Moten Words for the Day

voslim /vo̞slim/, noun: “beauty, appropriateness, fitness for purpose”

uflebe /ufle̞be̞/, noun: “quality, objective value, value”

kemabal /ke̞mabal/, noun: “opinion, subjective value, value”

No meme right now.

Okay, those nouns are going to need a small explanation. If they look familiar, it’s because they are: they are formed by mashing together the pairs of words I presented in the last three posts.

What’s happening here is that in Moten, when two nouns are semantically opposites (i.e. like “big vs. small”, “wide vs. narrow”, “rich vs. poor”), it’s common to form the noun that refers to the generic concept underlying them by compounding them. In English, it would be as if the generic concept of “size” (in general, rather than a big or a small size) was referred to by the word “bigsmall” :).

So that’s what’s happening here:

• Voslim is the combination of vo|sa and slim, and refers to appropriateness or fitness for purpose in general;
• Uflebe is the combination of ufan and tlebe, and refers to objective quality in general;
• Kemabal is the combination of kemi and abal, and refers to the concept of opinion in general.

In all cases, those nouns refer to a generic concept, and not to a specific value of that concept. It’s easy to understand with a word like kemabal, where the translation “opinion” is also neutral. It’s slightly more difficult for a word like voslim, where the usual translations (“appropriateness”, “fitness for purpose”) tend to have a positive connotation in English. But voslim doesn’t have a positive connotation in Moten. It’s perfectly neutral, just like kemabal. It doesn’t refer to appropriateness as a positive quality (that’s what vo|sa means), but to the generic concept of appropriateness. You can see vo|sa and slim as extreme points on a scale, while voslim refers to the entire scale itself.

The idea of compounding opposites to form the name of a generic concept is common in Moten, so keep it in mind as I describe new words in future posts.

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Moten Words for the Day

kemi /ke̞mi/, noun: “pleasantness, wonderfulness; also as adj. pleasant, wonderful, good”

abal /abal/, noun: “dreadfulness, lousiness; also as adj. dreadful, lousy, bad”

There, feeling better? :)

So, we’ve already seen two ways to translate “good” and “bad” into Moten: vo|sa and slim, which refer to fitness for purpose, and ufan and tlebe, which refer to objective quality. Today, we’re adding two more possible translations, this time referring to “good” and “bad” as simply a matter of opinion.

Kemi and abal are respectively positive and negative statements of opinion, and only opinion. They simply indicate whether someone likes whatever is qualified, or not. They are different from vo|sa and slim in that there is no need to have a purpose in mind in order to like or dislike something, and they are different from ufan and tlebe in that you don’t need to be able to objectively justify your opinion on something. As such, if you state that something is abal, you won’t be expected to explain for what purpose it is, nor will you be expected to justify your statement based on objective qualifications. At most, people will ask you why you are harbouring such an opinion.

To illustrate the difference between these three ways of translating “good” or “bad”, consider an example I gave earlier: that of a chair. A chair is ufan if it’s made of quality wood and built by a master carpenter (for instance). A chair is vo|sa if it sits comfortably and can easily handle your weight. Finally, a chair is kemi if you like it :).

Notice that these three forms of “good” are not necessarily companions. A chair that is ufan can still be slim if it’s uncomfortable. A chair can be both ufan and vo|sa and yet still be abal, if you just don’t like its design. Finally, a chair that is a heirloom from your favourite relative, who specifically donated it to you, can still be kemi, even if it’s both tlebe and slim. All those words refer to specific facets of goodness and badness, which are mostly independent from each other.

With these two, we have the three main pairs of words used to translate “good” and “bad” in Moten. There are others, naturally (just like English has things like “awful”, “fantastic”, “nice”, etc.), but those are the main ones and the most commonly used.

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Moten Words for the Day

ufan /ufan/, noun: “greatness, also as adj. great”

tlebe /tle̞be̞/, noun: “mediocrity, also as adj. mediocre, bad”

That squirrel knows its stuff.

So, last time I explained that Moten doesn’t have generic words for “good” and “bad”, and introduced vo|sa and slim as a less generic pair that can be used to replace them. It makes sense to carry on and introduce another pair of words that can be translated as “good” and “bad”, with a different specialisation.

Here, ufan and tlebe are the extremes in the range of objective quality. In other words, something is ufan when it can be objectively argued that it has excellent quality. Its opposite tlebe, on the other hand, denotes mediocrity, in the sense of a lack of objective quality.

By “objective quality”, I mean a characteristic that is not up for opinion. For instance, a manufactured object will be ufan if it’s a sturdy, good build, and made of quality materials. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the object will be fit for purpose (i.e. vo|sa) or even that the speaker has to actually like it. For instance, a dish will be ufan if it’s masterly cooked from quality ingredients. That doesn’t mean the speaker has to actually like the dish (those ingredients may not be to their liking), or even that the dish is fit for purpose (it might be a starter when the speaker was expecting dessert!). But as long as it can be objectively stated that something is excellent, it will be ufan.

