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Reminder: feel free to ask questions about the language, since my brief explanations aren't always clear, or if you want to know how some word could be derived; this also helps develop it.

My posting on Sika is highly fragmented, since the main way I develop it at the moment is to stress test it against various /r/conlangs challenges. However, I think I'd like making posts of varying frequency going into more detail.

It's worth noting that since modifiers are so much more common than nouns, I don't tend to care about the part of speech involved in translation; that's generally safely indicated by the number of hyphens, since the most common types of phrases are distinguished by their input count; they all have one output.

Also, -r- works by reversing the effect of whatever word immediately follows; e.g. it binds only to -ko in -rkoko, and while -ko gives a situational where the given thing is present, -rko gives something (often vague) that would give the given thing after applying -ko, i.e. a thing that is present in the given situational.

Daily Derivation #13 ["unlucky"] - kukerfife

I was actually looking back through that series to find something Sika could handle in its current state. However, the explanation I gave is a little thin.

kukerfife - the effect / affected (-fe) of something bad (kukerfi, something which tends (-r-fi) to destroy / make things (ku) not be (-ke)).

In other words, it is something affected by something negative, which derives as kukerfi. I figured this is a good translation since "unlucky" isn't usually used with a probabilistic nuance (and probability is only just starting to emerge in the language with the tentative -cii, "likely"). One would say that something is unlucky to be affected by something bad, and to be affected by something bad is unlucky. There are a couple details I've ignored here, though.

The first is how kukerfi means "bad"/"bad thing" in the first place. The reasoning is similar to that for kurfi (see below), it more or less literally means "helper to cause nothingness" (i.e. destructive). It's a bit clearer than kurfi, though.

The second is how -fe means both "effect" and "affected". The reason is simple: something that is affected by an event is, in part, an effect of it, though it is mixed with a number of other effects that allow it to retain its identity. This nuance between "effect" and "affect" isn't much cared for in Sika (or even in English sometimes), so -fe, being a short word, covers both for utility.

May be used as a modifier by adding --ci, roughly meaning "and".

If you've read the recent introductory grammar post, you have a better idea of what this means; since --ci is a conjunction, it takes two inputs, and if it appears immediately after kukerfife, that gives a net 1:1 phrase -kukerfifeci, a modifier.

Daily Derivation #59 ["triangle" ] - kuhirtaokonarkai

At this point, the series has changed gears to where participants derive new words from a given root, but I still was just deriving the given word, since that was long enough.

Sika can barely handle "triangle" at this point: kuhirtaokonarkai - something limited by (-r-kai) three of (-kona) a unit of (-r-tao) the location of (-hi) something (ku).

Breaking it down a bit, kuhirtao means "point(s)" (more or less lit. location units), and -konarkai describes an object bounded by the given thing(s); since the vertices are essentially the least included things in a polygon, I figured they'd make the most sense to describe its limits. Of course, I could just add a word like -poligon and have triangle be kukonapoligon or something, but that wouldn't be using just preexisting words.

Since they aren't yet fully in the language (but rather part of the working set), -kai gives the "limits" of a thing, i.e. what barely does/doesn't qualify (like topological boundary), -tao gives a locally-translationally-symmetric arrangement of a thing, i.e. a tesselation, and -hi gives location. Notably, though, both of these are inverted in the derived word.

Since kuhi refers to a generic location, we can consider that location as being made of points in a way which could be composed by -tao, so -rtao lets us get those points: kuhirtao.

It should be made clear that -konarkai gives something limited by three of the given things, since -kona comes before -rkai, the part that actually gets from the limits to the thing itself.

Also, while I'd probably understand -poligon if I saw it used, as mentioned, it's not really part of the lexicon; I'd much rather have one or two words that decompose it, coming out the same length, that can be used for other things.

"What are some non-intuitive derivations in your conlang?" - kurfi

This is actually good (no pun intended), so I'll just reproduce it here:

"good" derives as kurfi /kuɹ̠̊fi/, which more or less literally means "something that has as its (-r-) tendency (-fi) something (ku)". It can mean "constructive"/"productive"/"a tool"/"helpful"/"enabling", which is despite appearances a precise sense of the much vaguer "good" in English.

The key word/suffix in the derivation is -fi, since ku really just means "a thing" and -r- inverts the effect of the next component. -fi takes something and gives what it has a tendency to do, i.e. what it does or would do if it isn't impeded by something. Since tools make a task much easier once employed, one can think of them as having a tendency to perform that task, but when they aren't used they don't really do anything. (In case this isn't apparent, this doesn't have a particularly good English translation as far as I know.) So applying -r- gives -rfi, sort of like "helper for -", and kurfi means "good"/"helper".