Biweekly Telephone Game v3 (792)

Activity

This is a game of borrowing and loaning words! To give our conlangs a more naturalistic flair, this game can help us get realistic loans into our language by giving us an artificial-ish "world" to pull words from!

The Telephone Game will be posted every Monday and Friday, hopefully.

Rules

  1. Post a word in your language, with IPA and a definition.

Note: try to show your word inflected, as it would appear in a typical sentence. This can be the source of many interesting borrowings in natlangs (like how so many Arabic words were borrowed with the definite article fossilized onto it! algebra, alcohol, etc.)

  1. Respond to a post by adapting the word to your language's phonology, and consider shifting the meaning of the word a bit!

  2. Sometimes, you may see an interesting phrase or construction in a language. Instead of adopting the word as a loan word, you are welcome to calque the phrase -- for example, taking skyscraper by using your language's native words for sky and scraper. If you do this, please label the post at the start as Calque so people don't get confused about your path of adopting/loaning.


Last Time...

High Dwarven by u/ThyTeaDrinker

flonkjœ /ˈflɒŋ.kjœ/ J-stem, genitive: flonkrem

n. shield, defensive barrier

———

Kjôd grîfi flonkring grîdel gâfki kâlna eng kîfren.

/kjɒːd ˈgriː.vi ˈflɒŋ.kriŋg ˈgriː.dɛl ˈgɑːf.ki kɑːl.nɑ ɛŋg kiː.frɛn/

ten warrior-nom.plur shield-com.plur bridge-acc.sing able-future.3P defend-infinitive without struggle-acc.sing

Ten warriors with shields will be able to defend the bridge without difficulty.

——-
Additional dialectal information:

Northwestern Dwarven: flonky /flɔŋ.ky/

Eastern Dwarven: flonċö /flɒn.tʃœ/


Hope you have a good start to your week, amigos

Peace, Love, & Conlanging ❤️

Posted Aug 3, 2026, 2:02 PM UTC

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