particle · untranslated, marked in transcription as ⟨d⟩
The duration particle
A grammatical element in Tyrian Pelagine that resists translation; the author treats it as a particle, with reservations.
The duration particle is the survey's term for a recurring element in Tyrian utterance whose grammatical function is unclear and whose semantic content appears to be temporal — but in a sense the human language has no clean word for. The author transcribes it as ⟨d⟩ and resists translating it into any of the obvious English candidates.
Why not for, during, or while
Each of those English prepositions binds an event to an interval. The duration particle does not appear to do that. It appears, instead, to predicate something of an interval directly — to mark the interval as having a property — without saying what the property is. A rough analogue might be the way some human languages mark evidentiality: a piece of grammar that says something about the relation of the speaker to the utterance, rather than about the utterance's content.
Why not invent a word for it
Because the author has tried, twice, and the invention has each time failed to survive contact with a text in which the particle appears more than three times. The convention now is to leave the particle untranslated, mark it in transcription, and trust the reader to do less work than a confident translation would have them do.
See also
Pelagine duration — the author's gloss of the related concept, kept separate from the particle.