nowordsforsnow

[nowordsforsnow]

Hey, so, every once in a while I see someone new has followed this blog, and remember that it exists. So, just so it's clear for everyone, I'm no longer really in Homestuck fandom and am no longer working on this conlang. However, I am working on a different conlang currently, and it occurred to me that there might be some people following this blog who would be interested in that, too. It's for an original world, and the gimmick/conceit of this one is that it's an in-universe artificial language intended to be an intertemporal auxlang for a community of time travelers. The information on it, including the grammar and writing system, are in this github repo: https://github.com/faiuwle/qucheanya

So I figured, since this blog is still around, I might just start using it as a general-purpose conlanging blog and start posting about this new language on here, and I might eventually develop some natlangs in the same world as well. Are you current followers interested in that at all?

[nowordsforsnow]

So, I’ve successfully backed up this blog in light of recent events (there aren’t many images on here, but there are a few, and I’ve seen screenshots of a post with the IPA vowel chart in it getting flagged, so...)  Anyway, my plan is to reformulate the contents of this blog into nice “chapters” with nice formatting for posting on AO3 (hey, it’s fanwork, right?).  I also might continue working on some things and maybe producing more content in the future, but it will all be over there.  My AO3 account is paradoxcase, in case you didn’t know.

[nowordsforsnow]

Thanks! I was hoping there had been more detail, but oh well.

longroadstonowhere replied to your post: “Alright, time to do a partial survey of the canon troll slang. These…”:

also what if rumble sphere is like something trolls vibrate when they want to scare off potential threats? like a rattlesnake’s rattle, only it’s internal

I don’t know about internal, because I think it would be awesome to have some like exoskeletal clicking thing going on. Maybe that could be loosely approximated as “rumble”? And they rumble at each other when angry or maybe even just excited, which makes Meenah’s whole “clam your rumble spheres” stuff work. If it’s in the abdomen, it could maybe be the same thing used for grub echolocation?

Too bad isozyme isn’t doing those asks anymore.

[nowordsforsnow]

longroadstonowhere replied to your post: “longroadstonowhere replied to your post: “Alright, time to do a...”:

huh, i always finish that phrase as 'blink of an eye' not 'blink of an eyelash' - and yeah, it might make more sense to redefine things as, like, 'verb-doer' ('arm-bender' for elbow? things like that i guess)

Yeah, actually, I think you're probably right.

Arm-bender might work, but arm itself might be something to do with grasping (since we currently have the same word for hand and arm). But if "arm" were part of it, we could do the same thing for knee. So we might get some long words out of it, but I think that's in keeping with the language so far.

I'll have to come back to this later because I'm way too tired right now.

[nowordsforsnow]

Looking back at this post about grubs, it looks like we can probably imagine any kind of transformation from grub to troll we want because of metamorphosis, so we could always say that the rumble spheres move during that process, but that all sounds good. I like the Kanaya-lost-her-rumble-and-is-now-eerily-silent idea.

I can't find the post about grub brains. Dammit. I definitely remember one.

longroadstonowhere replied to your post: “Alright, time to do a partial survey of the canon troll slang. These…”:

also what if rumble sphere is like something trolls vibrate when they want to scare off potential threats? like a rattlesnake’s rattle, only it’s internal

I don’t know about internal, because I think it would be awesome to have some like exoskeletal clicking thing going on. Maybe that could be loosely approximated as “rumble”? And they rumble at each other when angry or maybe even just excited, which makes Meenah’s whole “clam your rumble spheres” stuff work. If it’s in the abdomen, it could maybe be the same thing used for grub echolocation?

Too bad isozyme isn’t doing those asks anymore.

[nowordsforsnow]

longroadstonowhere replied to your post: “Alright, time to do a partial survey of the canon troll slang. These...”:

also what if rumble sphere is like something trolls vibrate when they want to scare off potential threats? like a rattlesnake's rattle, only it's internal

I don't know about internal, because I think it would be awesome to have some like exoskeletal clicking thing going on. Maybe that could be loosely approximated as "rumble"? And they rumble at each other when angry or maybe even just excited, which makes Meenah's whole "clam your rumble spheres" stuff work. If it's in the abdomen, it could maybe be the same thing used for grub echolocation?

