Hey all,

I thought that I would give some details about Old Urasti, the conlang on
which I am working, by telling you how I made up a word recently.  I hope
that people will find this interesting.

I'm not a linguist, and so I started with about 300 words from the
reconstructed vocabulary of Proto-Nostratic.  I then began combining and
adding words, as well as loaning words from other real and invented
languages. The result is a work in progress. Here's three words' worth of
the progress:

I wanted a word for the inspiration that makes you produce vast amounts of
creative work: the ability or gift to sit down and write seven to nine
thousand words in a day, or write four novels in a year, or paint the
whole Mississippi.  I mentally called this the *storm of dreams*, although
to a doctor that means something else.  So I set out to translate this
phrase into a Urasti word.  

We didn't have a word for "storm". But rain is *talwa*, and great rain is
*tahal* (the last syllable is dropped and *ah* is infixed to denote
greatness).  We didn't have a word for dreams, but night is *hilla* and to
see is *ruy*, so *laru*, a contraction of *hillaruyci*, "night-see",
became the word for dream (the plural infixes a *y*, so "dreams" is
*laruyu*.  Adding the ablative case marker, *ta*, the word for a storm of
dreams is *tahaltalaru*.  
Um, this is an artlang/fictlang, I think.

Take care,

Jim   

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