“It Can Take Years. With The First Draft, I Just Write Everything. With The Second Draft, It Becomes

Find the Word

A tag from @theothersideofthewoods.

The goal is to find these words in my WIP: charm, bubble, poison, kiss

Your words are: gloom, shimmer, muck, home

Charm

Tonight, the chef had left a couple sliced apples with grilled salmon next to it. Irotijv, I thought to myself. The national dish of Zeneste. Definitely a good-luck charm for tomorrow. The apple was sweet and juicy, and the fish was seasoned and seared perfectly. I fell into my bed soon after having supper.

Bubble

I jumped back, ducking beneath the stream of flames when she turned around. Hota crossed their arms and closed their eyes. “I’m casting a blanket of tranquility,” they yelled, spreading their arms. A blue bubble enveloped the whole train car, dimming the flame in her mouth, but not the orange in her eyes.

Scar

[Taguchif] was sitting by a large window in another empty train car, staring out at the coast while the moon shone over it, reflecting over the water. Her gauntlets laid beside her, exposing her scarred hands. She did nothing when I sat beside her.

Poison

(Is it bad that this word literally doesn't show up in Meiste in the first ~50,000 words???)

Paging: @foxgloves-garden and @reedandstorm, along with open tag.

Day 14 (20 in base 7) of writing my novel again

Woohoo! I'm at two weeks of consistent progress!

I expanded Part Two to around 7,500 words today, which makes the whole thing around the 19,000 word count. I don't know what my original estimates for this thing were, but my newest estimates for how long this thing will be are between 70,000 and 100,000, since I'm probably only 20% of the way through and I'm already almost breaking 20,000. Definitely not a bad thing, it's just how the story I'm trying to tell is coming out.

Tomorrow will be national Odapir day (I decree it!) because I need to flesh the language and culture out. While there's already a substantial mass to work with, it's not ready to be translating anything, and I need translations.

That's all for now. Stay tuned!

Cursed Low Zeneth Translations

Consider this a makeshift guide to how Low Zeneth works.

Overview

Low Zeneth is a language and group of dialects spoken Southwestern Zeneste (the state of Tolftorrijv.) Its last common "ancestor" with Ipol was Classical Zispoel, but it had already started to diverge before the time of the Hero of Life. Low Zeneth is radically different than Ipol in many ways, though it's been influenced substantially by Ipol, too.

I will focus here on the prestige variety of Low Zeneth: the kind spoken in the city of Tolftorrijv.

Phonology/Romanization

Rendered Phonemically:

Stops: /p/ /b/ /t/ /d/ /k/ /g/

Nasal Stops: /m/ /n/

Affricates: /t͡s/ /t͡ʃ/

Fricatives: /f/ /θ/ /s/ /ʃ/ /h/

Approximants: /w/ /l/ /j/

Tap/flap: /ɾ/

Trill: /r/

Vowels:

/iː/ /i/ /yː/ /y/ /uː/ /u/

/eː/ /e/ /øː/ /ø/ /oː/ /o/ 

/ə̃/ /ə/

/a/ /ɑː/

That makes 34 total phonemes broken down from 20 consonants and 14 vowels.

Romanized:

p, b, t, d, k, g

m, n

ts, q

f, th, s, sh, h

w, l, j

r

rr

ij i üü ü uw u

ee ê öö ö oo o

v e

a aa

If you can't tell, I had fun deriving this phonology from the restrictive, Classical Zispoel phonology. Maybe a little too much, but oh well.

Morphology and Syntax - Grammar

Technically Low Zeneth is a VSO language, but that's not the full picture.

Basically, auxiliary verbs get sucked up into the (head-initial) tense-phrase. The tree below describes the translation "fijsesê bv hijfrê" which literally translates to "have I money" and means "I have money."

The result is that most subordinate clauses have the structure SVO, while the main clause has structure SV(A)O.

Low Zeneth has very slim morphology, only inflecting for a simple plural in nouns with -o, and no morphology at all in verbs. A series of sound changes rendered the T/A distinctions of Classical Zispoel basically indistinguishable, so to compensate, speakers of Low Zeneth employ heavy periphrasis.

