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Lexember 16 for Nómàk’óla


Drawing of a nisse stirring skillet full of diced apples on a stove. A quarter cup and jar of brown sugar are sitting on top of the stove.
Lexember 16

Àllímelassipépákkasìŋúlauno. Aáèkòèwétipéfóhopwi. “Measure 1/4 cup of brown sugar. Stir it in with the apples.”

When creating measurement words, I had created a noun for roughly 1/4 cup: ŋúlauno, which comes from the word for “ladle” (which is an instrumental noun form built on the verb root meaning “to dip”).

For “brown sugar”, I decided to borrow mélassi (“molasses”) from Finnish and compound it with “grain” to create a compound similar to sugar (which is a compound of “grain” + “sap”). The final form is ellímelassi, where the initial epenthetic e only occurs when following a consonant.

I also created a word for “to stir”. Its root is ópwi “to swirl” (as in water swirling in a little eddy), and the fóh- prefix is the causative derivation.