Conlangers

iteiwomo

• (n.) the full change of the moon (i.e. going from, for example, one new moon to another new moon)

Inivieke uomoko i iteiwomo.
“It’s a marvelous night for a full change of the moon.”

Notes: Heh, heh… Little multilingual pun there.

Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone but me will get it, because I just realized I haven’t done the word tei yet! Argh!

Anyway, if you break it down, iteiwomo means “moon dance”. Now hopefully fans of Van Morrison will get it.

Hey, today is a special day! Today marks the 365th post to the Kamakawi Word of the Day Blog! Despite adversity, I made it through a full year, with only one unfortunate break. Not a bad word for the anniversary, either.

See, the movement of the celestial bodies is conceptualized as a dance (at least for the calendrical system). The change of the moon from one phase to its opposite is conceptualized as a turn, and then the return to its original position is a dance.

In some ways, the iteiwomo is like a month in our calendar. However, an iteiwomo is not necessarily twenty eight days: an iteiwomo is an iteiwomo, no matter how long it takes. As such, it’s not a reliable enough metric to make reference to. Furthermore, it’s not thought of as comprising any number of days in a particular order. So from one new moon to the next is an iteiwomo, but so is the change from one waning crescent to another waning crescent.

This system, of course, does not hang together perfectly. To see the kluge that keeps it together, tune in tomorrow!

rēha

Still on the seventh sentence of the Babel text:

il tamma ien ē pa mēli anānīke ī pa sāim antaxōni ān tēna ī la ankāe ancēji ja ñatta rēha pa jāo jānne;

rēha is a future marker. So the subordinate clause ja ñatta rēha translates as “that they will do” and modifies ankāe ancēji, the “doable deeds that they will do”. And this entire noun phrase ankāe ancēji ja ñatta rēha is the object of la and thus the next noun phrase jāo jānne is an attribute of this one. Got that? la NP1 pa NP2 = NP2 is an attribute of NP1.

“Then He said: the people have unity and they have only one language and the doable deeds that they will do…”

umewomo

• (n.) a Kamakawi two week cycle (perhaps equivalent to a fortnight)

Eteke mowoito ki ti umewomo.
“Fourteen days make a fortnight.”

Notes: We haven’t yet finished up discussion of the ill-defined Kamakawi calendar. We’re getting close, though!

As has been mentioned previously, the Kamakawi “week” consists of fourteen days. This “week” is referred to as an umewomo. It refers to a changing of the moon: The time it takes for the moon to go from a new moon to a full moon, or vice versa. This is often considered the basic unit (beyond the day) of the Kamakawi calendar. In usage, then, it’s like a month, even though it’s closer to a week. That said, there are no special names for the umewomo: Just one after another after another after another.

More terms shall follow!

ancē

Still on the seventh sentence of the Babel text:

il tamma ien ē pa mēli anānīke ī pa sāim antaxōni ān tēna ī la ankāe ancēji ja ñatta rēha pa jāo jānne;

ancē denotes the quality or attribute of “doable” or “able to be done”. It is here in the collective plural modifying ankāe. Taken together, the phrase ankāe ancēji means something like “doable deeds”, or “deeds that can be done”. The phrase is then modified by the subordinate clause ja ñatta rēha and by the pa clause pa jāo jānne. More on that tomorrow.

or

uomo

• (n.) moon
• (v.) to be night
• (adj.) bright white

A teve uomo.
“The moon is bloody.”

Notes: Here’s a nice picture of what the Dothraki would call a jalan qoyi, or “blood moon”:

Photo Credit: photo by Jurvetson (flickr)

The glyph for uomo has a bit of a tangled history. Originally, the glyph for uo up there was the glyph for “moon”. It was just a moon character, and so a line was added below it to give it height. Pretty soon, the curvature of the moon part of the glyph changed, and came to look kind of like a hacek. Finally, the semantic concept “moon” became completely dissociated from the glyph, and it became just a syllabic glyph for uo (and we’ve seen it before in words like uola). It became such that a line determinative was needed to convey that the glyph meant “moon”.

Now, though, that usage has pretty much been phased out by the new glyph for “moon”. You can tell that it’s newer because the curvature of the moon part of the glyph has remained, and wasn’t angularized (spell check tells me that isn’t a word. I say fie on spell check!) the way other earlier curved glyphs were. Again, though, the curve of the moon was not felt to be large enough, and so the “ground” determinative was added beneath it, and that gives us the modern iku for “moon”.

Example:
Numy’het’xe yh mi’tore ,xe’la’sinu tuku, lija.
Ankle-GEN1S left 3S-hurt ,1S-PST-step wrong, because.
My left ankle hurts because I made a wrong step.

Indeed it does. I just wanted to go to a high place to make some photographs of the city. It worked, but going down what felt like maxint* stairs, I missed one, almost fell and twisted my ankle. It sucks. I would like to go to bed, but atm, climbling into the upper bed in the room I sleep in sounds like the kind of thing which would make it scream in pain again. And if it does so, metaphorically, I might do so literally. What also pains me is to see the ratio of legitimate comments vs. spam. There were mother than three times the amount of spam (thankfully eaten by Akismet) than of legitimate comments. Spammers are the scum of the earth!

Tore’tan is the kind of pain which is unwanted, annoying, and hurting. If it is pain which is part of a religious ceremony or generally has a positie connotation, rejistanis use another word: aela’tan.

It is also interesting that the expression ‘sinu tuku does not just literally mean to step wrongly, but also metaphorically all kinds of clumsiness.

* I learned programming in the 16 bit era, and thus maxint (the highest value which fits into an integer variable) to me still is 32767.

jakā

Still on the seventh sentence of the Babel text:

il tamma ien ē pa mēli anānīke ī pa sāim antaxōni ān tēna ī la ankāe ancēji ja ñatta rēha pa jāo jānne;

jakā is here in the collective plural form ankāe. jakā means “deed, something done”, so ankāe is deeds.