Too bad isozyme isn't doing those asks anymore.

[nowordsforsnow]

longroadstonowhere replied to your post: “Alright, time to do a partial survey of the canon troll slang. These...”:

glance nugget sounds like it could be related to eyeball (like it could just be 'eyeball' or it could be 'pupil', or something along those lines)

Glance nugget was from

CCG: OK, WHY DO YOU HAVE TO GO FROM ZERO TO DOUCHE LIKE IN THE BLINK OF A FUCKING GLANCE NUGGET. FCG: THE BLINK OF A GLANCE NUGGET?? I'VE BEEN AT THIS FOR TEN MINUTES ALREADY. AND COUNTING!

So probably meant to be eyelash, but it does seem odd with that morphology.

A lot of these go back and define body parts in relation to their function, sort of like the animals are defined. I'm wondering if we shouldn't actually go back and redefine some of those terms that way instead of using atomic roots? It would be strange, but it wouldn't be the only strange thing we've done, and I'm pretty sure doing common animals that way is strange too, and this is a verby language so it might be merited.

[nowordsforsnow]

Alright, time to do a partial survey of the canon troll slang.

These are all of the canon animal names:

barkbeast (matches sqâīkéâ) barn beast (does not match zecqōvr, "beardbeast") cheese critter cholerbear cluckbeast dirt noodle (this is funny, but it doesn't match the Xbeast pattern) gobblefiend (similarly) hoofbeast (matches zeqēxqìīs) marchbug musclebeast (matches zecquêcè) nibble vermin nut creature trunkbeast woolbeast

Cluckbeast fits with the way we named dogs and cats. Trunkbeast, woolbeast, nut creature, and marchbug fit with the Xbeast pattern. We have two possibilities for mouse: cheese critter and nibble vermin. I think nibble vermin is more likely, because I'm pretty sure mice will actually eat anything, but nibbling (or at least, that cute way they eat, the "nibble" morpheme may have more to do with some other aspect of it) is perpetual. I'm not sure what the morphemes of cholerbear are supposed to indicate - choleric bear? Dirt noodle is funny, and I think noodlebug might be a fun thing to do. Fiend in gobblefiend could be analogous to sqâī, again with onomatopoeia.

There are also these, which may or may not refer to real creatures:

bark gnome barkfiend

I think we should have an animal root in the Lime class for fantastic animals. Trolls also have elves as fantastic creatures, because Karkat said that John looked like one in the ectosuit and immediately knew they were talking about fantastic creatures. I don't think they would be animals, though. What are troll elves like? We will have to decide.

There's a lot of anatomy here, much of it redundant. For example, let us count all the ways trolls have referred to throats:

chagrin tunnel ignorance shaft meal tunnel prattle socket probechute (?) protein chute question geyser shout sphincter squawk blister squawk gaper squeal pipette statement tunnel

Of course, we already have a word (xěe), and the phrases that refer to food are not useful to us anyway, because the throat is not connected to the digestive system.

These are all the body parts that a) are probably not genitalia and b) we don't already have defined:

gallspincter (???) glance nugget lobe stem nub (???) nugbone (unless it means head) phlegm lobe (???) porous cranial plates rumble sphere sponge/think pan

It's not clear what some of these mean. Gallsphincter looks like it could be a regular human word, but most hits on google are for Homestuck. I think we could have both sponge and think pan - isozyme originally talked about a think pan versus a grub brain in the abdomen, I think we could have fun with that. I hate troll boobs, but we could probably do something else with rumble sphere - I think it would be great if we made it mean something completely different.

[nowordsforsnow]

Here's the troll slang index!

Here’s the index of all the Homestuck troll slang. The format is

term page # example ... example from same pesterlog page # example from new pesterlog

Terms are listed alphabetically. Only dialog and POV from people who are at least partly trolls count, with the exception of Dirk, Roxy, and Dirk’s robots, who are in there with **stars.

