Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Ceqli Through Pictures and a question.

I do auxlanging as a hobby.  My day job is cartooning, so I've started a Ceqli Through Pictures page.  The cartoons are deliberately crude.  See my regular cartoons here.  They're crude because I wanted the simplicity of those old "Through Pictures" paperbacks, but I also wanted them to be a little more attractive, somewhat cute.  The Ceqli name for the Ceqli language is "Ceqlizo," (the "zo" suffix turns a regular word into a name.)  "Ceqlizo" is also the name of the little narrator here.  She's saying "Heyl," which is pronounced like English "hail," and means the same thing, but is used to mean "hello."

Anyhow, the first question I have for everybody is this. I've been using the words for "big" and "small" (ga and pi) also as intensives, that is, they also mean "very" and "slightly," and are used as prefixes to intensify or moderate, much like Esperanto -eg and -et.  Now, I'm also using them to mean 'big' and 'small,' and I'm beginning to think I'm overloading them.  What do you think?  Do I need separate words for big/small?  If so, one possibility would be slam/smal (English 'small', reversed after the initial consonant to form the opposite) or hyu/hwi (from English HUge).   Or maybe kyo/koy (Japanese kanji meaning 'large') You can post your thoughts here, or email me at rmay@mac.com.

5 comments:

  1. Yes, overloaded, the poor little guys. Also, these are not good candidates for similar forms ("kyo/koy") based on inversion, since they are so common. "kyo" for big is good... choose something quite different for small.

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  2. So, would you say to keep ga and pi as 'very' and 'slightly,' and have say, gran and tini for size? Tini isn't phonetically invertible, and gran inverts kind of ugly, so I won't be wasting morphemes. Then ga and pi would continue to do the -eg/-et thing in compounds, right? The best invertibles have a diphthong in them.

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  3. How about this for big/small: Gran/Piwi Then, ga and pi can be considered to be _derived_ from them.

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  4. Yes, I like the gran/piwi => ga/pi concept.

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