Khurbyish Lesson #5 -- Verbs!

This one's been a long time coming, especially considering that the whole "how verbs work" thing is a pretty vital part of making a language! Now you'll finally be able to actually use the various verbs listed on the Khurbyish Dictionary page, rather than just looking at them and saying "hey, these are neat, too bad I have no idea how to conjugate them." XD

Present Tenses
To conjugate a verb into the simple present tense in Khurbyish, just add the suffix "-mu" (M - OO) to the end of the root word.  For example, if you wanted to say "I agree" in Khurbyish, you would say "ij menuwumu" rather than just using the verb menuwu (meaning "to agree") on its own.

Something like the continuous present tense in English can be formed when the word yu comes before a Khurbyish verb in the present tense.  For example, if you wanted to say "I'm thinking," you would say "ij yu menomu" -- adding "-mu" to the end of meno (to think), and yu in front of it.

Past Tenses
Conjugating a verb into a simple past tense in Khurbyish is similar to the simple present -- just add the suffix "-ru" (R - OO) to the end of the root verb. For example, to say "I drank three beers," you would say "ij gluhru ka vergluhn," adding "-ru" to the end of gluh (to drink.)

A continuous past tense is also possible, and is formed just like the continuous present tense but with "-ru" rather than "-mu."  So to say "I was drinking three beers every day," you would say "ij yu gluhru ka vergluhn ko'ohr."

Khurbyish also has a different past tense for events that took place further in the past, especially when referring to things that were different in the past compared to the present.  If used for things that are relatively recent (for example, something that happened last week) it carries very strong implications that what you said is no longer the case in the present, whereas if it's used to describe something that happened decades or centuries ago the implication leans more toward just emphasizing how long ago it was.  To conjugate a verb into this form, you add "-roi" (R - OI) to the end of the word.  Adding yu before the verb has the same effect as with the standard past tense.  So if you wanted to tell someone that you used to drink three beers a day at some point in the past (or that you used to drink three beers a day until your doctor told you to cut back last week!), you would say "ij yu gluhroi ka vergluhn ko'ohr."

Future Tense
Much like the present and past, Khurbyish has a simple future tense formed by adding a suffix to the end of the root verb -- in this case "-zu" (Z - OO.)  So if, for example, you wanted to say "I'll fly away" in Khurbyish, you would say "ij fasuzu asor," adding "-zu" to the end of fasu meaning "to fly."

That's all for now, but check back in the future -- though the basic stuff that I knew I absolutely needed for the language to work is in place now, I'll probably expand upon Khurbyish verbs and conjugation more at some point, and when I do that information will find its way here.

Khurbyish Lesson #4 -- Family and relationship terms

Here's some words I came up with a couple years ago (though a few of them -- like the words for father, mother, and child -- are a whole lot older, and a couple are newer, too.)  This time around it's another basic set that lends itself to the "chart" format -- a family tree!

And yeah, it's a bit big, so it was shrunk down a bit by this site... you may want to click it to get a better look.

Anyway... most of this should be fairly self-explanatory due to the "family tree" format which should look pretty familiar, but in case it's not, I'll go over the words introduced here.  Terms in red are female-specific, while terms in blue are male-specific; most of the Khurbyish family terms (shown in white) are gender-neutral.

YIYAKU: Family.  This word refers to an entire family; adding the plural N to make "yiyakun" would mean you're talking about more than one family, useful in cases of feuds and marriages and that sort of thing.  Using the adjective-form R and possessive-form Z, you can pretty much replicate any use of the word "family" in English with this one.

HAMYALU: Grandmother.

HAMYIKI: Grandfather.

YIKI: Father.

YALU: Mother.

YIKIZTISO: Aunt or uncle on the father's side.  Literally translates to "father's brother" or "father's sister."  As with most Khurbyish words, there are no gender-specific variations; paternal aunts and uncles alike would both be referred to as "yikiztiso."

YALUZTISO: Aunt or uncle on the mother's side.  Literally translates to "mother's brother" or "mother's sister."

