Mekia leu!

(Happy summer solstice!)

I don't really do conculturing - Vetela is just a personal language that I work on for the fun of doing so, and isn't supposed to have any fictional group of speakers.  However, the one small area of slightly pseudo-cultural stuff that I have added to the language (because I think it's interesting) concerns the observation of certain astronomical phenomena and waypoints in the cycle of the year.

The Vetela calendar is an alternative way of measuring the passage of the year, which is linked to the moments of the solstices and equinoxes (collectively known as nyuka in Vetela^[0]).  The four nyuka days have special names: Leetas, Mekia, Lantas and Vynyma (these are proper nouns and don't have any particular etymology, though the words do have ideophonic associations for me).  The periods in between these are known as Vaileta ("ascent"), Akoyna (from akoa "hot"), Vauleta ("descent"), and Leskyna (from leska "cold"), and are divided up into sections according to a system that I may explain in more detail in a future post.  So yesterday was 4-23 Vaileta, today is simply Mekia, and tomorrow will be 1-01 Akoyna.

Leetas is always the first day of the year, so there isn't a regular schedule of leap years - each year is as long as the number of days between consecutive Leetas days, which is always either 365 or 366, but doesn't vary in as simple a pattern as the Gregorian leap year cycle.  (It is however entirely predictable of course.)

Another thing to note is that, since this is essentially an Earth calendar and also doesn't deal with anything smaller than a day, timezones just work as they do normally, and all calculations are based on UTC.  So since today's moment of solstice occurred at 05:04 UTC, the 21st June 2013 is Mekia, regardless of timezone.  This means for example that, in the PDT timezone, the actual moment of solstice occurred yesterday on 4-23 Vaileta (20th June).

Pronunciations:

nyuka ['nɜu̯kɑ]
Leetas ['ɫɛ:t̪ɑs], Mekia ['mɛkʲ:ja], Lantas ['ɫɑn̪t̪ɑs], Vynyma ['fənəmɑ]
Vaileta ['fai̯ɫɛt̪ɑ], Akoyna ['ɑko.ənɑ], Vauleta ['fɑu̯lɛt̪ɑ], Leskyna ['ɫɛskənɑ]

[0] If I were to create a conculture one day, the nyuka would probably be national holidays. :)

Unexpected fun with a simple sentence

I mentioned in a previous post that I'd been working through the translation of this list of test sentences.  There was one sentence in the list that, despite its initially-simple appearance, resulted in the creation of both a new verb affix and a particularly pleasing translation.

The sentence was: "We should eat more slowly".  This caught me by surprise, since although Vetela already had a way of expressing "we should eat more slowly (than someone else does)"^[0], or indeed "we should eat more slowly (than we do something else)"^[1], neither of those fit here.  My first thought was to render it as "we should eat more slowly than before"^[2], but that seemed somehow both unwieldy and un-Vetela-like... so after some thought I decided to create a new aspectual affix -áyan-, expressing increasing degree over time (suggestions of names for this aspect welcomed).  I then used this to make two equivalent translations:

kisa antekáyanu nuynía talie
kisa   antek-áyan-u nuyní-a tali-e
we.ABS slow-INC-INS eat-ABS preferable-IND
"that we eat increasingly fast is preferable"

In this version, talie ("be preferable") is the verb, with the nominalised verb phrase kisa antekáyanu nuynía ("that we eat faster") as its object.  The middle word, antekáyanu, is the interesting one here - anteku would mean "quickly" and, with the new affix, means "increasingly quickly".

However, the second version is my favourite, and feels somehow more Vetela-like to me:

kisa nuynía antekáyana talie
kisa   nuyní-a antek-áyan-a tali-e
we.ABS eat-ABS slow-INC-ABS preferable-IND
"that our eating speeds up is preferable"

In this one, talie is again the verb, with the nominalised verb phrase kisa nuynía antekáyana ("that our eating speeds up") as its object.  However, that in turn breaks down into a nominalised verb (antekáyana) and its object, the nominalised verb phrase kisa nuynía ("that we eat").  It is this nesting of three verb phrases, and its elegant expression in Vetela as consecutive words in absolutive case, which I found appealing.