By the way, ufan is too strong to be translatable as “good”. That’s why I translate it as “great” instead. If one wants to indicate that something is simply of good quality, rather than really excellent, one can use the diminutive ufsin instead, which reduces the meaning of ufan while still keeping it positive. Tlebe, on the other hand, works rather well as a translation of “bad”.

Also, while I’m saying that ufan and tlebe are to be used only when one is talking about objective quality, I’m not saying that Moten speakers never use them subjectively: Moten speakers are just as likely to lie, exaggerate, mislead or simply be incorrect as anyone else ;).

Questions?

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Moten Words for the Day

vo|sa /vo̞t͡sa/, noun: “beauty, appropriateness; also as adj. beautiful, appropriate, good, fit for purpose”

slim /slim/, noun: “ugliness, inappropriateness; also as adj. ugly, inappropriate, unfit for purpose”

Not sure if this meme represents vo|sa or slim here.

A peculiarity of Moten is that it lacks truly generic words meaning “good” or “bad”. Instead, it has pairs of nouns that approximate those meanings, but always with a more restricted semantic range. Vo|sa and slim are one such pair.

Vo|sa and slim are basically the extremes in the range of appropriateness. That’s to say, vo|sa represents the quality of things that are good because they are fit for purpose, while slim represents the quality of things that are bad because they are unfit for purpose. The keyword here is purpose, by the way: vo|sa and slim are never used as absolute judgements of value, but only have a meaning when the speaker has some goal or need in mind, and judges the appropriateness of something based on the idea of fulfilling that goal.

For instance, a chair should be vo|sa when the goal is to sit down, but it’s not surprising if it’s actually slim when your goal is to reach the ceiling to change a lightbulb! And a chair that is slim when your goal is to sit down is basically an uncomfortable chair that misses its purpose. It may be of good quality, i.e. sturdy and made of pricey materials, and it may look nice, but if it doesn’t sit comfortably, it will still be slim.

Notice that I also translated vo|sa as “beauty” and slim as “ugliness”. That’s because for some objects, their purpose is simply to be aesthetically pleasing, so in that case “fitness for purpose” is equivalent to “beauty”. This is also true of ideas and concepts, which can be aesthetically pleasing even without looking at any kind of specific purpose, so vo|sa and slim can also be applied to abstractions in that sense.

Notice, however, that these nouns can never refer to the physical beauty of a person or animal. It seems Moten speakers rather balk at the idea that the entire purpose for the existence of a human being or animal could solely be to be aesthetically pleasing. Good for them!

Questions?

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Moten Word for the Day

ivalstu|l /ivalstuʎ/, verb: “to dream, to fantasise (about)”

Recursive sleep. Mmm… I could do with some of that!

So, this will be the last verb based on istu|l for now. After so many examples, you should have got an idea of how productive this verb is :).

In terms of morphology, this verb is formed with va|le, a noun meaning “image”, “idea” or “fantasy”. Here again, va|le is in its short compound form val-. So “to dream” is “to summon an idea”.

In terms of semantics, it mainly means “to dream”, but can also mean “to fantasise” (or “to imagine”), when the fantasy in question is considered implausible or at least the speaker treats it that way. When someone fantasises about things that are plausible, in Moten one will use the verb ivalpinasi instead, which is also a compound with va|le, but in this case with the verb ipinasi: “to feel, to look”, a verb that is worth an entry in this series all for itself, so I will not discuss it further for now ;).

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Moten Word for the Day

ikulstu|l /ikulstuʎ/, verb: “to create a language, to conlang”

It only gets worse with age…

So, a conlang having a word for conlanging. So meta! ;)

Seriously, this verb is simply formed by adding ku|lu: “language, tongue” to istu|l, making conlanging literally “to summon a language” (more probably, it’s some kind of portmanteau between ku|lu and idatistu|l: “to invent”, or at least it was coined based on that verb). Notice that ku|lu in this compound comes out as kul-. It’s what I call the “short compound form”. Stems can form compounds in both full form and short compound form, although it’s usually not predictable which form will be preferred.

Two interesting facts about ikulstu|l:

• it’s the base word for referring to conlanging. Other words (such as kulstuluz: “conlang”, kulstulbel: “conlanging” and kulstulnon: “conlanger”) are derived from it. It’s quite common in Moten for the base word that refers to some concept to actually be a verb, and other words, including nouns, to be derived from it. That’s unlike English, where conceptual base words tend to be nouns.
• It’s strictly a transitive verb, taking as object the language being created (or its name at least). That’s why the form kulstuluz, which is actually the participle of the verb, can take on the meaning “conlang”: the participle when used as a noun usually refers to the object of the verb. In fact, even when the object is not mentioned in a sentence, it will be implied (that’s pro-drop for you! :) ). It is possible, however, to remove the object entirely from the equation (i.e. if you want to say that you are conlanging in general, without any reference to which conlang you are working on), by putting the verb in the middle voice, a very common way in Moten to turn transitive verbs into generic intransitive ones.

