Two books, one apology

I'm sorry I haven't posted as much the past couple of weeks. As expected, I did got very into Final Fantasy XIII, and I beat it now. Yay!

A more conlang related exciting thing happened last week too.

/drumroll

I got my copy of the LCK print version. I wrote about this when I first heard it was going to come out, and it's finally here! I haven't had a chance to read more than the first few sections, and I will give a full review when I have gotten more through it.

While I was on Amazon ordering that I also ordered Okrent's In the Land of Invented Languages. I have heard of this book many times since it came out, but I never happened to see a copy at my local B&N. That plus the fact that I read very slowly, and don't buy books unless I have full intentions of reading them cover to cover caused me to pass up this since it came out around 2007. Well, ordering the LKC reminded me of it, and I added it to my cart.

It only took me four days to finish the book cover to cover. Okrent's narrative of her journey into the modern invented languages, and research on older ones is insightful, inspiring and a complete delight. I definitely recommend it to anyone who's interested in conlanging, or just linguistics in general.

Counting days

For the purposes of counting days in time I've divided up the year in Reisu. The word for year is nopurigi, which comes from the word nopu for day, and the word rigi for sun. Similarly the word for month is nopulaki, from nopu for day and laki for moon.

I decided to compose the week of 5 days instead of 7. 5 days in a week makes more sense to me, and a week is a totally arbitrary grouping of time anyway, so why not? The days are...

Nopukusi	Fireday
Nopuxusu	Waterday
Nopufimi	Windday
Nopudori	Landday
Nopukoxu	Plantday

When translating the days I've been using Nopukoxu as weekend days, although the reason I named it koxu is that I imagine it to be the market day. I suppose I do associate Saturday with a market day in modern times, because that's usually when families go to the grocery store. A week itself is called Koxukusi.

I also divided up the months, but I didn't make 12 months. I made 8, by dividing each season in half. For example Lakijeva (flower month) and Lakibuxu (grass month) are the spring month. I Imagine Lakijeva starting on the Spring Equinox and lasting until half way to the summer solstice, and then Lakibuxu ending just before the summer solstice, and so on like that through the seasons until we come back to spring.

Spring	Lakijeva	Flower month	Lakibuxu	Grass month
Summer	Lakitoxu	Rain month	Lakirati	Hot month
Autumn	Lakitaka	Yellow month	Lakigapa	Fruit month
Winter	Lakifuxu	Cold month	Lakifuso	Snow month

Because there's only 8 months I imagine in this word either the way the plant and/or moon rotate is different. So that either their year is shorter, or the moon phases last longer, or maybe a little of both.

Babel text

The Babel text in Reisu. Natlang translations here.

1. Lona aa neinala isu a kataru ya ootai. 2. Va esa jotola oto, emodosa heitila junasa po Shinar, ya omagila levo. 3. Esa neinala lo enosairifu, "Daxi, eka eisa leika koposa, ya kusi batei esa." Esa mainola dorixusu lo kopo, ya savi lo suko. 4. Esa neinala katave, "Daxi, eka eisa leika diko ya onapiru yuba evo vuti lo kaisa; ya eka eisa kiki einosarifu, ro eisa mitotilari re lona aa." 5. Bo Lord daxila yu la oki dikoru ya onapiru yuba, emodorusa leikala. 6. Lord neinala, "Ta emodorusa kuala a, ya esa maino isa a; esa lipaku aahe katave. 7. Daxi, eka eisa yata yu, ya juado isa esano, mo esa muzozo enosairifu." 8. Mo Lord totila esa re lona: ya esa kaxila diko. 9. Mo e kikila Babel; hai Lord juadola lona aa isano, ya Lord totila esa re lona aa.

I didn't translate the proper names, mostly because I have not decided if Reisu will have a Terran or non-Terran conworld.

Wiktionary

So, my dictionary spreadsheet was getting out of hand. To solve this I created a wiki that serves as a dictionary for Reisu. I'm especially excited about this, because if there's one thing I wanted to avoid it's "word of the day" type posts, for a conlang like this, without a shiny writing system, I simply don't think they are interesting enough. So the wiki let's me share all of the Reisu words with you in an easily digestible way.

One thing with the wiki is it implies that it's being edited by many. Of course this isn't the case with this wiki at the moment, but if you are interested in helping me with upkeep of it let me know. Depending on responses/if I get any I may decide differently.

Hot for teacher

Today I want to talk about one of my favorite youtubers, hotforwords. Her videos highlight the etymology of English words. And as much as I love etymology that's not the only good part of her videos. Well, I think you'll get the idea if you just watch this one:

Leru, levo, lehaa!

The le in the words above come from the preposition le, which means place or at a specific place. Leru means here. We get -ru from the demonstrative suffix 'close to the speaker'. Levo for there is derived the same way, from -vo. You can also say Levu for 'over there'.

Aa means all, every or whole. So lehaa means everywhere. With the same logic, leze means nowhere because ze means no, none or not. Ze negates nouns, where 'u' negates verbs.

You can also make these words with the third person pronoun e. An 'H' is inserted with two vowels come together, and dipthong isn't appropriate. So everything is ehaa and eze is nothing. Sometimes ehaa and eze are used for 'everyone' and 'no one' as well, but if you want to specify a group of people you can use the words emodohaa and emodoze. Emodo means person.

Always and never are formed the same way with the word kata for time. So always is katahaa and never is kataze. Kataru is now, katavo is then and katave is a farther away then.

The plural suffix -sa isn't usually needed on the -aa and -ze words because it's implied. The suffix -sai can be added to mean that the things in the group are different from each other. For example the difference between 'emodohaa' and 'emodohaasai' is 'all the people' and 'all the peoples' respectively.

Here's a handy table

Place	Le	Thing	E	Time	Kata
Here	Leru	This thing	Eru	Now	Kataru
There	Levo	That thing	Evo	Soon	Katvo
Over there	Leve	That (farther) thing	Eve	Then	Katave
Everywhere	Lehaa	Everything	Ehaa	Always	Katahaa
Nowhere	Leze	Nothing	Eze	Never	Kataze

Final Fantasy is an RPG

I've been pretty engrossed in Final Fantasy XIII this past weekend, so if I don't have a post every day this week it's because I was playing that instead of thinking about my blog, sorry in advance :(

There are two pretty cool conscripts in the game however. There's one for Pulse and one for Cocoon. Here's a scan of it from a Japanese guide. (No, I did not scan this myself)



The one on the top is Cocoon and the one on the bottom is Pulse.

This isn't the first time that a Final Fantasy has done this of course. Anyone remember the Spira alphabet? I really like when they put these kinds of things in Fantasy games. It helps give me the feeling that it's taking place outside of Earth, even if the letters can be directly translated.