Dapiica: Questions, colours, and setting

Posted on August 24, 2017
Tags: dapiica

It’s been a while, but I’ve got a significant update to dapiica - There are now questions!

c’icaʒt’a

c’i- ca -ʒ -t’a

can- speak- -2SG.ABS -QUESTION

“Can you speak?”

I’ve also added colours, which have a delightfully pointless inconsistency - ‘ax’ means colour, and is attached to the start of a word to indicate “the colour of this”, for example, numiʃaam means light (as in, not dark), so axnumiʃaam means “white”. But, if a colour is incorporated into a noun, ‘ax’ becomes ‘aʝ’ (thus, “white flower” is ‘aʝnumiʃaambanani’). Why? Well, presumably it had some grammatical/phonetic function in an ancient form of the language, but is now just a little quirk left as a remnant of some older grammatical system. I like introducing small inconsistencies like this, because it makes the language feel more natural - no real language is perfectly ordered, and every language has to deal with historical stuff that makes no sense.

I’ve also seperated the lexicon into it’s own file (but it’s missing a few entries, I’ll have to update it soon), and more importantly, started a page to describe çabi, the moon on which dapiica is spoken.

Check out dapiica here or çabi here!