[0] kisa (volti neulai) anteku nuynía talie
kisa   (volt-i    neul-ai)     antek-u  nuyní-a tali-e
we.ABS (other-ADJ someone-ILL) slow-INS eat-ABS be_preferable-IND
"that we eat more slowly (than someone else does) is preferable"

[1] kisa (volti nyila velai) anteku nuynía talie
kisa   (volt-i    nyil-a        vel-ai) antek-u  nuyní-a tali-e
we.ABS (other-ADJ something-ABS do-ILL) slow-INS eat-ABS be_preferable-IND
"that we eat more slowly (than we do something else) is preferable"

[2] kisa akkotoai anteku nuynía talie
kisa   akkoto-ai         antek-u  nuyní-a tali-e
we.ABS previous_time-ILL slow-INS eat-ABS be_preferable-IND
"that we eat more slowly than before is preferable"

Adjectives of dimension and position

It's always bothered me that words referring to dimensions and position in most natlangs (or those I've studied at any rate) seem kind of imprecise and ambiguous.

In English for example, for an object with an identifiably largest dimension, that dimension will generally be referred to as its "length", with the other(s) being variously described as "width", "breadth" or "depth".  "Depth", in turn, can refer either to the size of something in the negative vertical direction ("depth of a lake"), or in the usually-horizontal direction directly away from the point of observation ("depth of field"), or indeed the position of something underground ("depth of a tunnel"); "height" suffers from similar ambiguity.  As for "width", it can additionally refer to the size of something in any horizontal direction, regardless of whether that dimension is the largest or not ("width of a building"), or, in the case where there is no identifiable largest dimension, all three might well be described as the "width".

In short, it's a mess, and a few months ago I decided I wanted to do it much more neatly and unambiguously in Vetela.  Here's what I came up with (English glosses below are somewhat arbitrary):

There are three terms for size independent of the direction of gravity:

• aila "length": relative size in the noticeably largest dimension, if any (or the only dimension in the case of one-dimensional objects);
• kakua "thickness": relative size in the noticeably-smallest dimension, if any^[0];
• sueta "breadth": relative size in any dimension which is neither noticeably smallest nor largest.

And three relating to the direction of gravity (if any):

• vakua "tallness": subjective size in the direction of gravity of an object that extends above the reference point^[1];
• sukua "depth": subjective size in the direction of gravity of an object that extends below the reference point;
• lanima "width": subjective size in any horizontal direction.

(There is also the general term vooka "size/largeness", which refers to general size in any/all dimensions.)

Distinct from these, there is then a set of terms describing position rather than size:

• etiva "height": subjective position upwards along the direction of gravity from the reference point (i.e. altitude);
• utiva "lowness": subjective position downwards along the direction of gravity from the reference point;
• ouva "horizontal distance": subjective position along a direction normal to that of gravity;^[2]
• aana "distance": subjective position regardless of direction.

All of the above behave as unsigned-axis adjectives, so high/low degree are expressed with prefixes (see this post for more on that).  Two of them also have separate lexemes for low degree, however: liina ("smallness"; antonym of vooka) and kasina ("proximity"; antonym of aana).

[0] Note that while, strictly speaking, a 2D object's smallest dimension should be called its "thickness", humans generally conceptualise 2D objects as thin, flat 3D ones, so in concession to this it's acceptable to refer to a 2D object's smallest dimension as either kakua or sueta.

[1] Here "reference point" means the position from which the thing is being considered.  For example, a mine shaft might be said to be "tall" by someone at the bottom, or "deep" by someone at the top.

[2] Ouva is a rare word; in most circumstances, aana would be used instead, as it's rarely relevant to distinguish absolute distance from horizontal separation.  Ouva might be used to refer to downrange distance of a rocket, for example.