There’s one word I didn’t wind up getting, because by the time it occurred to me that I should be tracking it I was too far in to go back and add it: “coccoon” used to mean “bed”. I also did track: very common words like “hive”, troll romance terminology, puns, jargon specific to fiduspawn, flarp, seadwellers, etc. (though there’s some bee computing stuff and some things that are probably specific to Terezi’s roleplaying). An exception is “brinesucker” because I thought the juxtoposition of the two examples was funny. I also did not document every time that “pupa” was used to refer to either Pupa Pan or Tavros, because there were just too many instances of that.

Openbound sometimes had terms that were talked about in multiple conversations in the same flash. In those cases I’ve just listed each conversation separately, but using the same page number.

I probably missed some things. Let me know if I did; I can edit this paste.

Notes:

“nub”: So there is “cartilage nub” (nose?) and “frond nub” (something to do with trees?) and a whole lot of other uses of “nub” that don’t seem to have to do with either, so I just put everything that was “nub” under plain old “nub”.

“grubtube”: These two examples are obviously not the same thing.

“sponge” predates “think pan” as a word for brain/mind.

No one has talked about bulges since Kanaya: Return to the Core.

It’s not “blood pusher”, it’s “pump biscuit”. I had forgotten that was fanon.

Hussie kept coming up with new troll slang right up until the end. The second-to-last piece of troll slang was a never-before-seen phrase for “bell” (despite the fact that there was already a term for “bell”).

“four wheel device”: used to refer to both wheelchairs and skateboards.

I think “shithive maggots” may have been a self-coining neologism. The first time we see it, Karkat on the meteor uses it in a conversation with early-SGRUB-playing Kanaya, who expresses confusion about it, but by the end of the pesterlog Kanaya is using it too. I’m imagining a scenario where Kanya uses it because future Karkat uses it, and then everyone else (including future Karkat) adopts it because Kanaya uses it.

There are a number of cases where it looks like “bone bulge” might actually have meant “skull” at one point.

[nowordsforsnow]

Hey guys, those of you who contributed stuff that are still around (is there anyone other than longroadstonowhere?) - do you mind if at some point I post this stuff to the Zompist BB? I've been thinking about posting it there and getting more serious feedback and then maybe making some changes in response. I'll credit non-vocabulary contributions, although in some cases that's hard because people have chnaged their urls...

[nowordsforsnow]

Something else that occurs to me re: cleaning up the dictionary: Vrǐská isn't legal, because sk isn't legal. The k should really be a q, which means ká should be qá, which would help distinguish it from the preposition ká.

[nowordsforsnow]

Bit of an update on the future plans for this blog! I might get that nominalization post ready before Homestuck ends, we'll see.

Right, so here is the plan for my blogs when Homestuck ends:

I am going to reread the entire thing, because I’ve forgotten way too much of it. I’ll probably talk about it, but it won’t really be a liveblog or anything like that.

As I go, I’m going to make note of all the troll neologisms, with context. This will get posted on nowordsforsnow, so we can use it to continue to spruce up the troll conlang vocabulary.

When I finish it, having refreshed my knowledge of canon, I will do an Ask Me About Troll Homestuck Fandom period! Honestly, THF was the most fun I’ve had with Homestuck, so I want another go at it. But I can’t do it with my current knowledge of canon. I’ll probably do some more THF stuff later, as well.

The troll conlang will be on hold until this is finished. After this, I’ll go back to working on it and we can make use of that list of words!

When Hiveswap comes out, I’ll stop whatever I’m doing and play it. I’ll take a ton of notes, and everything will be worldbuilding and nothing will hurt! I want to play it as soon as it comes out so I don’t get spoiled. Don’t worry, I’ll tag/hide all my own spoilers.

In June, two things are happening:

I graduate! Since I moved, graduation is on the other side of the country, so I’ll be gone for a week or so.

Obduction comes out! So I’ll be playing it and everything will be Obduction for a while. I don’t expect rampant Obduction spoilers all over tumblr, though, so I’ll probably prioritize Homestuck stuff.

