GOLD

So this is cool. Someone shared this lovely link on the list recently, and I had to post it here. It's a database of all those crazy linguistic terms that I can never remember what they mean. I've searched for something like this before, but never come up with anything. Now I have gold. Yay :D

Drinking

We talked about meats recently, and this week I want to get to some even more basic words of eating. Back on my phonology posts when I started this blog I translated "amu" and "bubu" as verbs for eating and drinking.

This isn't always an appropriate translation, although it will work most of the time. Amu really means closer to 'consume' than 'eat'. We amu food, water, air, medicine and other things (that we probably shouldn't). This is the most basic word of consumption, and most often used in the context of eating.

But it's not only used for animals. Plants also amu sunlight, water and other nutrients from the soil. In fact objects can amu as well. For example my television can amu electricity, and cars amu gasoline.

Since amu can be used in all these ways, what is the word bubu for? I means the same as amu, only specifically to liquids. I use it if differentiation is needed, though it very rarely is. More commonly I use bubu to describe drinking 'ivija' or... alcohol! This is similar to a colloquial usage of drinking in English. Phrases like "Have you been drinking?" or "I've had too much to drink!" would normally refer to alcohol.

Similarly the word for breathing, feni, tends to be used when the context is not clear that we are referring to gasses. In practice, I've found this rarely necessary. If it's clear by the context amu is perfectly fine to use. And similarly to bubu, feni is used to refer to smoking. So a sign saying "ufeninu" would mean "no smoking" not "no breathing".

Unlike bubu for liquids and feni for gasses there is no special word for consuming solids. When speaking of solids always use 'amu'.

Some example sentences~
Amu safisa ono aa. - Eat all of your vegetables (Eat salad-greens you all).
Eka eisa bubu ata-go a. - Let's have one more drink (Let us drink cup-more one)!
Onapiru maino ufeninu - This is a non-smoking building (Building-this has NEG-smoking).

Case of the cute

Being a girl I am a lover of cute things. Cute animals, cute objects, even sometimes cute babies. I like to think this is sort of universal, being drawn to cute things.

In Reisu the word for this is 'guxi'. It is used not only to describe the cute or adorable quality in things, but the feeling they invoke, or the effect of the cute. Guxi vola xidoki, or the cute melts the soul. In better English, looking at cute things has a soul melting effect.

In these ways guxi is a specific type of larelai, and a specific type of puati. While others may find different things cute, the feeling cuteness invokes is so universal it is it's own two syllables instead of some compound of larelai or puati. And important enough for me to want to do a post just on this word.

Lastly, a helpful phrase. As you might often hear on the internet: Oki bofiru komo-denu guxi! Look at this cute cat picture! Literally, View picture-this kitten(cat-baby) cute!

Fufai

After having only a broken grill for almost a year we finally bought a new one. I had the first home grilled steak that I've had in a long time. And boyfriend cooks amazing things on the grill, especially steaks. He's got a Hank Hill like love of propane. So our house was very happy to day. In honor of that, this is going to be a food post, specifically about meats.

In English we have lots of words for animals that we only use when talking about meat. Beef, mutton, pork, etc. We seem to reserve these words for mammals mostly. Birds and fish don't tend to get different words. Chicken is chicken, duck is duck, salmon is salmon etc.

Not all natlangs do this of course. In Chinese the word for beef (牛肉) amounts to "Cow meat". I've taken a cue for Chinese for talking about meat in Reisu. In Reisu I try to think of no animal being above any other, and in this way the language reflects that. There's no special words for the animal simply because it's dead and going to be eaten. When talking about the meat of an animal we must remember the animal itself.

The word for meat is 'fufai', and we can pair that with the name of the animal. So beef in Reisu is 'fufai biho' or 'fufai bihomuka' depending on the context of the conversation. Reason being is 'biho' is a general term that can be used for many different large hooved animals domesticated or wild, although most commonly it refers to cattle. So if you need to specify cow specifically over another large ungulate like a giraffe we can say 'bihomuka', 'muka' meaning domesticated.

Below is a chart of animal names that we might use in a phrase with 'fufai'. 'Muka' is in parentheses if it's optional. If it's not in parentheses it's not optional.

