Re: Vocabulary Creation

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Kua Sai <GreenDragon2988@A...> wrote:
> Hey, Chiming in with a question on vocabulary
> design. How would I go about desiging a lexicon for my language? I
> would like this to be language that derives the terms from roots,
> rather then just randomly generate bunchs from a computer. I really
> can't understand the technique behind this process and would be very
> grateful if someone would go through and creat a few words with me,
> just so I can catch on to the details. Sorry to be Bothersome about
> stupid things! Thanks A Bunch!
I essentially cheated.  Praxian (Denamorain) is written for a
fictional world with a great deal of background aready extant.  I
pretended that place names and deity names were derived from roots
that could be used for developing other words.  For example,
"gagarthek" can either mean "a desert wind" (masculine gender) or
"disruption, disorder, misfortune" (foreign gender).  This comes from
the deity "Gagarth", who is the god of dust devils and a
mischief-maker.  "Airanth" can mean cow or woman (like "wahanth" can
mean bull or man).  Airitha is the goddess of cows and women's secrets
and Waha the god of bulls and men's secrets.  So, I decided that
"air-" was a root referring to "female" and "wah-" referred to "male",
but only in very general senses.  The world has a species called the
"morokanth", who are associated with mystical "darkness" and are
technically "human" in that they speak and keep herds.  So I decided
that "-kanth" referred to "that which speaks/that which can
understand".  The "k" got dropped when forming the "modern" words.  Of
course, this only went so far, so I have had to fill in holes.  There
is a local city called "Pavis", so I decided that, as far as these
nomadic herdsmen were concerned "bav-" was taken into the language to
mean "foolish, idle, silly" (neuter gender) or "vile, stinking, wrong"
(foreign gender).

Inventing a few suffixes, I got "bavekan" meaning "foolishness"
(neuter gender) or "crime/transgression" (foreign gender).

Now, a construction like "felenpenîraflíramis" is really involved.
While it is technically a "word" in Praxian, it is actually a complete
phrase meaning roughly "him into her yurt" with "yurt" actually being
composed of the terms for "herd", "skin", and "circle".  As far as a
Praxian is concerned, this is a simple turn of phrase, made up of very
short bits that every child knows.  It's only those ignorant
foreigners who think of it as one long word.

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