[nowordsforsnow]

A long time ago there were some things here that I wanted to fix, but I've honestly forgotten what they all were, and rereading the blog hasn't made anything really stand out to me. But there are a couple things that need to be fixed in the dictionary:

jǔoqǎēvǐqí ("cuttlefish") - we used the wrong diminutive, it was i, should have been í jraojròl ("tree") - compound was head-last âcrâqēuzìrē ("scorpion") - contained illegal consonant cluster

Next, I think we ought to iron out the rē nominalizations, since we have a few of them now. How many of you followers are still here?

[nowordsforsnow]

just to keep us aware, so far -rē has been used for 'lqèrē' [bathing] and 'eòvrǔcrē' [rest, recuperation], as well as (probably coincidentally) 'jrē' [before (temporal)], 'rûvrē' [neck], and 'âcrqēuzìrē' [scorpion; literally "stingbeast"], as well as theoretically all the weather verbs

Yeah, I looked through the dictionary for those, too, though now that I look at it âcrqēuzìrē has an illegal consonant cluster in it (crq), so that would have to be changed eventually.  "Sting" itself definitely might be a -rē noun, although the word for scorpion would still be Cerulean because the head of the compound is âcr.  jrē and rûvrē are going to be coincidental.

[nowordsforsnow]

Good ideas. I think we can hold off on multiple types of weather expressions for now, but I like putting -rē nouns in the Lime class.

From longroadstonowhere:

so i know you’ve definitely been taking a break from this stuff, and it might be a dead project, but i still like thinking about it every once in a while, so i decided to try tackling weather expressions

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[nowordsforsnow]

From longroadstonowhere:

so i know you’ve definitely been taking a break from this stuff, and it might be a dead project, but i still like thinking about it every once in a while, so i decided to try tackling weather expressions

It’s definitely not a dead project - I think I might go back and change some things, and it definitely needs more googlesite documentation, but once I get a chance to do that I’ll try to get back on this thing - maybe this summer. Sorry I left this in the inbox for a few days, I’ve just been pretty stressed about IRL things. I know there’s some words languishing in the google spreadsheet too, I’ll get to those eventually.

bit of info dump first - in earth languages, weather expressions are handled in one of three ways:

predicate-based weather expressions, where all of the relevant information comes from the predicate and the arguments are usually semantically empty (like english’s ‘it’s snowing’ - all the information about the weather is in the verb)

argument-based weather expressions, which is basically the opposite of predicate-based (which would be like if in english, instead of saying ‘it’s snowing’, we usually said ‘snow falls’, ‘rain falls’, ‘hail falls’, etc.)

argument-predicate-based weather expressions, where both the argument and the predicate have information about the weather (‘snow is snowing’, ‘rain is raining’, etc.)

based on the grammar of lǎzèról thus far, i’d say using primarily predicate-based expressions would make the most sense

I think so too, but tell me, since I know you’ve been researching this lately - is it actually cross-linguistically more common for head-initial (or maybe head-marking) languages to use predicates? That would be my intuition, but I don’t have data.

i think what would work best is if we have verbs for each of the meteorological conditions (rain, snow, etc.), and we use the nominalization morpheme -rē for the nouns of each expression

here are some words: zūkràa - rain srēā - snow rěqoī - hail jôov - wind koó - lightning lêēxr - storm (can either sit on its own or be compounded to be a more specific kind of storm)

grammatically, i think it should work that these verbs are functionally intransitive and they take the brown absolutive marker (since brown class includes weather), so the way you say ‘it’s raining’ in lǎzèról would be jǒzukràa

what do you think?

I like it. I think we’ve been using -rē as an action nominalization too, so that works. The funny thing is that the nouns (zūkràarē, etc.) might not wind up being Brown themselves (even though that was what I originally intended when I put “weather effects” in the class description) because I don’t think we’ve decided what class to (probably arbitrarily) place products of that nominalization in. The jǒ- probably refers to something like “the weather” though.

[nowordsforsnow]

How to write in Alternian.

Source: [x]

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