Today I’m starting a data science bootcamp. This means I’ll likely have approximately no time to do conlanging, so the next three months of Weekly Words will be very bare-bones. My current plan is to make my way down the Liepzig-Jakarta list, making one word from this list in each language every week. That’s a manageable three words per week, all likely to have simple etymologies, and it’s an opportunity to flesh out the basic vocabulary of my languages.
But before then, I have one more in-depth Weekly Words. Since I’m doing “bootcamp”, this week’s theme is military training.
In Muipido, the army was mostly made of ordinary farmers wielding spears and shields. They received rudimentary training, focused on practicing staying in a tight formation as they moved. The training usually took place on cleared areas away from the settled river valleys, which were called kuphïyk’ïdo [ˈku.pʰɘjˌkʼɨ.do], literally “place of dust”.
Kharul was known for its small professional army of skilled archers, which were bolstered by conscript spearmen when needed. Archers practiced in facilities called anzalgyipyugh [an.zalʲ.ɟəˈpʲuʝ], literally just “archery targets”, which is itself a nominalization meaning “one shoots at it” (from the verb lyeghpyú [lʲɛʝˈpʲu] “to shoot”).
Nitherian basic military training was often referred to with the same word used for cooking fish, chnpya [ˈtɕn̩.pja], which is literally “to make/become tender”. This was originally a nautical usage before spreading to the army as well; part of its attraction was that the root chano “tender” had a secondary meaning “pliable, obedient”.