EPA: Cousin.

KU: Child.  Khurbyish does not have specific words for "daughter" or "son," or at least not any that are in common usage; most of the time, only this general term for kids of all sorts is used.

TISO: Brother or sister.  As with most of these words, it's not specific as to the gender of the relative in question.

CHOKI: Niece or nephew.

KUZKU: Grandchild.  Literally translates to "child's child."

As with the other posts in this series, I will most likely come back and add even more to this at a later date.  Specifically, I'll most likely be adding terms for other relationships beyond family -- for example, how to say "friend" in Khurbyish, or how to describe a caretaker who isn't actually your parent.

Khurbyish Lesson #3 -- Anatomy

And here's my third post about the Khurbyish language -- last time I covered some basic color-related words (and a few a little less basic), and now it's time for something completely different...

...with that "something" being some of the basic words for body parts.  Unlike the color words, these may not be immediately obvious even with lines pointing to the corresponding parts on this drawing of a Burijeoo disguised in human form, so I'll go over each one in a little more detail.

PLUO: The Khurbyish word for "head" or "face."  This double meaning is probably due to the abundance of round-bodied species (such as K'hyurbhis and Blurbys) on the planet Nummorro, who don't really have a distinct "head" region on their bodies.
This word is also an example of a situation where the combination of "OO" and another vowel doesn't change to the second vowel with a W sound before it -- "plwo" would be an unpronounceable mess (either that, or sound exactly like "pluo" if you did mangle a pronunciation out of it that made sense), after all!  This is generally how things work with "consonant+OO+vowel" combinations; the W sound from "OO" and another vowel combining only forms when "OO" is the first sound in a word, or if it's preceded by another vowel or the dash that's sometimes used to separate a word into two.

JE: Hair.  Can refer to hair on any part of the body, combining with other body-part words as if making a possessive form (like "head's hair," "arm's hair," and so on) if you want to be really specific.  For example, "pluozje" would mean "head hair" specifically.

DIU:  Eye.

DOIN:  Ear.

YED:  Neck.  This is a word that doesn't get a lot of use among the majority of Nummorro's inhabitants, as Numnums, K'hyurbhis, and Blurbys are all essentially neckless.  Presumably the word developed in order to describe the neck region on the bodies of other species.

ZUR:  Nose.  Can refer to either the external nose structure (on those species that have them) or just the nostrils.

WAPI:  Mouth.

ARR:  Hand or fist.

TAN:  Arm or leg.  Essentially, "tan" means "limb" in general, rather than being specific to what we humans would call "arms" or "legs."  As such, I've labeled both an arm and a leg with "tan" on the picture above.  The only way to refer to an arm (as in, a limb used primarily for grasping) specifically would be to combine the words for "hand" and "limb" -- making "arrtan."  Making a leg-specific word works the same way, combining the words for "foot" and "limb" to make "bolotan."

DEN:  Finger.  Thumbs are not distinguished from the other fingers in Khurbyish.  Toes are also not counted as something separate from fingers, though if you wanted to refer specifically to a toe rather than a finger, you could combine the words for "foot" and "finger" (as a possessive form, just like when referring to hair on specific parts of the body) to make "bolozden."  Along the same lines, you could specify "arrzden" to mean the fingers on someone's hand specifically.

PUKU:  Claw.

TAND:  Body.  Can also be used to refer to the torso specifically, in the case of creatures with more distinct body segments than those of Nummorro's species (such as humans, or anything else with a bipedal/humanoid body shape.)

BOLO:  Foot.

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Of course, most humanoid creatures lack certain body parts that are commonly found on some of Nummorro's other residents.  Here's some words for body parts found on Numnums and K'hyurbhis that weren't present on the diagram above:

TEJE: Feathers.  Literally translates to "bird hair," with "te" being a word used to refer to birdlike creatures.

YUZ:  Tail.  Note that this is an older drawing of a Numnum (from around 2010), so the tail is not drawn quite as long here as it should be -- but it's still present enough for the purposes of this post.

