7th Lexember Word

om /o̞m/, noun: “tree, wood (material)”

That’s a tree I suggest you get away from very fast :).

OK, there’s little to say about today’s word. Om refers to large wooden plants, as well as the material they are made from. That’s it. No more to read in this. No insights into Moten culture. Just a plain old word. Not even a derivation.

What a waste…

OK, I might have something to say about this word, but you’ll have to wait for two days. I trust you are all patient, right?

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6th Lexember Word

joami /jo̞.ami/, verb: “to feel, to sense, to notice; to smell, to taste, to feel by touch”

That… is surprisingly a correct example of how joami is used. And incidentally also how my dog reacts to cheese :).

When it comes to feelings, Moten is quite complicated, using different words depending on whether we are talking about internal or external sensations, whether it’s the speaker speaking about themself or someone else, etc. Joami, however, is not the most complicated one of the bunch. It simply refers to experiencing something from your environment using one or more of your senses. Basically, if you can see, hear, smell, taste or feel something by touch, you can use joami to describe that experience. That’s what you call a hypernym (here of the various verbs of sensing). And given this generic meaning, it can also be used where English people would say “to notice”.

This said, the fact is that in Moten, there are specific verbs referring to seeing/watching (ipe|laj) and hearing/listening (jezeti), but none for the remaining senses. So it’s common for joami to refer only to those remaining senses, in which case it’s more a counterpart of ipe|laj and jezeti, and it can mean “to smell”, “to taste” or “to feel by touch” depending on the context.

As with all transitive verbs, the exact meaning of joami depends on the form of its subject. If that subject is in the nominative case, it marks an active form of sensing or probing (compare once again ipe|laj and jezeti, which mean “to watch” and “to listen to” respectively, with a subject in the nominative case). If that subject is in the instrumental, it marks it as an experiencer, i.e. a passive recipient of sensory stimulations (in that same case, ipe|laj means “to see”, and jezeti means “to hear”).

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5th Lexember Word

sej(f) /se̞j(f)/, noun: “steam, water vapour; smoke, fume; blur, also as adj. blurry, blurred”

Eh… no. Not that kind of steam…

Sej(f) is a typical example of how Moten tends to stretch its words near breaking point, piling semantic generalisation upon semantic generalisation while keeping the original sense of the word alive.

In this case, the original meaning of sej(f) is “steam, water vapour”. Basically, It’s the one word for water I was still missing (since Moten has various words for water depending on temperature and one for non-drinkable water, as explained here, as well as a word for ice and snow: |no, water vapour was basically the last gap here).

By extension, sej(f) also refers to any kind of vapour coming from burning or boiling materials, hence the meanings “smoke” and “fume”. And finally, because of the way the air gets blurry when there’s smoke in it, sej(f) got metaphorically extended to mean “blur”, also used as an adjective meaning “blurry”.

As for the shape of this root, it contains what I call a “fragile coda consonant”. Basically, Moten phonotactics only allow single consonant codas. However, some roots happen to have two coda consonants. When that happens, the second one becomes fragile, and normally drops, only resurfacing when compounding or suffixes make it pronounceable. In other words, the word sej(f) will most often appear simply as sej, with the final -f resurfacing only when suffixing or compounding turn it into the onset of a new syllable. That’s what I’m trying to show by putting the last consonant of that word in parentheses.

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4th Lexember Word

ba|zip /bad͡zip/, noun: “(table) salt, sea salt, sodium chloride”

That’s the expression “table salt” taken to a brand new level!

Another word related to cooking, ba|zip refers strictly to salt used as a condiment and for preservation, i.e. sodium chloride (or at least to something containing mostly sodium chloride, like sea salt). It’s not used for other combinations of acids and bases, like the English word “salt” is used in chemistry.

In terms of etymology, ba|zip seems to be a head-first compound of bale: “brine”, the 1st Lexember word, and |zipuz, the participle of i|zipi: “to boil”, the 3rd Lexember word. In other words, it originates from the erosion of the expression bale |zipuz: “boiled brine”, which could be an indication of when Moten speakers discovered salt for the first time :). Such compounds are common in Moten, and the amount of erosion this one suffered seems to indicate that it’s relatively old.

And I guess you’ve noticed that of the 4 words I’ve created so far, only two are truly new roots, with the other two being derived from them. It’s a good illustration of the way I work: I never create words in isolation, preferring instead to create roots and derivations together. And since the rules of Lexember allow it, why shouldn’t I create related words if I want to?

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3rd Lexember Word

i|zipi /id͡zipi/, verb: “to boil, to bake, to cook”

I don’t actually have a smoke alarm. Doesn’t say anything about my cooking though! :P

So, here we have a new verb. Moten so far has had a very big lexical gap in the area of food and cooking, so I decided to start filling it by looking at the basics. And the basics are to have a word for cooking itself ;).

I|zipi's original meaning is “to boil”, with the subject being the thing boiling (i|zipi is strictly an intransitive verb, with the subject always being the undergoer of the action). As in English, it can refer to liquids boiling, or to solids being boiled in liquids. And through generalisation, it has also come to refer to any form of cooking that involves heat, with or without liquids involved.

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2nd Lexember Word

balebale /bale̞bale̞/, noun: “sea, ocean, salt lake”

The pun is only marginally better than yesterday, but at least the picture is cute :).

So, the reason why I created the word bale yesterday? Just so I would have a source to today’s word! Yeah, languages can be quite roundabout can’t they? :P

Anyway, balebale refers to any kind of large expanse of salt water. I.e. it refers to what in English are called seas, oceans, and salt lakes. And no, there are no more specific words in Moten for various types of salt water expanses. It seems that to Moten speakers, it’s more important to know whether the water is drinkable, than to know whether the water feature is landlocked, just big, or freaking huge. To each their own :).

As for the derivation, balebale is simply the full reduplication of bale. Full reduplication in Moten usually means “all the…”, but such words are often subject to semantic shift, and it seems this has happened to this one as well.

In any case, you can’t argue that this word isn’t an everyday word! :P

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1st Lexember Word

bale /bale̞/, noun: “salt water, seawater, brine, non-drinkable water”

I know, it’s bad, but try finding brine memes!

Anyway, as promised, here is the first Lexember word for Moten. Yeah! :) And as promised, it’s an everyday word (for some value of “everyday” :P).

Bale is an underived stem that refers to salt water (also called “brine”), sea water, and by extension any kind of non-drinkable water. If you’re wondering whether salt water actually deserves an underived stem, you have to realise that Moten already has unrelated words for liquid water at various temperatures (vone means “cold water”, zuba is “warm water”, while den is “hot water”). So having an unrelated word for water that is unsuited for human consumption (mostly because of salt contents, but possibly because of other reasons) doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

And if you’re wondering whether bale really qualifies as an “everyday” word, let’s just say that I needed it for tomorrow’s word, which should really qualify for that distinction. I hope you’re looking forward to it! :)

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