Good morning interweb! Let's worldbuild. Word building: the process of constructing a language's vocabulary or in linguist's speak: its lexicon. There is no "one correct way" of constructing words but I like to: Create basic root words, run them through a derivation system, and then log them alphabetically in a spreadsheet. Rinse and repeat. Systematically translating the English dictionary, one for one, would lead to an incoherent English clonelang. So, to avoid this, I create words as I need them, when I'm writing or worldbuilding. Like, let's say I'm mapping and I need a word for river, stream, brook, etc. First thing I do is construct a basic root word for the concept of "river." My language's phonotactics allow for a max syllable structure of (C)(C)V(C)(C). But I tend to choose something smaller for my roots to allow for future expansion. Let's say, CVC. I then go to my phonemic inventory and begin selecting sounds. To reduce my options, I try to think symbolically. What sounds remind me of running water? For me, that's fricatives, liquids, and nasals, and vowels like /a/ and /o/ as they feel deep and wide like a river. Compare /a/ and /o/ to /i/. More on sound symbolism later. Anyways, with my choices limited, I start mashing together sounds until I get a basic root I'm happy with: /nam/. Also, be aware that natlangs don't distribute their sounds evenly. We should try to replicate something like this in our conlangs. Don't keep using the most obscure sounds in your inventory just because you think they're cool. Next step is to hit up all the dictionaries I can and translate "river" back and forth through as many languages as possible. I constantly try to do the opposite of English. Where English has several words that exist in the same semantic space, I try to combine them. And, where English has several words with vastly different meanings, I try to create a different word for each entry. In this case, "river" is quite singular in its semantic reach, so dictionary studies is an important step to extend the semantic scope a bit. Here's some of the interesting goodies Google translate spat at me. Weird stuff in red. Bearing all this in mind, I now think of a river as a... ...stream of water or other viscous substances of several different sizes, flowing in a channel... ...something that moves... ...something that meanders... ...a natural road... ...something that brings fertility and abundance... ...and perhaps a metaphor for time and or consciousness. Time to hard bake some of this goodness into my lexicon with a bit of derivation. So we can build a family of related words, a derivational morphology, that'll take our root and turn it into multiple other words. Here's my demo derivation system. Next, I need to differentiate all those "nams." By far the easiest way of doing this is affixation. You know, prefixes. Or suffixes. Let's go with suffixes. Next, I need to assign some nouns based on the root plus the various derivation combos in our list. So, "nam" is simply my root concept, "river". A large, natural stream of water flowing in a channel to the sea, a lake, or another river. A place where you'd find rivers would be a river valley, floodplain. Notice how I'm doubling up the meanings in a non-English way. A river animal could be a fish. Every now and then try to get some cultural stuff in the lexicon by adding an informal or colloquial meanings. So, "namai" could also refer to anything that lives in the water. Namai namai namai, namai namai. A collection of rivers could be a river system, a network of rivers. Colloquially, it could refer to any point where two or more bodies of water meet and mingle. By extension then, it could also refer to the mingling of people, goods, ideas, transportation, money, etc. that would occur at the trade hotspots, located primarily at river intersections. So, traffic and trade. And, the river as an abstract concept is where I brought in the whole river as a metaphor for life-thing, from earlier. "Life-river" is the idea that life can, or should be lived like the river. Navigating around impediments with ease in a kinda "hakuna matata" fashion. Acknowledging that life has it's calm and choppy parts but ultimately, we all flow to the sea. By extension, it also refers to the irreversible passage of time. The river ends up in the sea, so too the life-river ends up in the sea of the afterlife. It's a sorta "yin-yang" worldview that my culture has and, it's my attempt at hard-baking even more cultural stuff into my lexicon. Interestingly, many types of affixation exist. There's the well known prefix and suffix, but also infix, circumfix, interfix, duplifix, transfix, simulfix, suprafix, and disfix. Links in the doo-blee-doo. So, if we're feeling adventurous we could circumfix river-place. The river is literally contained within the river valley. Or we could infix river animal. The fish is literally contained within the river. A nice way of bringing a little flavour in, but in general, try to be systematic. Next up, my language has verbs so I can add verbal forms to some, or all of the nouns. So, the verb "nam" is riffing off the flowing nature of rivers. It kinda means