Cursed Translations from Today

Fijatsia bv io dv luw êraanva ijrenva

Phonemic: /fi.ˈja.tsi.a ˈbə̃ ˈi.o ˈluː e.ˈɾɑː.nə̃.a ˈiː.ɾe.nə̃.a/

Lit. Translation: Will I give you of news urgent.

Meaning: I will give you urgent news/I must give you urgent news.

Üümen ijnvth Dvrr Ilaajote hijthen-luwario

Phonemic: /ˈyː.men ˈiː.nə̃θ ˈdə̃r i.ˈlɑː.jo.tə ˈhiː.θen.lu.wa.ɾi.o/

Lit. Manages Zeneste Emperor Tolftorrijv fight-people.

Meaning: The Emperor of Zeneste (now) manages the Tolftorrijv army.

Conclusion

I just figured I'd talk about Low Zeneth today because I haven't talked about it a lot but have been producing a bunch of translations. I realize only now that I didn't go over forming questions in this post, but maybe later I will. Feel free, as always, to request that I translate random words/phrases into this language.

since i’ve actually thought about this for my con world, let me indulge:

In Zeneste, lots of fish. Like, insane amounts of fish. Pickled fish. Breaded and fried fish. Grilled fish. I imagine it chopped up and served in little cups or on skewers with the same chopped up pieces.

As you approach the northern parts of Zeneste, there is increasingly more fruit. Mostly stone fruits: plums, apples, pears, peaches. The climate is colder, so closer to the coast you’ll encounter more cod and salmon in the Northeast.

In Åtepsi (which I may later rename), you’ll find much more rice with tropical fruit. They like sweet rice a lot, so balls of sticky, sweet rice are sold a lot. Also okra.

In Ōdapir there’s a lot of dairy (more so than the rest of the world) and so lots of cheese curds. Also tree nuts.

not enough fantasy settings talk about street food like c'mon there was street food in ancient times across basically every culture lemme see what weird snacks you can buy off a guy in an alleyway

things that happened to me when i was a woman in STEM:

an advisor humiliated me in front of an entire lab group because of a call I made in his place when he wouldn't reply to my e-mails for months

he later delegated part of my master's thesis work to a 19-year old male undergrad without my approval

a male scientist at a NASA conference looked me up and down and asked when i was graduating and if i was open to a job at his company. right before inquiring what my ethnicity was because i "looked exotic"

a random male member of the public began talking over me and my female advisor, an oceanographer with a pHD and decades of experience, saying he knew more about oceanography than us

things that have happened to me since becoming a man in STEM:

being asked consistently for advice on projects despite being completely new to a position

male colleagues approaching me to drop candid information regarding our partners / higher ups that I was not privy to before

lenience toward my work in a way I haven't experienced before. incredible understanding when I need to take time off to care for my family.

conference rooms go silent when I start talking. no side chatter. I get a baseline level of attention and focus from people that's very unfamiliar and genuinely difficult for me to wrap my head around.

like. yes some PI's will still be assholes regardless of the gender of their subordinates but, I've lived this transition. misogyny in STEM is killing women's careers, and trans men can and do experience male privilege.

I was yapping about register (sociolinguistics) in therapy when my therapist asked if I (as an undiagnosed autistic person) use sociolinguistics to understand other people.

While I have thought about that, I'm not entirely sure that's the case? Sure, linguistics as a whole is a special interest, but where my interest really lies in the whole thing is historical reconstruction of protolanguages.

Like, you're telling me we don't know where the gender system in Indo-European languages came from? Or where Arabic triconsonantal roots came from?

Sociolinguistics, while useful as a field of interest, just isn't quite mine.

the point of writing is to make your readers feel either sick or shattered. either make them feel so disgusted they taste bile in their throats, or make them feel so devastated and heartbroken they’ll never be the same again

Enjoy the show

whether you’re proud of it or not it’s words on the page and that alone deserves praise