Animals, Plants, And More | Worldbuilding For Mastodon | 3

As I continue to add to the Degomsktiyenkom lexicon, I will start with the very basic nouns, specifically animals and plants. These words are based on some of the most commonly used English words, including a study by Morris Swadesh about lexicon pertaining to many words, including animals and plants, featuring in many languages as commonalities.

Animals And Plants

These are the common animal words shown here:

I will not add all of the lexicon to this site or for Mastodon, but this display is to demonstrate my progress thus far. Obviously, as noted in my previous entries, I managed to make some changes to the orthography and the word structures.

Here are the common plant words:

So far, I could see a sentence being formed as such:

Sagishanʲ gænk’m m’feskom.

[I bring the stick from the tree]

Genitive Case

A special constraint I gave myself was to always make sure every adjectives ended with a consonant. To create the genitive case, I simply took the word “onsk” meaning “as/like” and made a cognate of it with a genitive case. This way, I can work within my creative constraint and be able to exercise morphological shift with my nouns and verbs. The inspirations of the Somali, Irish, and Jerriais languages also function as creative constraints and I will move away with them after I developed a completely realized framework. That framework can only be determined by how well I can write complicated sentences. This series will end once I am able to translate a passage from any of William Shakespeare’s plays without difficulty–or as Martius Coriolanus would say “without blows.”

I also created a nominative case, along with an alternative nominative case to be used as an absolutive case and definite article within the context of a sentence, but that’s another entry.

Ba:lekshu:xat m’skotoskadog’m

[We everywhere are making a knowledgeable forest]

Possessive Pronoun Prefixes

I want to ensure that the Degomsktiyenkom language is not a prepositional language, or at least a language solely reliant on prepositions. Instead, I will make use of prepositions when indicating dative nouns in advanced sentences, while also indicating pronoun possession in every other sentence.

Kwoz m’samshowum nakwatsank?

[Who will walk my dog?]

Iterative And Gerund

To create the iterative case in a verb, I would need to replicate a form of “re+” as in “return” or “reassemble.” As such, I took the word “to put” which is “obo” and made a cognate which would be “ob+.” In a way, this cognate would indicate that a verb is continuously “putting.”

M’limrosksʲas’m ba:bdetsu:xat myonom

[You all here are returning the tribe to the flowerly land]

To use the gerund feature, I would have to refer to an adjective that is an acting verb, while a morphologically verbal adjective would refer to the state of the noun it modifies. I could make use of the present continuous lenition in such a case, though I would need to indicate that it is an adjective beyond just a verb. I would need to achieve “walking tree” instead of “a tree is walking.” As such, it might be possible for me to conjugate a present continuous verb with the genitive case to achieve a gerund.

kwatsanu:xoskænkom

However, I find such a juxtaposition to lengthen the word too much. As such, I would need to condense this word cluster from “…nu:xosk” to “…nu:xk.” So, my result would be:

kwatsanu:xkænkom

Sources

• Ahlqvist, Anders. “The history of Irish in a typological perspective.” Finnish Journal of Linguistics 4 (1991): 9-17.
• Swadesh, Morris. (1952). “Lexicostatistic Dating of Prehistoric Ethnic Contacts.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 96, 456–7.
• Nordquist, Richard. “The 100 Most Commonly Used Words in English.” Thoughtco. Apr. 5, 2023.
• Wikipedia.
  • Irish Grammar.
  • Jerriais.
  • Somali Grammar.