ARKU: Spike or horn.  Generally used to refer to the spikes on the top of a K'hyurbhi's head, though some other species have short, sturdy spikes or horns which are described as "arku" as well.  Thorns on a plant are sometimes referred to as "arku," as are spikes built into suits of armor or buildings for defensive purposes.  Longer or more elaborate horns, and especially those which fall out and regrow on a regular basis like a deer's antlers, would not usually be described as "arku" in Khurbyish.

KHURB'YIWALEN: A term that refers to the natural tattoo-like markings on a K'hyurbhi's face, which are present shortly after hatching (fading in from a very pale color over their first few years of life.)  These markings are the best way to identify an individual K'hyurbhi on sight, as they are like human fingerprints in that no two individuals' markings are exactly alike.  Literally translates to "K'hyurbhi colors," albeit using the Ancient Khurbyish form "Khurb'yi" rather than the modern "K'hyurbhi" -- this is a rather old term, and has probably remained due to the fact that "K'hyurbhiwalen" would be even longer than this already abnormally long word.

As with the colors page (and probably others to come in the future), this page will be updated to include other terms not included on the current version -- probably with even more body part words not found on humanoid creatures, such as wings and tentacles!

Khurbyish Lesson #2 -- Colors

Now that you know how to read and write the Khurbyish alphabet and recognize some basic forms of words (like being able to point out when a word is plural), now it's time for some basic Khurbyish vocabulary.

...and I mean something really, really basic.  As in, the names of colors!

Above is the standard "color wheel" that you've probably seen half a billion times before... but this time, all of its labels have been written in Khurbyish.  I also added white, gray, and black at the bottom since those are just as basic and important to know as the primary/secondary colors shown in the wheel.

"Walen" at the top means colors -- and, as you could probably guess by the "en" ending, the singular word for "color" in Khurbyish is just "wal."  Pronounced... basically exactly like the English word "wall," actually.

The colors themselves should be pretty self-explanatory, and the pronunciation of the words should be pretty easy to understand if you refer back to the previous post on how each letter/symbol is pronounced.

And here's some more color-related words, this time some a bit less basic than the primary/secondary colors shown up above.  "Sazipu" refers to all sorts of blue-green colors, "rahtin" is used for various browns, and "sheh" to various shades of pink.  "Rei" refers to dark reds and maroon sorts of colors like the ones used for that circle and the letters within.  "Rahhi" refers to various tan, beige, etc. sorts of colors, as demonstrated by the colors used for its circle and lettering.  Between "rahtin," "sheh," and "rahhi" (and perhaps "yai" and "ii" from up above if you want to exaggerate a bit), it's possible to describe pretty much every natural human skin tone using Khurbyish words... though as of this Khurbyish lesson, it's not yet possible to get really specific by going into whether it's a dark or light shade of that particular color.  I suppose you could say "ii-rahtin" or "yai-sheh" but then you'd sound... well, about as silly as someone going around describing someone's skin as "whitepink" would in English.  You could use "shehr-yai," which would translate to "pinkish-white," which is closer... but still not quite the way you'd normally describe a very pale pinkish skin tone in Khurbyish.
(Oh, by the way, that means you guys reading this now know how to make a "vague adjective" out of an already-adjective word... just add the adjective-forming "R" or "EH - R" to the end of it.  A second one on top of the one that's already there, if necessary.  So "shehr" would mean "pinkish" rather than just pink... and you could also form a word that means something along the lines of "snowy-ish" or "a little snowy" by changing "narr" into "narrer," for example.)
There are specific Khurbyish words for "dark" and "light" that can be combined with the colors to describe a specific color in more detail, but they'll come up later when I cover some basic adjectives.  Or weather-related words.  Whichever comes up first. XD

Also shown above is "vu" (another example of how F makes a V sound when combined with certain vowels in Khurbyish) and "chai," which refer to gold and silver.  Not the metals, of course, but the colors that we humans often associate with those metals -- metallic yellowy colors are "vu" and metallic gray-blue-white sorts of colors are "chai."  The metals that we call "gold" and "silver" probably have Khurbyish names as well, but those names probably aren't just "vu" or "chai."