Cow	Biho(muka)
Chicken	Vexumuka
Pig	Hopi(muka)
Turkey	Vexubila
Sheep	Mukatoxi
Fish	Xudo

Na'vi in a nutshell

I finally finished reading all of NeotrekkerZ's Na'vi in a Nutshell. It's been out for a few weeks, but I hadn't finished reading it to give my full take, and now I have finished! This is the best guide I have read on learning Na'vi since I started scouring the internet for information after seeing the movie opening night.

Na'vi, like almost any conlang, is simply not developed enough to teach in the traditional classroom sense. In a classroom you learn grammar, exceptions to grammar and idiomatic phrases in a much more roundabout way. Since we can't do that with Na'vi we must take a much more direct approach. Na'vi in a Nutshell is broken down into sections on parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc), and it goes through all of Na'vi's cute little adpositions and infixes in a more or less logical order. There's even a skills test at the end to see how much you've learned. I haven't taken it yet. I want some more time for it to sink in before I'm struck with the realization that I still don't get it :)

The one draw back of course is certain sections are pretty heavy on the linguistic terminology. I'm no professional linguist, so sometimes that terminology goes over my head. There were a few places where I had to read it a few times, but for the most part I was able to get it from a practical perspective. And there's always Wikipedia to remind myself what certain terms mean.

So if you are interested in Na'vi, go check it out! After reading it I feel much more confident in how all the pieces fit together.

The way this guide is layed out is actually my preferred method to introducing myself to a new language. Not having a backbone like this is what caused me to give up on Japanese. I could never understand it because they only teach you the polite forms first, so I couldn't reason out the basic structures that I feel like I should have known after a 101. I definitely want to pick it up again someday, but right now I'll just stick to the random things I've gleaned from watching subtitled anime.

You're hot then you're cold

I know I haven't been posting much. There is no excuse. Mostly it's because we have new people at work which is keeping me from goofing off and conlanging there, and at home I've been playing too much WoW. Totally going to level a new toon when Cata comes out. Probably a female Worgen druid if they don't make their voices too annoying.

Ahem... anyway...

It's started getting really hot here! It actually has been hitting 90 degrees a few days. Now I love the warm weather compared to the cold, but when wishing for summer I always forget how annoying driving is in the hot weather. So I thought it would be a good time to talk about Reisu temperature words.

The main words to describe temperature are rati and fuxu, hot and cold respectively. The proper word for temperature is 'juaratifuxu' or a 'hot/cold scale', often just shortened to ratifuxu.

Like other modifiers in Reisu we can use them as verbs. While in English we would need to use a dummy subject and verb "It's hot", in Reisu we can just say "hot" or "rati".

Temperature especially in relation to the weather is common small talk in English. At least it's what clients always seem to talk about at work. However we don't normally say just hot or cold. We exaggerate saying freezing or sweltering, or we downplay it saying warm or cool. We can use quantifiers in Reisu to do the same thing. On a scale of coldest to hottest the words go this way.

fuxuge > fuxu > fuxutai > ratitai > rati > ratige

So getting into the car I might begrudgingly mumble 'ratige...'

Directional prepositions

Like demonstratives in Reisu directional prepositions have one more degree than English. For example we can talk about 'below' as directly below (vu) and below with at least some separation by distance (yu).

Ha	Beside, next to
Bi	Beside, but not directly next to. Implying an object or some distance is between the two things
Vu	Below, directly below, hanging from
Yu	Below, with an object or distance seperating
Fa	On top of
Ka	Above
Ma	Directly in front of
Be	In front of, with distance or an object sepearting
Di	Directly behind
Fi	Behind with distance or an object between

Examples of Ha/Bi:

Po okoko ha okoko eino kuala obani.
Inside House beside house 1S-POSS equals neighbor.
In the house next to mine is my neighbor.

Po okoko bi okoko eino kuala obani.
Inside house beside-with-something-separating 1S-POSS equals neighbor.
In the house down the street from mine is my neighbor.
Bi could mean the house is two doors down, across the street or down the street.

Po okoko bi okoko eino ukuala obani.
Inside okoko far-from house 1S-POSS NEG-equals neighbor.
The people in the house far from me are not my neighbors.
This use of bi implies the other house is very far from the speaker's house, too far to be neighbors.