While wrestling with Ai-Naidari adjectives, I found some more pedestrian words, which is good because, you know, you can’t talk about relationships all the time. Even if you’re Ai-Naidari.
ush (noun) - meals (singular, ushi). Interestingly, this is not “food.” This is a meal, and implies it was prepared for someone to eat. Food is a passive description of something, that it’s fit for eating. That word is kul. Ush is something edible that’s been made and planned to be eaten.
sulivej (adj) – nourishing. Can be said of food or relationships, etc. Interestingly, I mistook this word for “healthy” when I first found it, but it’s not, it’s definitely nourishing.
Note that there’s a word for “to make food nourishing,” bashen (a verb). A meal (ushi) is food (kul) that has been made nourishing (bashen). And as mentioned before, a person who makes food nourishing is a bashendari. This is different from someone who grows food, or gathers food. Until you make food into a meal, something intended to nourish someone, you are not a bashendari.
It turns out Ai-Naidar have strong feelings about food. I should have known… they’re a social people. I will ask them about spices next.
I also found this:
pash (verb) - to walk.
Finally, a word for something the Ai-Naidar do all the time. Moving on:
sen (verb) - to write. This is write, like “I’m writing something down using letters.” When Farren says “I am writing” as part of his work, this is the word he uses (when he doesn’t use words relating to calligraphy/drawing). This is as opposed to:
lekain (verb) – to write/create. This is write, like “I’m writing a story.” Notice the relationship with ekain, “stories.”
Also, I realized that the word “dream” in English can apply to what you do at night, or what you do during the day when you’re woolgathering, or what you do while conscious and you are excited about some grand plan. Does not work that way for them.
tsol (noun) – Dreams like “grand planning, I have a dream to do this wonderful thing with my life!”
Contrast this with jiliqil, “fitful dreams (at night)” and yulun, “restful dreams (at night).”
The whole thing with the adjectives… ugh, crazy-making. I am pretty sure that adjectives that modify objects (things in the second declension, the “not-people” declension) go after the noun they modify (so, “the horse beautiful”). But adjectives that modify people go in front of the noun (so, “the beautiful woman”) unless you are effacing them as another part of using the Abased mode (so, to be humble, “the woman beautiful”). There are also separate rules for reflexives; in sentences like this:
She was beautiful.
I am almost completely certain that the adjective is treated like a verb, so instead of saying “she was beautiful” what happens is more like “she beautiful-with-verb-endings.”
I think. There’s also a reflexive verb prefix I’m still investigating.
I also think adjectives might be unmodified (!) unless they indicate a specific thing… so if you say “a beautiful woman”, you use the adjective without modifiers, but if you say “that beautiful woman (that one, over there!),” then it gets something added to it. But I won’t understand that better until I get into articles. I’m not ready for articles! *clutches ears*
Ahem. Anyway. Have some more vocabulary.
