Conlang Nerd – A Lesson in Werewolf Proto-language

found on stocksnap.io, picture taken by Jeffery Betts

Today’s word of the day, because I seem to be writing about them a lot lately, is rabbit.

In Skaod, a language spoken by the Yurha werewolves, the word for rabbit is “tovi.”  Much to my main character Toby’s annoyance, Skaod also doesn’t make much use of the phoneme “b” so he rather accidentally ended up with the name rabbit after being adopted by the werewolves.  Not the best name to have among a rather hard living, hunting, people, but Toby has done fine with it.

And because I love language building, we’ll take a little trip back to Wevek, one of the languages that Skaod sprang from.

In Wevek, the word for rabbit was kos (tovi came as a loaner from another language). To say what, to us, is the rather simple sentence, “the rabbit hopped behind the bush,” is a bit trickier in Wevek.

Here are the words you need:

the rabbit – kos   arkoshi

hopped – sot   skogchra

behind – ki

the bush – put latpuyi

Now, I’ll tell you that Wevek is usually an OVS language.  So, you might put together something like:

Ki put sot kos

That sentence would be akin to a toddler’s barely intelligible babbling Wevek.  All my fellow language nerds (I know you’re out there somewhere) know what’s coming.

To begin with, each of those words is merely the vanilla form of the word.  Capable of being used, on it’s own, as part of a sentence.  However, Wevek is a very agglutinating language.  Vanilla words tend to have a lot of stuff added to them to convey a variety of meanings and purposes.

So, here’s a more accurate list of the words you will need:

the rabbit –  arkoshi   (a – indicates this word is the subject; r – indicates the gender class of furred animals; kos – the root word for rabbit, the s gets dropped; sh – indicates the rabbit is moving and completed an action; i –  indicates this rabbit has been mentioned before, aka “the”

hopped – skogchra  (sk- indicates third person animal; og – all that’s left of the verb, where did that g come from, who knows; ch -indicates the speaker saw this happen; ra – indicates immediate past tense

behind – ka (adjusted to indicate that the rabbit placed itself behind the bush, as oppose to be put there, or simply found there)

the bush – latpuyi (la – indicates object of a preposition; t – indicates gender class of plant life; pu – the root word bush; y – indicates something is happening around the bush; i – indicates this bush has been mentioned before.

 

found on gratisography

Those of you who aren’t con-lang nerds are gaping at the screen, and wondering if I have any sort of social life.  Yes, creating this sort of thing is really what gets me pumped in my spare time.

The root of this sentence is the word rkos, rabbit. Every other word must be attached to it, and cannot exist alone.  The forms in which these words can exist alone are quite different.  Wevek makes a habit of making what in English would be entire sentences, into single words.  There are real world languages that do this, including many Native American ones.

 

So, the real sentence/word:

latpuyikaskogchrarkoshi

Wevek is long extinct, or more accurately turned into many other languages, as languages often do.  Skaod is much less polysynthetic, owing to its other parent language being more isolating.

There’s my geek moment for today.  Sound off in the comments, and tell me what makes you geek out, whether it be writing, music, television or whatever.

Cheers