Creating Proto-Nebulonic Vocabulary: The Canticle of the Creatures by Saint Francis of Assisi
Hello all! In this post, I will be creating a number of words for Proto-Nebulonic by going through The Canticle of the Creatures by Saint Francis of Assisi.
The first thing I'm going to take a word for is "sun". Now, in Sajem Tan, the word for "sun" also means "star". To me, this implies that perhaps Sajem Planet has multiple large stars in the sky during the day, so that a distinction between stars seen in the day and stars seen in the night is not so obvious. Other tribemembers said there was talk of having two suns. So I am going to run with the multiple sun idea and reflect that in the Nebulonic language.
Obviously, these concepts would be named as soon as possible in the language, so they can be from Era 1: they use sound symbolism and they have simple phonotactics. Using my sound symbolism, I am going to coin the root *mosa to mean both "sun" and "star". To differentiate between the large stars seen in the day time and the small stars seen at night, Proto-Nebulonic will speak of *roemosa "day star" (< *roe "day") and *balemosa "night star" (< *bale "night"). This distinction will be necessary to translate the Canticle of the Creatures. *roemosa will translate "sun" and *balemosaam will translate "stars".
The next words I want to create are the terms for "brother" and "sister". Brother can be *seḳol and sister can be *ṭerona. These words show no sound symbolism and *seḳol has relatively complex phonotactics, so they look like later words, but this is not necessary to be the case.
So now we have two phrases: Seḳol Roemosa "Brother Sun" and Ṭerona Balemosaam "Sister Stars". I was going to put the titles "brother" and "sister" after the main noun, butI realized I have been putting last names after given names, so putting them before made more sense. So this is how apposition works. Also, in Ṭerona Balemosaam, only *balemosa gets a plural marking, not *ṭerona. This is because plurality is already marked on *balemosa so it is understood on *ṭerona.
The next word I want is "moon". The word for that will be *ḳopam. So "Sister Moon" is Ṭerona Ḳopam.
I already have a word for "wind": *ḳosa. I seem to be having an awful lot of ejectives, but that's okay: that means more fricatives in Old and Modern Nebulonic. "Air" can be *saro. "Cloud" is already *jub. "Water" can be *geeta. "Fire" can be *temila.
For "earth", we can have *barnoda. "Fruit" in the sense of "that which is grown" can be *sera (see also *sila "to grow"). "Grass" is *muṗi. "Flower" is *lopira. Finally, "death" is *pama.
That should be it for now. I focused on simple, basic nouns because they are easier to coin, but later I may come back and make some verbs or adjectives. They will require more thought and may be more likely to belong to the other two eras of word coining. So long!
The first thing I'm going to take a word for is "sun". Now, in Sajem Tan, the word for "sun" also means "star". To me, this implies that perhaps Sajem Planet has multiple large stars in the sky during the day, so that a distinction between stars seen in the day and stars seen in the night is not so obvious. Other tribemembers said there was talk of having two suns. So I am going to run with the multiple sun idea and reflect that in the Nebulonic language.
Obviously, these concepts would be named as soon as possible in the language, so they can be from Era 1: they use sound symbolism and they have simple phonotactics. Using my sound symbolism, I am going to coin the root *mosa to mean both "sun" and "star". To differentiate between the large stars seen in the day time and the small stars seen at night, Proto-Nebulonic will speak of *roemosa "day star" (< *roe "day") and *balemosa "night star" (< *bale "night"). This distinction will be necessary to translate the Canticle of the Creatures. *roemosa will translate "sun" and *balemosaam will translate "stars".
The next words I want to create are the terms for "brother" and "sister". Brother can be *seḳol and sister can be *ṭerona. These words show no sound symbolism and *seḳol has relatively complex phonotactics, so they look like later words, but this is not necessary to be the case.
So now we have two phrases: Seḳol Roemosa "Brother Sun" and Ṭerona Balemosaam "Sister Stars". I was going to put the titles "brother" and "sister" after the main noun, butI realized I have been putting last names after given names, so putting them before made more sense. So this is how apposition works. Also, in Ṭerona Balemosaam, only *balemosa gets a plural marking, not *ṭerona. This is because plurality is already marked on *balemosa so it is understood on *ṭerona.
The next word I want is "moon". The word for that will be *ḳopam. So "Sister Moon" is Ṭerona Ḳopam.
I already have a word for "wind": *ḳosa. I seem to be having an awful lot of ejectives, but that's okay: that means more fricatives in Old and Modern Nebulonic. "Air" can be *saro. "Cloud" is already *jub. "Water" can be *geeta. "Fire" can be *temila.
For "earth", we can have *barnoda. "Fruit" in the sense of "that which is grown" can be *sera (see also *sila "to grow"). "Grass" is *muṗi. "Flower" is *lopira. Finally, "death" is *pama.
That should be it for now. I focused on simple, basic nouns because they are easier to coin, but later I may come back and make some verbs or adjectives. They will require more thought and may be more likely to belong to the other two eras of word coining. So long!
