticed her get Kept again, some time later. It was the Addergoole soap opera (for those of them that could remember soap operas); everybody watched it.

That was Ce’Rilla’s first year. In her second year, she met Yoshi’s little brother.

–

Ce’rilla was not sure what to think about Yoshi cy’Drake.

She would probably have accepted his collar with more grace than she’d taken any of the collars she’d ended up with in her first year, she thought. He was handsome, cheerful, and polite, and the girl he kept Ce’Rilla’s first year seemed pretty happy with him, as much as someone could be happy being collared.

Other than that, she hadn’t either noticed or paid attention to the older boy. There were lots of older boys, and the ones that weren’t directly involved with her Keepers weren’t people she needed to worry about. Just getting through the year was proving tricky enough.

That was her first year. In her second year, she met Yoshi’s little brother.

–

Viðrou was pretty sure Sigruko and Yoshi, Kishmish and Amy and Ariel meant well. Well, he was certain about his brother and sister, and decently convinced that his cousins were trying to help him.

He knew that Yoshi’s first year had messed him up. He knew that Ruki had come back quiet and thoughtful about a lot of things. He knew it could be rough, and he knew, by now, that the rough usually involved a collar. And he knew all about collars.

He was pretty glad he had his big sister and big brother here (He could have gone either way with the cousins. They were some pretty scary women). He knew that having your family or crew at your back was the best bet, always.

And then he met Ce’Rilla cy’Valerian.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/428481.html. You can comment here or there.

Not Being stupid, a drabble in re. many drabbles

Dec8

(Most recently this by Rion in response to this by me)

I always did well in history. Professors told me I was an eager student.

Luke was still chewing over that one – and trying hard, hard, not to imagine Mystral as Laurel’s eager student, what had Mike been doing to his head? – when she kissed him.

Luke had kissed Mystral before, of course. They had a daughter together, after all. But this… this was different.

And as the images in his head shifted like flip-cards from Mystral with Laurel to Mystral as she’d been in his bed, years ago, she dropped the bomb.

“I’d love you all the same.”

Luke’s wings flared widely, and his mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.

That, that he hadn’t been expecting.

Liking him around? Yes. There were reasons to like a man like him, a Mara like him around. Even Mike thought he was decent company.

Wanting to live with him – well, they had a daughter together. And she liked his company, and the world had fallen to pieces.

But love.

Love.

His wings flapped. His mouth opened and closed.

Some day, Wil had said to him, you’ll be ready. And when you are, lovely man… don’t be stupid about it.

Maureen had said something similar to him, a few years back.

Mike said it all the time.

“This is me,” he informed Mystral carefully, “trying hard not to be stupid. Mystral… I love you.”

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#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

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