I Tried Writing About the Weather and it Works

Over the last few weeks, on the advice of William S. Annis, I have begun to approach my conlang journaling by writing a sentence or two about the weather every day, and (if it is something I can easily say) a bit more of whatever else pops into my head. Unsurprisingly, it works quite well.

In addition to mundane things like "warm" and "cold" and "it's raining", I have found myself inventing some truly creative words and expressions. For instance, one day I realized that Tala could have a verb meaning 'to cook or fry with light' — later defined to be raulo — which would cover all of frying something with a laser, burning wood with a magnifying glass, and getting a sunburn. And in the latter case, you can say something like that following:

(The weather where I live has not actually been like that recently for me, but spring has almost sprung and we are starting to think about when we will need sunscreen.)

For an example that actually matches the weather in Finland right now, try:

For the curious, I would describe Tala as 95% analytic. There is a tiny amount of internal complexity that I skip over in these interlinears, but it is all derivational and not relevant to the current topic.

Some clear Finnishisms have made it into the language, such as ifli arki 'rain (literally "precipitate water")', which is a clear calque of Finnish sataa vettä — down to the fact that you can use the verb arki 'to rain/precipitate' without a noun and liquid rain will be assumed. While there is nothing wrong with this pattern, I am also considering tweaks that would diverge from the Finnish pattern, such as creating a different verb for flakes or drops that arrive sideways.

So far, nothing in this language is as creative as the Finnish term pääkallokeli 'skull weather (i.e. icy enough that you might fall and break your skull)', but there is plenty of time. The ice will be back next year.

On top of the above, I have also started naming things in my actual environment more actively than before. Technological items that I use regularly, silverware, and (as my previous post indicates) rooms in a dwelling have come up so far; other things will probably surface in the near future. It will be a long time before I can actually write a full description of my day without creating words as I go along, but the metaphorical arrow is pointing in that direction now — and the blog post I linked in the first paragraph give the same warning about this not being a fast process.

The weather, though, is still a good place to start each day's journal entry, and also a good source of metaphors for daily life. In other conlanging projects, I have toyed with the idea of using expressions analogous to weather expressions to talk about e.g. the strength of a wifi or cellular signal, or downtime of a server; these ideas will probably make it into Tala in some form or other.