Biblaridion

Conlang Showcase Extra: Edun

Added 2019-12-01 23:24:34 +0000 UTC

Some fun facts about Edun that didn’t make it into the video:

1. The word achkh, “fire”, which also means "soul", is onomatopoeic. It’s supposed to sound like the crackling of burning wood.

2. The derivational suffix “-ost”, which turns a stem into the noun that the stem produces (e.g. achkh, “fire” > achkost “ashes”), came from the Proto-Thirean root hoohltu, which means “crop”, “fruit”, or “harvest”, because the resulting noun was metaphorically described as the fruit that the verb grows (kind of like the English expression “The fruits of one’s labour”)

3. Speaking of “-ost”, the word for slave or servant is ngwakhost, which comes from the root ngwakh, “to beat, strike”, so a slave is literally “the product/fruit of a beating”. This word also fits in with the teacher vs. steering wheel derivation bit I was talking about near the end. In Modern Edun, ngwà (the word-final consonants were lost in the development of tone) just means “subordinate” or “apprentice”.

4. Edun has multiple ways of saying “yes” and “no”. If someone asks a yes/no question, you use the word fi or chi, which are actually just the present forms of the copula and negative verb respectively ( i.e. "it is" and "it is not"). If you want to express agreement or disagreement with what someone is saying, you use the exclamations hran or khazh.

5. And one final Easter egg, one of the words for the lands that the Empire of the Sun exists in is Tsanduk “the place of the sun”, which comes from a derivational suffix on the root tsan, “sun”. This word comes from the Proto-Thirean root thaan, which I took from one of my older projects, where it was rendered as Thand, and the language they spoke in Thand was therefore Thandian…