Conlang: How to Make Good Words

how to make good words in my view for all languages whether natural or constructed the most important thing about it is ultimately the words of the language you can have a delicious phonology delightful phone tactics a darling grammar daring conceptual metaphors dazzling pragmatics and disarming paralinguistic features but without words without a lexicon all that is merely scaffolding and for anyone who's been inside an actual building we know well that scaffolding alone is simply not enough so how does one create words and good words at that i'll break this down to three parts choosing word sounds choosing words meanings and extending what you have what follows is not a blueprint mind you just my thoughts on the matter brewed from my own brain and some external sources listed below for further reading let's crack on choosing the sounds of the words one just do it some people have an innate ability to just coin words off the top of their heads and some can do this for every word in their conlangs lexicon and that's amazing but i can't do that so i rely on other means number two use a generator this method some might consider cold but it is effective you can decide on the phonotactic constraints of your conlang either x nihilo or maybe after analyzing some of those words you invented on the fly then plug them into a generator and generate as many words as needed in my conlanging career i started with the zompest generator then moved to awkwards and currently i use lexifer which handily you can now use online instead of having to teach yourself python like i did the advantage of generators is that unlike your brain they never get tired and importantly create outputs that are both diverse and constrained if you needed to invent 100 lexical items right now chances are many would look really similar to each other while others would look too different and wouldn't seem to belong to the set generators can create aesthetic unity but you need not be slave to them as you are always at liberty to keep or reject any part of the generated output three invent or obscure natural languages this is one of my go-to's take an outline word flip it around and smush it into the phonotactic constraints of your conlang let's suppose i need a generic word for uncle without going into the intricacies of kinship and the diversity of evuncularity i can take the russian word for uncle jaja convert it into ipa reverse the sounds or maybe i died and then scrunch it into the phonotactic constraints of saying and we get adjacent or we might reverse the russian orthography first before putting it into the ipa which would yield the adjad which in the phonetic constraints of biatumi would become yatyat and bob another method i employ is to take a word of related or opposite meaning and then reverse it say i want for blue a related word in english is sky so i might reverse and fiddle it to yaks or x or maintain some orthographic influence with oox honestly the x is the limit another another method i like to use is instead of taking full words from an atlang extract the root instead let's say i want a word for dappled there's a proto-indo-european root prank which we believe meant scatter and which by the way gave us both sprinkle and freckle reversing gives knurp and putting it into beard kumi with the adjectival ending yields knurby sometimes they even borrow silly roots from controversial languages like altaic because why not you can also blend words together from matlanks but the bottom line is have fun with this and experiment and play also though i've referenced natlangs in this section a lot that's only because the resources for them are readily available but all these methods can apply to taking words from conlangs too four easter eggs it's quite nice to take the names of things and people you like or dislike looking at you leonard and make them into words i know david j peterson did this as in dothraki the word edinat meaning to be good comes from his wife's name aaron and the word okay meaning friend was the name of his cat i made the word for to fill with dread i wonder where that came from five random inspiration this method is a bit like the just do it method but instead of inventing a word out of nothing apart from shia labeouf's charisma you look to the real world to do the first few steps for you four ways i like is typos scrabble movie credits and license plates when i type i never use autocorrect so sometimes i type hastily and in my haste aura upon horrors i make mistakes but these mistakes are occasionally highly pleasing to me so i'll note it down for a conlang word before correcting it playing scrabble is great because you literally shuffle letters around and i'm happy to admit that when i'm struggling in the game i have an enormous faculty for inventing novel words based on the tiles in my hand most movies or films nowadays have hundreds of people in the credits and you're bound to find distinctive names to co-op or apply the natlang inversion technique to them license plates for which i can only speak of the british ones and in three letters walking down my street this morning there's ute mdx and vzm so i might coin words like sometimes i listen to the radio in languages i don't understand and pick things out of that the bottom line is though you can find inspiration pretty much anywhere in summary to choose the sounds of words some ways you can do are one just do it two use a generator three muddler matlan four add in easter eggs or five get random inspiration from the real world words you actually need now once you have some sounds for words it's worth asking what do i need words for this is where you need to consider the end goal of your conlang if it is for a fantasy novel chances are you will not need a word for download microwave but you probably will need sword and forest many at the start of a conlang decide to create a set of basic words and many turn to the swadesh list for this my advice don't do this the swadish list was developed as part of glotta chronology where it was believed that certain basic words would resist changing or being erased by loans of supplement and as part of lexico statistics to assess the genealogical relatedness of