Continuing on with the misadventures in proffering insults by way of a dead
conlang (i.e. Novial), let's review what we discovered in the first part, and
then move on to something barely more challenging.
In the first part, we learned that me is "I"; that odia is "hate", and vu is
singular "you". (With vus the plural.) Thus we can say in Novial, me odia vu,
or "I hate you". Or we could say, to a group of neo-Nazis, perhaps, "me odia
vus".
We also learned that you negate verbs by prefixing them with non. If you're
reading this, then me non odia vu. :)
This is really basic, but it's a good starting point, and we've learned a
couple of important things about how the Novial language works, or worked. But
where do we go from here?
The next-simplest sort of insult might be something like "you bite" or "you
suck" or "you blow", but I sort of feel like these, at least the last two, are
very much back into the realm of insult-by-social-convention, which I'm trying
to avoid. But being bitten is unpleasant no matter what culture you're from
(spare me the emails about vampire erasure, kids) and probably fairly
understandable as a bad thing, so I guess we can go over that real quick.
Vu (or vus, if we're speaking of more than one person) is still "you". Morda
is the verb for bite. Vu morda. Morda me. (Non morda me!) Just in case you're
wondering, yep, that appears to be correct; it's the same word for "I" and
"me" both.
While certainly useful, we haven't really learned anything new from this. So
let's remedy that.
In Novial, es is the word for, well, is. And are. (We'll get to past and future
tenses and all that crap later, hopefully.) Technically I guess it's the
present-tense form of "be".
Idiote is the noun for "idiot", and "idioti" is Novial for "idiotic". Confused?
Vu es non idioti. :)
But wait, there's more! Now that we're dealing with nouns, we must briefly
address... gender. Novial indicates gender with the endings of nouns, in a
manner that should be intuitive to anyone who understands a little, say,
Spanish. So "idiote" is gender-neutral, but you can also have a male idiot - un
idioto - or a female one - una idiota. For the most part this is only important
when you're dealing with ideas like aunt/uncle, brother/sister, etc. I'd guess
that 95% of the time the neutral form is perfectly fine. Since this is all
about insulting people, I suppose you could try to cause offense by trying to
deliberately misgender someone, or call someone a little girl when you know
they identify as a guy, or something like that. But I'm going to try not to
do that in this series of posts, because it's lazy, and because it's honestly
pretty stupid. Also, using the wrong suffix is just, well, wrong, on purely
technical grounds, and I'm also opposed to that, on principle. It might well
be a dead language nobody speaks, but that's no reason to use it incorrectly.
And just as a bonus, ma is Novial for "but", which allows us to craft our first
halfway-complicated sentence in Novial: Vu es idioti, ma me non odia vu. :)
(Also, double bonus, e is "and". So since this is supposed to be about
insults... vus es idioti, e me odia vus.) (Note that idioti here doesn't get
an s and become plural; y'all are idiotic, not y'all are idiotics. But we
would say vus es idiotes - y'all are idiots - or me odia idiotos - I hate
idiots of a male variety.)
Hopefully you've enjoyed that. More to come, probably, maybe.
