I’m finally changing Lutrin’s name.  When my friend and I came up with the idea, we weren’t planning on doing a whole lot with it except for some private writing, so yeah, why not be lazy and just name a race off of their literal translation in Latin?  Now, though, Ipakha has its own name as a canon, and has publications, so I think it’s time we glazed over our laziness and at least gave them a unique name.

Being a tribal society, those-who-were-formerly-known-as-Lutrin would probably name themselves something very egocentric when asked: typically, these societies call themselves things like “the first people,” like in my own beloved Blackfoot (niitsitapi), or, indeed, just “people”.  In the case of ex-Lutrin, the translation of this would be oekinmerel, but because I want my names to be shorter and so more memorable, I am just going to stick with “people”.  This would be oekinel, which I believe I will continue to use as an endonym, but because encroachers rarely properly use inflections, if they use the native language at all (or even a translation: ‘Blackfoot’ is lucky; there are nations close by that wound up being called ‘Carrier’ or ‘Slave’ by translated exonyms), I will drop the plural suffix and make the common name of the people and language Oekin.

My friend, bless him, likes it particularly because it ends with -kin.

Ipakha, the universe for which Lutrin is being created, is finally getting written as a story.  The first couple chapters written thusfar (by me; my collaborator is still working out things on their end) are about the Lutrins, either in part or in full.  This means that, especially in the case of the second, their language finally sees some real use, which is very exciting to me.

The first is titled Sinking of the SSS Dungong, and follows two Lutrins aboard a sinking landship, a hybrid of comedy and tragedy and a lot of in-line exposition.

The second is A Sacrifice to Child Lake, which tells the bloody, sordid story of one Lutrin’s mother, and illustrates the tribal nature of these otter-like people.

More to come, very soon, in Ipakha.

A few days ago I worked on Lutrin a little more, because my main partner in crime in writing who commissioned (see: made me want to create) Lutrin got me excited again.

I realized that throughout Lutrin’s development hitherto it has not really used the verb “to be”. This verb rarely appears in Genesis 11:1-9, the only text I’ve translated into Lutrin, which makes me wonder if I should change my benchmark first translation; where it does appear, it’s in the present tense, third person.

Because I’m not just writing this conlang for myself but also for another person who really isn’t a linguist and has no experience as far as I know with learning second languages, I tried to keep it simple and used the aspect/mood infixed morphemes as the roots of their respective copular inflections. It means the copula isn’t irregular at all, apart from the infinitive, but given the amount of inflection in the language I think this can be realistic.

Demonstratives, on the other hand, have nothing to regulate to. I based them on the e/o alternation found throughout Lutrin when it comes to gender and smashed paradigms together until there were only five different proximal demonstratives that agree with both gender and case. Once again, in the interest of keeping things sort of simple without making Lutrin an English clone or a “logical” language, I formed the distal just with a single non-syllabic suffix.

Now I just need more things to translate.