We realized earlier today that Fay, Tempest, Negarahn, and Djao'Kain don't really have an accurate term for their gender. Finding an accurate term has proven difficult. The only really accurate human term we've found so far is "hermaphrodite," but that's a word the intersex community doesn't like people using.

Of course, the conversation on gender goes a little weird at times. Recently, one of us was like "Okay so what would the AKB of Traipah call their gender?" Fay was like "They wouldn't. They only have the one sex." But then Tempest countered with "Yeah but once they met the humans, they might come up with a term for it, it would be their version of "cisgender." And they have something like intersex as well, so gender terms for them might come in handy. So what would the AKB call their majority gender?"

Fay thought a moment, then said, "Well gender would be a new concept for them. So they'd probably use some variation on the English word 'gender.' Considering most AKB are just the one sex, I think they'd call it AhKHoi'djender (ah-ḥoy ʒen-der."

Derived, of course, from the Ah'Koi of "Ah'Koi Bahnis" and the word "gender."

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Sahnailah [sawn ail ah] = A word for "beautiful" that only applies to people with lots of fat. The word is said with reverence bordering on worship, as it usually applies to deities like Duenicohn or Morshenda, but can apply to mortals as well.

Ziishraal [zeesh rahl] = Abnormally thin, gaunt and starved in appearance.

Ziishraalailah [zeesh rahl ail ah] = Zishraal, but possessing terrible beauty. (Terrible in the "intimidating/scary" sense.) Unlikely to be applicable to mortals.

Vah'zyahl-maak [vah zyahl mock] = The state of having multiple minds in a single body. From "vahzii" meaning "many" and "ahl" meaning "one."

Vah'zyahl-bahn [vah zyahl bon] = An individual body possessing multiple minds.

Urah'HKah [u: rɒ xɒ] = The dominant sex for Ah'Koi Bahnis, which is "true hermaphrodite" in English.

Drexyah [dreks yah] = The state of having incomplete, unusually-formed, and/or missing reproductive tissues; similar to "intersex" in English, except that AKB, as true hermaphrodites, would be drexyah for other reasons, for example someone born without a grah'bihn (equivalent to a penis). [One of my stories contains a passing reference to one such person, who is the romantic partner of one of the foreground characters.] It is generally considered mildly unfortunate, but if it isn't posing a threat to the person's health, then any cosmetic surgery is left to them to decide for themselves later in life, as it is considered a grievous crime to violate the bodily autonomy of anyone for any reason other than saving their life. (And even then as well, if they gave clear instructions to the contrary.)

~

It is also a grievous crime to deny somebody necessary medical attention for any reason other than their own wishes, or to unduly punish them for needing those services by - for example - charging absurdly high prices for it (they would take one look at the USA's "health care" system and declare us all unrepentant savages). Traipahni people are big on bodily autonomy - it's your body, as such it is sacred, someone defying your will about your body is sacrilege. But you can |do what you want to/have done what you want to| with your own body and it's nobody's business but yours.

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In my constructed language Trai'Pahg'Nan'Nog, they have one pronoun, djai ( ʒeɪ ) and its posessive form djair ( ʒeəʳ ). But pronouns can get confusing even for humans, so I came up with an idea that is apparently called obviative pronouns. It's a series of suffixes to denote different people in the convo.

-ardj ( ɑ:rʒ ) = a second person in the convo
-airsh ( eəʳʃ ) = a third person
-arḥ ( ɑ:rḥ ) = a fourth person
-yurth ( yɜ:ʳð ) = a fith person

Beyond that, you'd be getting into "silly" territory.

Whichever suffix you use is assigned to a certain person, and should remain assigned to that person if reasonable. This assignation applies to the posessive form as well.

Anyway, let's see how that looks.

Without obviative pronouns:

I saw djai take djair arm and guide djai to djair pencil.

Confusing, eh? Lots of meanings. Let's see them with obviative pronouns:

I saw djai take djair-ardj arm and guide djai-ardj to djair-ardj pencil.
(I saw [person 1] take [person 2's] arm and guide [person 2] to [person 2's] pencil.)

Or maybe the situation is even more complex:

I saw djai take djair-ardj arm and guide djai-ardj to djair-airsh pencil.
(I saw [person 1] take [person 2's] arm and guide [person 2] to [person 3's] pencil.)

Or another sentence: I saw djai and djai and djai talking with djai and djai, about sada ("their" always plural in TPNN) earlier conversation about djair pencil.

With o-pronouns:

I saw djai and djai-ardj and djai-airsh talking with djai-arḥ and djai-yurth, about sada ("their" always plural in TPNN) earlier conversation about djair-arḥ pencil.

