Finally moving on

This has been a draft post for a while now…

I think it might be time to go…

… To somewhere other than this rusty ole wordpress!!!

I’m moving over to a snazzy new platform at my own little domain: adventures-in-esperanto.com

There you’ll even find a little AI app for practicing Esperanto that I’ve built. It’s for roleplaying random scenarios with generated characters, solving mysteries, going on adventures and more. Though you’ll need to get a pay-as-you-go Open AI key to use it, since it’s built on Open AI’s GPT chat model.

I’ll transfer and spruce up my old posts as I get time and amuse myself by generating appropriately weird / weirdly appropriate AI images for each post that I port over – so hopefully even old posts have a new life to them!

I’d love for you to subscribe over there, so you’ll catch when I post more content there. Thanks for all those who’ve commented & liked over the years – it warms my heart!

^{Image generated by a prompt to DALL·E 3}

A whiffle of chatter

Generated using a prompt to DALL·E 3

Apparently, you might consider “whiffle” and “chatter” to be frequentatives of “whiff” and “chat” respectively!

A frequentative is a form of word used to express repeated or habitual action. So “chatter” is repeated/habitual/ongoing “chat”.

In English, they are most usually formed with an “-le” or “-er” suffix, and you can see a bunch of examples on wikipedia. But the suffixes are not productive, i.e. slapping one of them onto the end of a word doesn’t necessarily generate a frequentative or even a term that anyone will understand. Sometimes, the relation between the two forms is even a bit lost to time.

Though I feel there is something pleasingly quaint about the English frequentatives. Crumble, whiffle, clamber, nuzzle, sniffle. Why do they all sound so tremulous… so wobbly?

Frequaintatives?

The closest I can think of in Esperanto is the “-ad” suffix, which denotes repeated, lasting, or habitual action:

Babili, babilado

To chat, chatter

But that doesn’t sound very wobbly – more like business as usual. It’s got the advantage that everyone’s going to be able to get your meaning, pretty much no matter what word you stick the suffix on, but it’s definitely got me wondering about how to introduce some delicate wobbliness.

Is it sufficient to use a diminutive? The suffix “-et” reduces a thing to its small or diminutive form.

pluvi, pluveti

To rain, to drizzle

“To rain” already implies duration so I don’t think we need “-ad” above… but perhaps a combined “-adet” or “- etad” suffix (depending on whether the original word must be diminufied or made continual first) would make sense? Perhaps the slight unusualness of the construction would be enough to feel wobbly?

frapi, frapeti, frapetadi

To hit, to pat, to patter?

Or perhaps:

Fuzi, fuzado, fuzadeto

To fizz, fizzing, fizzle?

Well it makes sense to me.