And finally, there's "awal," which can be translate a variety of different ways into English -- clear, transparent, colorless, that sort of thing.  If you wanted to describe the color of glass, water, a crystal, or something else that doesn't have an actual color to it, you would use this word.  Anything you can see through without the image on the other side changing color is "awal" in Khurbyish, whether the image on the other side turns out perfectly clear or kinda blurry.  Awal is basically just the word for "color" with "a" (note: this is pronounced "ah," not "ay" or any other way you might pronounce a letter A by itself in English) added onto the front of it -- and "a" in Khurbyish basically means "no."  It can be used on its own like the word "no," and it can also be used to modify another word, creating an opposite of that word -- so "awal" means "no color," if you want to translate it literally.

I may add even more color words to this post as I come up with them, so watch this space for future expansions.

Khurbyish Lesson #1 -- Letters, sounds, and some other basic stuff

As some of you may already know, "Khurbyish" (pronounced kurb-yish, only two syllables) is the name of the primary language of the planet Nummorro, spoken and written by the Numnums, K'hyurbhis, Blurbys, and the majority of other intelligent species who share the planet with them (though some of those other species do still speak their original languages as well.)

Modern-day Khurbyish is actually a combination of two older languages which are no longer in use -- the Nummian language spoken by Numnums in the distant past, and Ancient Khurbyish, which was the original language of the K'hyurbhis and was also spoken by some Blurbys.  Though some bits of Ancient Khurbyish (and words derived from that long-dead language) can still be found in the modern version, the Nummian language's largest surviving contribution seems to be its alphabet, which the current Khurbyish alphabet is closely based on... though some Numnum names and the names of places in Numnum-populated areas still include occasional elements of Nummian, often blended with modern Khurbyish (the most notable example being the continent of Ummiboro, which essentially means something along the lines of "Numnum Lands." The name is derived from one of several old Nummian words that referred to Numnums, combined with the standard Khurbyish word "boro" meaning place, town, land, etc.)

Since its development many, many thousands of years ago, the Khurbyish language has spread far from its planet of origin.  It has basically become a universal language among species capable of Num Warp travel throughout the entire First Nherbi, spoken on worlds as close as Nummorro's neighbors Brijetoo and Bifiboro and as far away as Kekyb and Zwoobah.  As a result of this widespread usage, various dialects of Khurbyish have sprung up, perhaps the most unusual being the "Brijuo-Khurbyish" used by the Burijeoo (which discards the standard Khurbyish alphabet, replacing it with that of the Brijuo language which Khurbyish replaced, and mixes fragments of Brijuo itself in with standard Khurbyish to create a new form of the language that some speakers of standard Khurbyish find difficult to understand at times.)  Khurbyish has even been adopted by the internherbi Council of Iklai based in the 40th Nherbi as a sort of "language of diplomacy," ensuring that its members (who come from a variety of alien species from all over) have a common language between them.

Vowels

Like many languages (but unlike English), pronunciation in Khurbyish follows very consistent rules; vowels in particular are always pronounced the same, regardless of what combination of letters they are surrounded by.

The following is a table of the vowel sounds present in Khurbyish and the symbols which represent them (as the image is pretty large, it's been shrunk down automatically by the site and may not be super readable; you may want to click on it to see the full-size version.)

The right column of vowels are pronounced exactly like their equivalents on the left column, but with a Y sound preceding them (for example, the letter matching the pronunciation "yay" sounds pretty much exactly like the English exclamation "yay!" does.)  The "consonant Y" sound does not have its own letter in Khurbyish, existing only in the form of these secondary vowels.