(I saw [person 1] and [person 2] and [person 3] talking with [person 4] and [person 5] about their earlier conversation about [person 4's] pencil.)

And so on and so forth.

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In another attempt to make my daily stretches more bearable, since I can't really turn them into rituals all the time, I came up with a little song to sing. It's a simple song, counting from 1 - 10 in TPNN and then in Dvencoilii for the second and fourth sets (so it's not the same thing for all four sets). Which means I had to come up with Dvencoilii numbers, but whatever. Oh, and both number systems are base 6, so 6 is called ten.

Just a couple notes before I go on to the lyrics. In TPNN, all the "-ahl" numbers rhyme with the English word "ball." "Ors" rhymes with "horse." In Dvencoilii, the "Hk" phoneme is like clearing your throat. "Ohl" phoneme kinda rhymes with "bowl," but not really. My mouth is much more O shaped and my lips are a bit lower when I make the Dvencoilii "oh" sound. And the "r" is always rolling, a bit like a growl, in Dvencoilii.

Lyrics:

Ahl tahl zahl kahl mahl, ors,
Mahl kahl zahl tahl ahl.
(Repeat 6 or 7¹ more times)

Hkehl, shahth, Hkohl, vaath, Hkreht, ohl.
Hkreht, Vaath, Khohl, shahth, Hkehl.
(Repeat 6 or 7 times)

Translation is fairly simple for both:

One two three four five, ten.
Five four three two one.

And here is a link to the song recording I made: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1847428/stretch%20song.mp3

1 = I know that to get to 60, I only need to count to 11 about 6 times, but sometimes I sing the song faster than I ought to, so I add stanzas if I think I need them.

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I like having things to say to start rituals, like calling the elements and directions to cast the sphere. (I use 9 elements/directions and cast a sphere rather than a circle.) But I keep forgetting them, or having to read from a paper, and then messing up even when it's on the paper.

So I came up with a solution. I came up with what I call a "Mad Libs" ritual. IE, the thing I say at each direction is always the same except for three words, which are fill-in-the-blank. Maybe not immune to issues, but it lends itself well to memorization, I think.

Anyway, here's what I came up with:

( Under the cut because it is long.Collapse )

1 = "Shyo" may look like "shy-oh," but it is a single syllable and rhymes with "go." Like in the name Shyao'Shyo, which is two syllables, and the "Shyao" bit rhymes with "wow." This is because Y is always a consonant in TPNN. Since I sometimes have to use y as a vowel in the Latin-letter versions of some words, this can get a bit confusing. I may have to learn the international standard phoenetic alphabet and write words out in that.

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I was working on my TPNN language again earlier today, translating a short story to find holes in the language. Got a couple paragraphs done, and a lot of words added. Part of the process had me just saying sounds until good-sounding word-like things came up, writing those down, and later assigning them to words. Which included some of the nonsense things I say as curse words. My favorite, these last couple months, has been "syastebaat," and I split that into two words, "syast" and "ehbaat." They now mean "summer" and "spare me." So "syastebaat" now means "Summer spare me!" This fits, because I hate summer's heat and sunniness.

Also, there are about 6 different words for "quite," one for each definition. It's another example of wanting to avoid the same multiple-meaning words that English has. (TPNN would have its own, if any.) Another example is the 3 or 4 words for different definitions of "channel." Many of those have a root word, with other roots added for different meanings. A water channel would have the word for "water" in it, a TV or radio channel would have the word for "light" in it. And then there's the word for channeling spirits, and the word for channeling things in general.

Got really annoyed with the alt + ` function (which cycles through windows in the same application, on Ubuntu) today. When there's only two windows in an app, it works fine. But three or more, and there seems to be a distinct lack of pattern to which window will come up no matter how many times you hit that key combo. Finally got to the point where I just did Super + S and put each window in its own workspace; CTRL + ALT + [arrow keys] is SOOOO much easier to deal with than ALT + ` is.

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Corrected version of "ten little humans":

Ahl piik, tahl piik, zahl piik da-dwahtaim,
Kahl piik, mahl piik, ors¹ piik da-dwahtaim,
Ahl-ors piik, tahl-ors piik, zahl-ors piik da-dwahtaim,
Kahl-ors piik da-dwahtaim flo thiiah 'glorai!

Translation:
(Keep in mind, Traipahni numbers are base 6, IE digits 0-5 with 6 being called 10 and so on)

One little, two little, three little humans,
Four little, five little, ten little humans,
Eleven little, twelve little, thirteen little humans,
Fourteen little humans in my sight!