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Moten Words for the Day

idatistu|l /idatistuʎ/, verb: “to make up, to think up, to create, to invent”

ipistu|l /ipistuʎ/, verb: “to build, to construct, to create, to invent”

In this case, created awesomeness! :P

Today, two verbs based on istu|l instead of one! And all because they are similar in meaning and form a natural group :).

In Moten, there’s not a single word for “thing”. Rather, Moten works similarly to Japanese by separating things into “concrete things” (mono in Japanese, ipi in Moten) and “abstract things (koto in Japanese, dati in Moten). Basically, ipi means “thing, object, tool, machine”, while dati means “thing, concept, way, manner”. And when combined with istu|l, they form two different verbs both meaning basically “to create” or “to invent”, with ipistu|l focussed on the creation of concrete things (hence “to build”) and idatistu|l focussed on the creation of abstract things (hence “to think up”).

So “to invent” in Moten is literally “to summon a thing” :).

Questions?

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Moten Word for the Day

ibivostu|l /ibivo̞stuʎ/, verb: “to count, to measure”

I kept getting memes about the wrong kind of “count” (and most measuring memes were NSFW ;) ).

This time, we have istu|l added to the noun bivo: “quantity, number”. It means “to count” when referring to discrete items, and “to measure” when referring to continuous ones (which is in line with bivo's main sense of “quantity”). Here again, istu|l is mostly a semantically bleached quasi-suffix here, although the idea that “to count” translates as “to summon a number” is not that far-fetched :).

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Moten Word for the Day

ipa|nastu|l /ipaɲastuʎ/, verb: “to give birth to (s.o.)”

I actually did, until I decided to stop caring. Long story.

In any case, here we have a compound of istu|l with the noun pa|na: “birth”. It’s getting a bit more difficult to argue that istu|l still has its main meaning intact here (“to give birth” as “to summon birth”? Can work, but is a bit weird). It’s more a semantically bleached quasi-suffix used to form a verb out of a noun (as I mentioned before, Moten stems are usually stuck in a single part of speech, unlike say English stems which are happy to be verbed and nouned freely).

One thing I need to mention is that ipa|nastu|l is the standard verb used to refer to someone’s birth. But it focusses on the mother’s action, unlike the English “to be born”, which focusses on the child. So if you want to say that you were born on the 25th of March, you actually have to say in Moten that someone gave birth to you on that date. Since Moten is aggressively pro-drop, you don’t have to specify a subject at all, but it’s still considered present. The expression looks like this:

Gdan zoba|saj (opa) egevel|ziza ipa|nastu|l etok.

Literally: “gave birth to me on March 25th” (the word in parentheses is opa: “and”, which is optionally present between the name of the month and the name of the day).

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Moten Word for the Day

ipenlastu|l /ipe̞nlastuʎ/, verb: “to invite; to ask out”

And then? Looks to me that this plan hasn’t been thought out thoroughly enough ;).

Once again we are looking at a verb-verb compound, this time with istu|l compounded with ipenlaj: “to wait for; to expect”. In other words, that verb means literally “to summon and wait”, which is pretty much what inviting people is about (I always get nervous waiting for people to show up, and constantly worrying they won’t actually bother…).

So far, all the compounds I’ve shown “make sense”, i.e. in those compounds istu|l is used in a way that is semantically meaningful. In the next compounds though, it will only be used as a sort of “verbal carrier”, i.e. a semantically bleached suffix there to ensure the resulting word is a verb. So expect a bit more variety in the next words for the day! :)

Questions?

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Moten Word for the Day

ipe|lastu|l /ipe̞ʎastuʎ/, verb: “to show; to reveal”

Yeah, couldn’t find anything better. Vepe|ne ! ;)

As promised, this one is slightly more interesting than the previous compound. First, it is a verb-verb compound, something that speakers of European languages won’t be very familiar with. It’s also a dvandva compound, i.e. a compound where both elements are at the same level and are connected with a notional “and”.

It is formed by adding ipe|laj: “to see, to watch” to istu|l. The resulting verb ipe|lastu|l literally means “to summon and see”, which is basically what “showing” or “revealing” is (calling someone so that they can see something :) ).

Verb-verb compounds are common in Moten, so don’t be surprised if you see a few more appearing in this series, or even afterwards ;).

Questions?

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Moten Word for the Day

imikostu|l /imiko̞stuʎ/, verb: “to phone, to call on the phone”

I did warn you! Can’t get enough of the calling dog ;).

When looking at compounds of istu|l, imikostu|l is probably the most boring one. It’s formed by compounding istu|l with miko: “remoteness, long distance, far”, i.e. “to call from afar”.

The main reason why it’s so boring is that istu|l basically keeps its meaning in this compound, making imikostu|l just a subset of istu|l. And indeed, just like in English one can simply say that they “called” someone and people will understand that they meant “by phone”, in Moten it’s common to simply use the verb istu|l when one actually means imikostu|l.

Don’t worry though, I promise the next compounds will be more interesting to look at :).

Questions?

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