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Fith
Fith Lexicon

 

Fith Lexicon   Advanced

This is as much of the Fith-English lexicon as has so far been documented.  We made the decision to publish once we reached 10,000 words.  Issues to be addressed in future editions:
Many of the verbs have not yet been properly identified as either two-argument or three-argument (Fith speakers no this innately - it is not listed in their dictionaries); for now, assume "v" indicates possible three-argument verbs.  An unknown number of irregular verbs require the object to proceed the subject; those have not all been identified yet.
Few compound words have been given in this initial lexicon.   They do exist, though they are possibly more transient and polysemous than the common one-syllable words given here.
The class of Siamese words has only just begun to be studied. Apparently, Siamese words place two nouns on the stack, which are not treated as a phrase. For instance, there is a word that places "clan" and "mother" on the stack. If the next word were a verb, say "misses", then the sentence would be "Mother misses the clan." The component words could be used as subjects, objects, prepositional objects: they could be used in any way that saying the words "clan mother" could.
The Fithians have a rich vocabulary for discussing politics and alliances, and this has yet to be fully documented.
Etymologies documenting the evolution from multiple-syllable Old Fith words to the vowel-harmonized roots of Middle Fith and the monosyllables of Modern Fith have not yet been researched. Old Fith had 14 vowels, with /oo/ (took) and /ah/ (father) used, but they were the least frequently used sounds and were gradually abandoned in favor of a system that fit den zhaimn ke ("the golden twelve", the belief that twelve is the right number to have of something, meaning literally "the green twelve" in Fith, since green has the equivalent of the positive connotations of the color of gold).  Also because of den zhaimn ke, four final consonant clusters of Old Fith (/l/, /lh/, /r/, and /rh/) were abandoned in favor of the "the golden twelve" endings (10 nasals, the vowel, and the non-nasalization of the vowel).
No font for the Fithian writing system has been developed yet.  The Fithian writing system is a combination of an alphabet, a syllabary (for want of a better word) and an ideography. The initial consonant cluster of a word is represented alphabetically. Each unique combination of vowel and final consonant (the rime of a syllable, comprising 160 forms in Fith) has a unique symbol: so /oi/ is written differently than /oin/, which is written differently than /oimn/. And as if that wasn't enough, about the thousand most common words (actually it has been formalized at 12*144, hlemnh sing) have unique symbols. And the 144 digits (0 to 143) have unique symbols. So Fithians have to learn close to 2000 symbols to represent their language. Their brains are well suited to this; where humans using ideographic systems (Chinese, for instance) take decades to master all their symbols; a young Fithian can learn their writing system is about two Terran years.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
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