languages neither of these are particularly useful for creating a lexicon and the swadesh list and its brethren like the leipzig jakarta list have other flaws one by having separate entries it can create the presupposition that certain words are unrelated like die and kill in english die and kill are obviously distinct but in some languages kill might be the causative form of die or die might be a detransitivized form of kill 2. it presupposes certain plurality distinctions and pronouns and disregards other potential pronominal systems three it presupposes certain kinship structures and relations and four you probably don't need a word for liver or laos and if you do you don't need the swadesh list to tell you that having said all that it does have some interesting things in it to think about but do not think that your language is somehow defunct or incomplete because you do not translate the whole swadesh list but what to do well there are two things you can do first make your own list of words you need and second translate stuff translating is the single best thing you can do because it gets you to generate vocabulary while also thinking about grammar choose things to translate that are relevant to your goal you can pluck from prose poetry your own writing scripture movies and even textbooks and you'll find that the basic words are the ones that will naturally crop up again and again it is a bit of a conlang tradition to translate the tower of babel story but in my opinion that's actually quite a hard piece to translate you need to consider how verbs of motion work reciprocal constructions imperatives relative clauses if clauses and so on so by all means start with something easier and at this mention of translation i must discuss something else dealings with meanings while it may seem that a word simply means what it means it is always worth thinking about the meaning carefully because a word can have many meanings according to context both the context of the utterance and the context of the words around it and because there is rarely a perfect overlapping meaning of two words from different languages let's take the english word man and say that in our conlang examplish the word from man is nagu we could translate jim is a man with simple juxtaposition as jim nagu but if we were to translate the lament oh man it is superbly unlikely that we would render it as the words while ostensibly the same have vastly different meanings in these contexts and as we all well know the proper translation would be ah where shazbat is the examplish word for bucket or let's take the english phrase are you getting this if you were in a lesson and your maths teacher said are you getting this they are asking if you understand but if you're in a book shop and your lover holds up a copy of semaphore made fun and says are you getting this this is a query about whether or not you intend to purchase the book the word get gets even better though based on what words are around it get on get on it get it on get with it get with jeremy get off with jeremy get off it get it off get over it get it over with get up it get it up get down get down from partying on the roof or get down partying on the roof or take the english word no the following sentence is perfectly fine i know leonard and i know he's a charsbot now translating this into french gives us scone leonard a jose kiletan you'll notice the french uses two different verbs is used with people while see is used with facts the scope of the english no encompasses both kone and se is english more efficient is french more precise i do not think these questions matter what matters is recognizing that different languages cut up the multicolored multi-dimensional cake of life in different ways so you should be mindful of where you make your slices and you should be mindful that this cake is a weird one because how you slice it changes its flavor if you slice the cake the same way as your mother tongue you end up creating what is called a relax where the lexicon overlaps exactly with your mother tongue most conlangers find this undesirable but if you want to do it go ahead just be aware in summary for choosing what words you need one keep your goals in mind two make a list of the words you need and three translate relevant stuff extending what you have let us suppose you have some words now there are a couple of ways you might use them as a base to expand your lexicon the first method is using derivational morphology let us imagine i am inventing english and all i have created so far are three words the verbs write sing and dance i want to derive nouns from these verbs specifically nouns that do the verb so i invent the morpheme er adding that to my verbs gives me writer singer and dancer so with one morpheme i've doubled my words if you have a robust system of derivational morphology for deriving new words from already existing words or roots then you can expand your lexicon quite quickly but you do not need derivational morphology for every conceivable meaning or transmutation arabic has the ma prefix to make nouns of place masjid the respective roots of these words is kuttaba to do with writing to do with cooking to do with the west and sajada to do with bowing and worship we could imagine english having an equivalent morpheme with the suffix place to yield right place cook place west place and prey place but instead we have desk kitchen sunset and mosque i won't go through the etymologies fully but in brief desk comes from the medieval latin descartes from the latin discourse meaning platter or dish kitchen ultimately comes from the latin word coco a cook sunset pretty obviously comes from sun and set and mosque is a straight line from the arabic via french and spanish we do have words that end in place like workplace and fireplace but you cannot make words ending in place that will be immediately understood this brings us to the idea of whether the derivational morphology is productive or not if not productive new words cannot be formed with that particular morpheme or construction if it is productive new words can be coined easily like the error in english is giving us such gems as blogger and youtuber instead of the infinitely more cumbersome one