Isian, as we have seen before, is spoken by a culture that tends more towards the old-fashioned. It’s not the highly corporate environment of the West, nor the planned, centralized systems common in the East. It’s its own thing, really, a kind of land out of time.
Lucky for us, that makes things easier. We can look at the basic terms below (I’ll assume you can follow along), but I’ll pick out a few that have more nuanced meanings.
First up, masca, “to trade”, is a kind of catch-all. It’s intended more for the economic type of trading, a generic term for buying, selling, bartering, etc. That’s why “business” is translated as the derived noun mascanas. The Isian word might be better considered as “to do business with”.
“Cheap” and “expensive”, dib and gowan respectively, follow the style of other large/small pairs by having distinctive vowels: the high, front vowel i is characteristic of “small” things in many languages. “Poor” and “rich”, on the other hand, might seem backwards, but this could mean that the quality being measured here is poverty rather than wealth. Or it’s just happenstance. That’s a more likely explanation.
Next up, cosen is “money” when used as a mass noun. As a count noun, however, it means something closer to “price” or “amount”. (The difference is that count nouns take articles and quantifiers, while mass nouns don’t.)
And then we come to ama. It’s a bit of an oddity in Isian. It’s strictly translated as “to own”, and it does have an element of possession as its primary connotation. But it’s different from the simpler fana “to have”, because it carries a secondary meaning: the object being owned has monetary value to its owner.
Word list
- business: mascanas
- cheap: dib
- cost: chake
- expensive: gowan
- generous: nemis (“generosity”: nemiros)
- greed: sumat
- job: bor
- money: cosen
- poor: umar
- rich: irdes
- to accept: achine
- to borrow: mante
- to buy: tochi
- to gain: elge
- to get: gana
- to keep: ifa
- to lend: hente
- to lose (possession of): pulo
- to offer: acate
- to own: ama
- to receive: rano
- to reject: nuyana
- to sell: dule
- to steal: toya
- to store: odaga
- to trade: masca
- value: luros