Gradable adjectives, axes and "signedness"

Another thing I've been meaning to write about for a while is how Vetela treats gradable adjectives^[0] - specifically, the way words are mapped onto different areas of an adjective's 'axis'.

First of all, in most languages, gradable adjectives often come in sets of at least two: large/small, hot/cold, etc.  For many everyday terms, Vetela does this too.  However, it also sometimes uses one word per "axis of meaning", with different degrees being expressed by prefixes.  For example:

Root	Adjectival
	Low degree	High degree	Extreme degree
teka "speed"	anteki "slow"	enteki "fast"	senteki "very fast"
kavua "mass"	ankavui "light"	enkavui "heavy"	senkavui "very heavy"

For adjectives of this type, the prefixless root merely states the presence of the property described by the axis, without making any comment about degree.  Or, to put that more clearly: describing an object as teki just means that it has a speed, be that fast or slow.  Similarly, putting it in the negative (tekúvi) doesn't mean that the object is "not fast" and therefore slow - for something to be described as tekúvi, it would have to have zero speed (or be something incapable of speed, such as an abstract concept).

The next thing to note is that there is a distinction between two classes of adjective:

• those whose axis of meaning ranges from "high negative degree" to "high positive degree", with an identifiable zero point in between (e.g. sad/happy); and
• those whose axis ranges from "zero" through "low degree" to "high degree" (e.g. small/large).

Since I'm a comp sci geek, I like to refer to these as "signed" and "unsigned" respectively. :)  The examples above were all unsigned; signed adjectives behave slightly differently:

    lesta: contentedness
    laulesti: sad
    kaslesti: neutral; neither happy nor sad
    leilesti: happy

The prefixes of degree (including an- and en- above) can still be added to the lau-/lei- forms:

    anlaulesti: slightly sad
    enleilesti: quite happy
    senleilesti: very happy

Again, an unprefixed root strictly speaking should be used only to refer to the property, making no comment about either degree or sign.  However, this can be unwieldy so the prefixes are commonly omitted in the informal language, with high-degree or positive-sign being assumed.

[0] Officially, there is no such word class as "adjectives", since Vetela has one main word class, all members of which can fulfil the same range of syntactic roles.  Calling them adjectives is convenient for the purposes of readability in this post, though :)

Relatives - a surprising omission

Last night I was going through some of these test sentences in a bid to find and plug obvious gaps in Vetela (of which there are still several).  While doing so I realised that, though kinship terms are probably often among the first vocab that many conlangers create, Vetela has for a good eight years got by with just 'mother' (liana) and 'father' (vaana)^[0].  So I set about rectifying that, and this is a summary of what I ended up with:

• There is now a general term for 'sibling' (tona), and brothers/sisters are effectively referred to as male/female siblings (vaitona/koitona)
• Grandparents are 'two-parents', great-grandparents 'three-parents' and so on: kaivaana 'grandfather', suiliana 'great-grandmother'
• Similarly for grandchildren: kailaita grandchild, suilaikoi great-granddaughter (< laikoi 'female child')
• Aunts/uncles are to sisters/brothers as grandparents are to parents, so an aunt is a 'two-sister' (kaikoitona) and a great-uncle is a 'three-brother' (suivaitona)
• The word touzana means direct lineal relation in either direction - i.e. either ancestor or descendent.  These can take the following pre-existing prefixes:
• aku- 'previous': akutouzana 'ancestor'
• kiu- 'subsequent': kiutouzana 'descendent'
• ven- 'immediately previous': ventouzana 'parent'
• in- 'immediately subsequent': intouzana 'offspring' (though the usual way to refer to one's children is still laita 'child')
• Finally, half-siblings are 'parent-siblings', with maternal/paternal half-siblings specified as 'mother-siblings' and 'father-siblings' respectively, e.g. vaakoitona 'paternal half-sister'.

Not yet sure what, if anything, to do about cousins - stuff like kaikoitono laita 'aunt's child' is a bit of a mouthful...

[0] Clearly, coming as I do from a tiny family with little in the way of relations, such things aren't very important to me :)