#like kijanki which doesn't help with a frog connotation XD

[thunderboltfire]

The side effect of my mother tongue is that I’m automatically rebracketing the word “githyanki”

In Polish, the suffix “-ki” is characteristic for plural nouns.

When it comes to people, there’s a group of female nouns that pretty regularly usually ends with “-ka” includes nationalities and town citizens. So French woman would be Francuzka, pl. Francuzki, Swedish woman would be Szwedka, pl. Szwedki, girl/woman from Warsaw would be warszawianka, pl. warszawianki, it’s pretty consistent, because largely the basic form of nationality is male, and female form uses the formant “-ka” during the word formation.

So by my first instinct, the word “githyanki”:

- sounds like a female noun

- sounds like it’s plural, and the singular form would be githyanka.

Which is not true, because githyanki is one of the names that remain completely unchanged and uninflected in translation and as far as I know it’s a name that can be either singular or plural and it doesn’t change its form at all. However, I can’t get rid of that notion and playing BG3 only reminded me of it.

#It's a textbook definition of rebracketing #take a noun identify the morphemes incorrectly and run with it #There ARE male nouns that also use this formant but the connection seems less automatic for me #It could end with -k then #like ziemniak XD #wianek or koszyk #It could very well be githyanek - githyanka - githyanki #like kijanki which doesn't help with a frog connotation XD #linguistics? #RPG #translation