to flow, like one could flow, "nam" to work in the morning, and flow "nam" back home again at the end of the day. With "namai" to use the English meaning of "to fish" as in, "He fished for his ID" but let's think outside the box. Perhaps to fish, to "namai" could mean to prep your fish stall for market. Kinda like to fish up, if you will. And, by extension, it could've morphed into setting up any stall, at any market. The cabbage vendor fishes up, "namais" for the vedge market. And the rest are just straight verbal versions of their respective nouns. Now my language also has adjectives, so I could just assign one to each entry but just for fun, and to demo some more techniques, let's do this. Here, I added a suffix with a consonant. Affixation isn't only for vowels. And collected all the meanings of the first set into the word "namir". The most interesting which I think is this guy. In English, fishy has negative connotations, but here I wanted it to be positive, so in my culture, a "namir" person is a free spirited type who understands their "nami", and "namis" well. Kinda like the personification of the above six entries Now, although contentious, one could make a case that front vowels imply smallness, softness, or high pitch. Whilst low and back vowels imply largeness, lowness, and low pitch. At least in English, this kinda holds, but it also kinda doesn't. Either way, let's use this particular sound symbolism as inspiration for more derivation. The vowel change in "nim" gives us a smaller version of "nam", so a small river and also, the small rivers of the body. And "namnam" is a reduplication of "nam", hinting at a larger structure. I left out the verb here, 'cuz you really don't have to have perfect 1:1 noun verb correlations. And that's kind of it, going forward I could start forming longer words by tacking on, or concatenating other words to "nam". And every time I create a new root, I can run it through the same set of derivations. Therefore, it's really important you choose a derivation system that is general, and can be applied to most roots. In The Language Construction Kit, Rosenfelder suggests this set, which is a great list and I highly recommend using it, or using something very similar. Now, there is an obvious drawback to derivational morphology, and that's homogeneity. A lot of your language will begin to look really similar really quickly, and words can start to compound really fast. So, it's something that needs to be managed, but this is a price I gladly pay for consistency and ease of execution, but it's not for everyone. So, let me know in comments your preferred word-building method. But for now, word-building: done!! And logged. Really important to stay organized, you will thank me later. Good morning interweb! So the word-building method that I outlined in this video is largely drawn from two sources. Mark Rosenfelder and his Language Construction Kit. It's a great book, links in the doo-blee-doo. You should totally get it, and a redditer who goes by the name of u/Askadia. I came across this person's post a few months ago, and there's just really good quality conlanging fodder, so thank you to The Language Construction Kit, and thank you to Askadia. Links in the doo-blee-doo, you can go check all of them out. Now the last thing I wanted to say is on the subject of sound symbolism. I don't want anyone going away from this video thinking that natlangs necessarily use sound symbolism. It's more a thing I like to do just to impose creative restraints on myself. On the flip side as well, don't go too heavily down the sound symbolism route and make your languages like super onomatopoeic. It's just not going to work very well. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed the video. Thank you SO MUCH for watching. Rao!
Excellent video! I totally do this and didn't realize it was a bona fide technique.
Oh my god! You're back?
This is awesome! I’m partial to writing urban fantasy but this makes me want to make my own fantasy language.
This is simply an amazing video and thanks for publishing!
He is alive!
Thank you for your videos. I created a lunar calendar for my world using your guide, one for each of the two moons :)
I'll definitely be checking this one out!
A fan of Matt Colville, I see.
Always great to see another video, Edgar!
Actually much of this sounds really correct from my experience of translating ancient greek. I am able to figure out the meaning of a word without the need to look into my lexicon by just looking at the root of it and to piece it together.
Again, loved the video! (Also when is the next episode of the podcast coming out?)
Honestly, I get in such a rut when it comes to naming things, I've been wanting to make conlangs just for things like that- I like the parts where you put together a grammar, but I get so overwhelmed when it comes to creating a lexicon and it never sounds natural. I really like this video- especially the advice at the beginning about building words as you need them. I think part of my being overwhelmed is me trying to create an entire language in one day.
That was awesome! I’ve not even considered any of this stuff before, so cool.