Legacy 3

This follows on from Legacy 2.

Baranyi had decided to stay in the coastal town of Gaeda. It had some fishing and the surrounding farmland was mainly rice paddies, with goats, naturally. She had rented a small house near the shore and was still not sure whether its differences to the house she grew up in were due to climate, when the two houses were built, or Calenyan and Bitrani cultural differences. Frankly, Baranyi suspected a healthy dose of all three plus a few idiosyncratic residents. The furniture was plainer than she was used to, lacking in painted decoration, but she was beginning to see that the plain polished wooden surfaces where part of the larger Bitrani aesthetic.

That was an insight she was gaining from both her studies at the town library, which had a collection of interesting pictures plus books in Bitrani on Bitrani art, and from her regular discussions with her Bitrani art teacher. Andulo’s usual students were local children hoping to increase their overall marks enough to get into an Academy, and Baranyi had the impression that he enjoyed talking colour theory with her because their conversations started where his explanations to his students ended. They didn’t just talk about colour theory, of course, there was composition and media as well, but Baranyi’s primary interest was in how the Bitrani chose their palettes.

Andulo’s wife, Mira, had been a bit wary of Baranyi to begin with – until the younger woman had confessed her confusion at the numerous types of rice available in the local markets and shops and her complete ignorance of what to do with them. In return for that language and cooking lesson, Baranyi had made Mira a batch of the sweet bean cakes from her paternal grandmother’s recipe, which had led to sweet rice cakes, and then the two women swapping honey candy recipes. Having made a friend of Mira meant that the other Bitrani women in the neighbourhood looked a little more kindly on their northern visitor and that gave Baranyi more people who were willing to let her try her growing Bitrani vocabulary and grammar on.

In the early mornings Baranyi painted watercolours of sunrise over the fields, sometimes with the mountains in the distance. Early morning flocks of birds soared from their resting places and she was learning how to make the quietly clad farm workers a feature of the scene. Calenyan farmers wore brighter colours so it was easier to show them in the fields as a feature, but she had to work to make the Bitrani the feature she expected them to be in her finished works.

In the evenings she sat on the dock near her house and painted sunsets. The challenges of that included moving boats and a much shorter dusk period after the sun went down than she was used to at home. It turned out that they also included the fisherman whose berth was closest to the end of the pier where she set up to do her painting. He was tall and blond, of course, and he wanted to talk while she was working.

This is now followed by Legacy 4.

Conlaging: First Attempt

aldersprig has been having so much fun with her Calenyan conlagging for Lexember that it made me want to try too. Unfortunately I don't have a setting with a burning need for a new language. However, I do have a setting with the bare mention of a language and some vocabulary and grammar. This NSFW series of very short stories written for kink bingo has a few words of Sarachayn in it.

Because I have tried teaching myself a little Latin, it came into the world with a first declension verb, which currently looks like this:

First Declension verbs

Have the root form CVCVC.

Form the to-infinitive as CVCVCus.

Example: parabus – to collar.

1^st person singular                                              parabee

2^nd person – familiar                                          parable

2^nd person subordinate                                       parabi

2^nd person formal/superior                                parabin

3^rd person inhuman plural                                  parabend