(Fourteen in base 6 being 10 in base 10)

Thus, BASE 10 translation:

One little, two little, three little humans,
Four little, five little, six little humans.
Seven little, eight little, nine little humans,
Ten little humans in my sight!

1 = "Ors" rhymes with "horse."

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My brain is weird. Just a bit ago, I started to spontaneously sing a Trai'Pahg'Nan'Nog version of the "one little, two little, three little" song, one that just came out of nowhere, already complete:

Ahl piik, tahl piik, zahl piik da-dwahtaim,¹
Ahl piik, tahl piik, zahl piik da-dwahtaim,
Ahl piik, tahl piik, zahl piik da-dwahtaim,
Zahl piik da-dwahtaim flo thiiah 'glorai.

(One little, two little, three little humans,
One little, two little, three little humans,
One little, two little, three little humans,
Three little humans in my sight!)


I... I think this means I'm starting to think in TPNN, at least part of the time. :-)


1 = Dwahtaim is actually a mildly derogatory term for humans, a bit like "gringo" is toward white people. Only, "dwahtaim" is usually only used for mild disbelief, like instead of sighing at something a human has done and saying "Humans...," you sigh and say "Dwahtaim..." As you can see, "dwahtaim" is already plural, but the rhyme works better with the da- of plurality.

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Okay... something has been missing from TPNN for all this time, and I can't believe it's taken me this long to realize it. But I finally realized it last night on my way back from the pagan meetup, while planning something in my head. I was getting annoyed because I couldn't decide if I wanted to use singular or plural pronouns for our collective, and both had their pros and cons. Then I did a facepalm as I realized what I needed to do. Especially since multiplicity is more common on Traipah. (It's at least as common there as homosexuality/bisexuality is here.)

So now, I have some "singulaplural" (singular AND plural) pronouns for Trai'Pahg'Nan'Nog, specifically for use by/with multiple groups. And here they are...

(Examples will be mostly in English because I intend to use these new pronouns!)

For use BY multiple groups, when referring to themselves:

Sha'az (shah-ahz) = I/we (alternative "shaaz")
Shiiah (she-uh) = my/ours mine/ours

Examples:
A. Shaaz think that you're not being very respectful of shiiah feelings.
B. Some day shaaz will get shiiah-self a cat.

For use when referring to multiple groups:

Gry = Them/they/she/he
Grair = their/his/hers

Examples:
A. Gry said I wasn't being respectful of grair feelings, but that's just because I had a headache. Can you get gry the message?
B. I really like grair cat. I wonder where gry got it?

EDIT:

Adding second person singulaplurals, which could be used for more than just multiples:

Goh - you/y'all
Griiah - your/y'all's

(For non-multiples, or unknowns, TPNN still uses "thiin (theen)" for "I/me," "thiiah (thee-ah)" for "my," "grehn" for "we," and "grehj" for "our." "They" is "uugaam (oo-gahm)," and "their" is "sada (say-dah)" or "uugahnihn (oo-gone-in).")

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For those who don't already know, I follow a path I call Yahgahn. I created this path as a religion for my fictional planet of Traipah, and I fell in love with the planet, its people, and the Yahgahn religion.

( A bunch of babble that may or may not be interesting.Collapse )

Anyway, so the real reason I started this post was because part of the flexibility of Yahgahn is the acceptance of new, non-canonical deities into a person's personal pantheon, whether borrowed from another religion or created out of thin air. It is for this reason and the other flexibilities of Yahgahn that there are a lot of people who count Yahgahn as just one of their religions.

But anyway, I came up with two new ones for my own personal use, which I will also include in the Traipah stories as popular non-canon Yahgahn Deities: Kwah'Gorrin, Deity of Technology in general. And Ayil'Kwahl'Ahgorah, Deity of Computers and Electronics. I got the idea from how Lilla has been using an Egyptian deity named Input for working with computers; it seems that since Input isn't well known anymore, She was kind of out of work. Attention is food for Deities, so poor Input must have been starving; no wonder She lets Lilla work with Her on stuff beyond Her original function.

But as for me, I never had much luck with Input. I get far more help from Shao'Kehn with computers, but that's mostly protecting them. She doesn't do much else with them. So I came up with Ayil'Kwahl'Ahgorah, whose name is derived from the Trai'Pahg'Nan'Nog word for electronics. (Basically the TPNN word for "electricity" translates into "flowing lightning" or "lightning which flows like water." The word for "technology" translates into "art of the tool." And the word for "electronics" translates into "art of the tool, used to bend [or harness] lightning.")

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