who blogs or one who serves the algorithm it is worth noting as well the difference between bound morphemes and unbound morphemes you can go hence and look at the details but the gist is that bound morphemes cannot occur on their own like er and they must attach to a word or root and cannot exist in isolation and unbound morphemes are the opposite of that in terms of deciding on the shape and sound of your derivational morphology assuming you are not designing a template and root system like languages in the semitic family have you can just choose sounds you like or make compounds using full words most morphemes have full lexical item antecedents meaning they used to be words in their own right but many become so eroded through phonological change that it is impossible to tell what they were originally wiktionary has a surprisingly good etymology section if you're interested in the origins of some morphemes the second method to extend what you have is taking advantage of the linguistic phenomena of re-analysis you may have come across this in phonology where the boundary of words is reanalyzed in english this process gave us words like adder and apron which were formerly madder and apron a nada and an apron were re-analyzed as an adder and an apron easy to hear why but phonetics aside this can also apply to re-analyzing morpheme boundaries within a word the word burglar originally comes from the latin burgare to break open and the word sculptor comes from the latin verb school pere meaning to carve but both sound like they have that error ending we have come across so we'll re-analyze as burgle plus er and sculpt plus er allowing us to extract those two verbs we alone love burgle and sculpt this type of re-analysis is called back formation note do not focus on the orthography it is all about the sounds if a word sounds like it has a certain morpheme it might get re-analyzed as such as i might because this particular english back formation re-analysis did not happen everywhere like with the word doctor you cannot doct someone to good health or can you re-analysis can also create new derivational morphology take the word hamburger in german the language that gave us the word the morphemes are hamburg the city where this food originates and air an associative suffix so together means roughly thing from hamburg but most english speakers do not know german and ham was already a word so we re-analyzed it as ham plus burger and that burger suffix is now used to derive via analogy all sorts of things for patty in burn entities beef burger cheeseburger veggie burger choc gothburger for a conlang this can easily work for loanwords and even native words where sound change has obscured the original morphine boundaries or where the boundaries get reanalyzed anyway the third method of extending what you have is to add more meanings to your words you can do this synchronically meaning from a point of view frozen in time to create what is called polysemy or diachronically from a point of view moving through time to create what is called semantic drift an example in english of the former would be the word handle which has the physical sense of manipulating with the hands as in the phrase handle with care but also a more abstract sense of dealing with or enduring something can you handle the heat an example of the latter would be the word handsome which today means attractive or agreeable to the eye but formally meant fit or appropriate and before that it meant ready at hand or easy to handle looking at foreign dictionaries can give a great sense of the range of meanings or policyme a word might have and looking at etymologies can give you a great sense of semantic drift another thing to do is change a words part of speech as this will normally entail a slight or massive change in meaning take doctor according to the cambridge dictionary doctor as a noun means a person with a medical degree whose job is to treat people who are ill or hurt well doctor as a verb means to change a document in order to deceive people think about the difference between a fire and firing a gun or a fathom as a unit of measurement for depth and fathom meaning to understand or think about deeply these meanings are clearly related but distinct in summary for extending what you have you can use derivational morphology use re-analysis simply add more meanings through polysemy or semantic drift and change your words part of speech well that takes us nearly to the end so in grand summary we have for choosing the sounds of words one just do it two use a generator three invert or obscure nat langs four throw in easter eggs and five get random inspiration for generating word meanings you can firstly make a list or secondly translate things and for extending what you have you can use derivational morphology reanalysis adding more meanings via policemen or semantic drift and changing words parts of speech but also some final tips first don't coin a new word or root every time look back over what you have and see if you can extend meaning derive something or make a compound second don't think that there must be a one-to-one translation for everything and in that vein think about how broad or narrow the scope of the meaning of a particular word is third the more common a word is the shorter it tends to be but this is only a tendency not a rule and lastly always be aware of context this is by no means exhaustive and i'm sure there is plenty i have left out but that is all i will mention for now but if there is interest i might make a further video in this vein perhaps touching on things like phonosemantic matching calcs ideophones blendings and clippings quantitative meaning versus denotative meaning and markedness endocentric compounds and exocentric compounds synecdoche and metonymy hypotonomy and hypernomy phatic expressions euphemisms and dysphemisms conceptual metaphors fossilization and idioms in the meantime check out the resources in the description i hope you enjoyed this and found it in some way helpful and as always don't like and don't subscribe

Channel: Lichen the Fictioneer

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Length: 20min 47sec (1247 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 18 2022