Missing words...

[Kahina Draig'alor]

Su'cuy vode,

So I've noticed a few words I feel should exist in Mando'a but don't

Most obvious are words like: pistol, rifle, gun, carbine

Although it would be possible to smash together words like short and blaster to make skotah'tracy'uur which would work for pistol, or carbine, but it's neither specific nor compact enough to be all that useful for a language that is supposed to be more efficient for military conversing

Alternatively we could use gaan'tracy'uur for pistol, which is more specific as it is literally hand blaster, but is again unwieldy (pardon the pun)

Similarly one translation for rifle could be munit'tracy'uur, meaning long blaster, but again it's unwieldy

Skotah'munit could work as a word for carbine, being a shortened long arm, or munit'skotah, being a lengenthed pistol (think C96/luger carbines)

Perhaps if there were a shorter word for weapon, much like how 'arm' is used in English, that would solve the issue. Any suggestion as to what this word could be?

[Vlet Hansen]

Well, that gets tricky because you start running into a decision you need to make. How much will you be strictly constructive, only mashing together existing words, versus generating new ones? There's a lot of people who just decided to make their own words, but then we've got a bunch of dialects and people might not even be able to communicate...

As an example, I actually really like the terms ravik and kivik for rifle and pistol respectively, taken from the Cuun Joha stuff. They sound right and they're very convenient. However, others wouldn't recognize it, and Cuun Joha has a LOT of weird and bad decisions made in it, so I don't adopt it entirely. Tal'jair's stuff is also great, but again only works for people who've read it.

Trying to strictly combine existing words eliminates that problem, though I've noticed it's often not as clear as we want it to be, but the words you get from that are almost always waaaaaay too long to be useful in conversation.