Promiseland

[Fetian]

I got! Five hours of sleep last night! I'm very tired.

I did get a couple chores done, along with a pimsleur lesson and the doodles shown above. I've also got a thing I've been trying to work out, re kets, that I'll talk through tomorrow when I'm hopefully less tired.

ash and I watched some Kipos and the recent 10 Minute Power Hour with Ify Nwadiwe as a guest, and then he went to bed because he's also tired. While I was hanging out at the computer afterwards, my sister texted me a bunch of questions about my bike, which is weird but I'm taking as just an attempt to catch up with her brother, you know. We don't really, like, chat, so she just had a topic she could ask me about and took the opportunity to ask me about something that's going on in my life, I assume.

As mentioned I am very tired so I'm going to go to bed early, I might even do the thing where I fall asleep right now and get up in a couple hours to feed the cats and actually get ready for bed. We'll see

[Fetian]

Alright, so. A while back I learned that there are, in real life, a Ket people and a Ket language¹, and I've been thinking about what to do with that information. I am pretty attached to the terms in my conlang, but I can't reasonably just ignore this, especially considering that the people and language are endangered and that I'm using the term to describe non-humans. It would be like if I accidentally called my language "thai" -- a reasonable mistake to make, in a universe where thai isn't a commonly-known language, but one that needs corrected. In the extremely unlikely scenario that my conlang becomes famous, I don't want to be stealing this name from somebody.²

But the question remains of how to fix it.

In decreasing priority:

1. Change the name of the ket species

2. The new name has to have a phonology predictable to English-speakers while following Teket spelling rules ("c" in Teket words is pronounced like "ch" in English, for example, so "kec", meant to be pronounced "ketch" but more likely to be pronounced "kek", is a no-go)

3. Specifically humans in-universe and the narration have to use the new name

4. The new name and any other terms that needed to change, both sound and look good to me

5. The change should leave the current Teket dictionary as intact as possible. There are several words derived from the species name, these either need to change with the species or have a plausible reason for staying the same

Point two unfortunately rules out a change that would almost be perfect -- changing to /kɛɾ/, which would need to be spelled "ker" and which therefore would result in people pronouncing it "kirr" (/kɪɹ/). The difference in that 'r' is that the latter is what you likely think of as an 'r' as an english-speaker (every 'r' in that sentence is /ɹ/), and the former is a tap where you bring the tip of your tongue up behind your teeth briefly to pronounce it. It's often transcribed 'd' and I could change the spelling conventions of the language to call them keds and get people to mostly get the pronunciation right -- but I hate how that looks. Teked Lau. Seiked. Cuked. Awful, it feels like they have stuffy noses.

So that's out, and the same rule also rules out some other letters that are used for a different sound than an English-speaker would expect: r, c, ch, vh, and any doubled vowels (aa, ee, ii, uu)

I considered 'kel', but the pluralising suffix '-al' (making kelal) is displeasing, so I also considered changing the suffix to '-at' (making kelat, seikelat, luenat, marhuniat, etc), but ultimately I don't like that. Could change the suffix to something else, and may consider it, but right now this one is not a top runner.

"kes" was considered and discarded because I don't like how it looks. "kest" was considered and discarded because I don't like how it combines with suffixes, though the resemblance to English superlative is tempting.

"ken" has been considered, but I don't like how it changes the derived words.

"keit" is a top-runner because I can get away with keeping the dictionary the same and saying the diphthong's been reduced in derived words. I'm also considering just switching the letters around and making them teks.

Another option in my sleeve is to keep them kets in the ket language but have humans call them something different and blame language drift. (This happened with the yen in Japanese -- when English (well, Portuguese-speakers) made contact with them, the え was pronounced "ye", but now it's "e", so the yen is "yen" in English but "en" in Japanese. The more you know). Or have whatever the original term for the species was be fossilised in the language but have derived terms &c have drifted.

Obviously I haven't actually decided on anything, yet, but those are the options I've largely come down to. I'll probably test them out before settling on one I think I'll like best. If anyone has any opinions on the matter I'd be happy to hear them

 

---

_{¹Genuinely at a loss for how I didn't find this out before I settled on the name, I almost always search terms like this before naming things for exactly this reason. At a guess I just searched "ket" with no further descriptors, which puts the people and language Very low in search results and brings up other-language results before it does the relevant wikipedia pages.
²Imagine you were a member of a little-known group of Klingon people living on a mountain somewhere, and everyone's first thought when hearing about you or your language was the Star Trek aliens. People are learning "Klingon" but it's some fantasy Klingon. Awful.}

[Fetian]

Annoyed! Because this is on last week's discussion board

Screenshot 2025-04-01 at 03-59-19 Topic Discussion Board 5 Let's Talk About Language.png

which I thought meant I didn't need to reply to anyone but then there was this

Screenshot 2025-04-01 at 03-59-39 Topic Discussion Board 5 Let's Talk About Language.png

which my ADHD ass didn't notice until 2 AM, two hours after the deadline

"Makes stupid mistakes disease"

I'm not at all confident on my submission there in the first place, nor on my essay, so we'll see what kind of marks I get. Uuughhhh. At least the lowest scores of everything will get dropped at the end of class so it probably won't end up affecting my grade at all, but if I get dinged that does remove some of my safety net.

 
Weather's turned again so I've been doing not a lot! A lot of focus on getting that classwork done. This coming week has a 55 page PDF I have to read so I'm going to, uh, continue to focus on that. It's on language acquisition which is one of my main interests in linguistics, so at least it shouldn't bore me.

[Fetian]

Having a lot of sad thoughts about Oz tonight. Nothing triggered by anything in specific, just a keen awareness of how little time I have left with her even in the best case scenario

I should start stockpiling money for handling her remains, and decide what I want done. It's just truly painful to think about

[Fetian]

I ran out of one of the vitamins I've been taking to help with the adhd uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh while ago so I stopped taking any of them until I can get more and You Can Fuckin Tell

[Fetian]

Case in point I've been meaning to mention that since it happened and kept forgetting

[Fetian]

The little asshole! Tricked Me! Into getting up to feed him TWO HOURS before his breakfast time!!

[erikavonkaiser]

Having a lot of sad thoughts about Oz tonight. Nothing triggered by anything in specific, just a keen awareness of how little time I have left with her even in the best case scenario

I should start stockpiling money for handling her remains, and decide what I want done. It's just truly painful to think about

If you ever want to chat about this re: options and prices I have pretty up-to-date information due to Baby Dog's recent passing and wouldn't mind talking about the logistics. It's good to prepare for, I think, and to decide things like if you want a paw print in advance of that (in Baby's old age I bought one of those at-home kits to make an ink print of her paw and nose) or a snip of hair kept in a certain way, that kinda thing.

(I wear Baby Dog's tag from her collar on a necklace)

[erikavonkaiser]

Also on a less macabre note I don't have anything valuable to add about the language dilemma but I think it is good and thoughtful of you to approach the conlang vs real language situation the way you are, and I think you do really good linguistics work in general!

[Fetian]

I'm ow