One exception to the usual rule of pronouncing Khurbyish vowels exists with "oo."  This sound can be combined with one of the other primary vowel sounds (those in the left column) in order to create a W sound -- for example, in the Khurbyish word "wa" (meaning sword or blade, and written as "OO - AH.")  A more complicated example is the name "Poowuku" (which would be spelled in Khurbyish as "P - OO - OO - OO - K - OO"), where the second and third instances of "oo" combine into "woo" instead of being pronounced separately; it's impossible to have "woo" followed by "oo" in standard Khurbyish, as a string of three "oo" will always have the second and third become "woo" while the first stays as "oo."  The only way to represent such a word in Khurbyish would be to separate it into two words by using a small dash between them (a symbol which is usually used to separate two parts of a place's name, or someone's first name from any surnames.)  To turn "Poowuku" into "Pwu'ooku," you would need to place this dash  between the second and third "oo."

Another quirk of Khurbyish is that in writing, certain vowels followed by R are sometimes dropped.  This is the case with combinations of "UH - R" and "IH - R," which are both pronounced approximately the same (like "er" in English) and are generally written as just an R by itself, especially when positioned in such a way that the pronunciation as "er" is clear.  For example, "Blurby" is written as "B - L - R - B - EE" in Khurbyish, as the only possible pronunciation of an R sandwiched between two other consonants would be "er."  "YUH - R" and "YIH - R" are also pronounced the same ("yer"), but in the case of those combinations the vowel stays in place, as otherwise there would be no indication that the Y sound is supposed to precede the "er."

Consonants

As with the vowels, Khurbyish consonants have consistent pronunciations regardless of what other letters they are used in combination with (with one exception, which will be explained in more detail after the chart.)

Here's a table of the Khurbyish consonant sounds and the symbols used to represent them.

The pronunciations of most of these should be self-explanatory.  Khurbyish G is a "hard G" as in "guy" or "gross," though you probably could have guessed that considering that the J sound already has its own letter.  "ZH" is a bit of an unusual one, and its pronunciation is somewhat harder to explain than the others.  The closest equivalent I can find in a common English word is in "vision," where the "si" combination makes a very different sound from a standard English S but not quite a standard English Z, either.

The lone exception to the "every consonant in Khurbyish has one pronunciation" rule mentioned above is F, which is sometimes pronounced as a V sound instead.  Though some obscure Khurbyish dialects replace many F sounds with V sounds (and still others never use V, pronouncing F as F no matter what other sounds it is combined with), standard Khurbyish pronunciation uses the V sound only in the case of "F - EH," "F - AY," and "F - OO" combinations.  A common example of this change in pronunciation can be found in "veryeh" (F - EH - R - YEH), the Khurbyish word for bread.

Pluralizing, possessives, and adjectives

Making Khurbyish plurals is pretty easy when compared to a language like English which is riddled with a chaotic jumble of inconsistent plural forms (due primarily to borrowing from so many other languages.)  To make a word plural, you simply add "N" (if it ends in a vowel) or "EH - N" (if it ends in a consonant) to the end of that word.  For example, the Khurbyish plural of Blurby would be "Blurbyn" (B - L - R - B - EE - N), and the plural of Numnum would be "Numnumen" (N - UH - M - N - UH - M - EH - N.)

Creating possessive forms of a word or name works in a similar way.  To create a possessive form of a word that ends in a vowel or most consonants, you add Z to the end.  For example, the Khurbyish word for a paternal aunt or uncle is "yikiztiso" (YIH - K - EE - Z - T - EE - S - OH), literally meaning "father's brother or sister."  Words ending in Z, S, J, CH, SH, or ZH are a bit different, and to make a possessive form of them you add "EH - Z" to the end, similarly to how plurals of words ending in a consonant work.

A third way to make new words by adding a single letter or sound is to "adjective-ize" a word.  To do so, simply add "R" to the end of the word.  Though some Khurbyish adjectives exist as independent words from nouns with a similar meaning, many of them are created in this way -- examples include words like "narr" (snowy, derived from "na" meaning snow), "kukar" (insectoid or "buggy," derived from "kuka" which is a term for hard-shelled invertebrates), and even the name "Nummer" (which literally translates to "Numnum-like," albeit using the shortened "Num" rather than the full "Numnum.")