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Re: Creating words

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Wednesday, January 16, 2002, 20:14
En réponse à Joe Hill <joe@...>:

> Can anyone help? > > I've got a fairly complete lang, grammatically and phonologically, but I > seem to get stuck at the word creating bit. I've translated the Babel > text, and I've got all the words in there, but I never seem to be able > to get any further. Do I translate more, or do I invent words out of > thin air? >
Well, it all depends on your character and your way of conlanging. In short, there's no universal way of building vocabulary. Some people translate like hell, with the risk of having the semantics of the original language get into the target lang (a way to get around it is to translate from plenty of different languages, not only from English). Some people take a list like Basic English or Swadesh, a program like Langmaker, fed with the phonotactics of the language, generate plenty of words and assign them meanings. Some, like you said, invent words out of thin air (I am of that kind), which makes vocabulary building rather slow, but helps givng a very special feeling to the language (by inventing words with their very own semantic content, not relexes of other languages). Another way is to apply a list like Swadesh not to the language itself, but from a protolanguage of it, and derive words by sound changes and semantic changes, like it happens in reality. Tolkien did that for instance (though I don't think he used the Swadesh list originally :)) ). In brief, you need to find your own way. Ans remember: creating a word often opens the door to other words. With the Babel text for instance, you need words like "clay" or so. What are the other construction materials possible in you conculture (if there's any). How to translate "brick", "wood", "concrete" (if it exists), are they related words or not? You needed "tower", how would you translate "house", "castle", "mansion", "room", "kitchen", etc... Each word comes with a host of relatives belonging to the same theme. No word is alone in the language (whether it has cognates from the same root, or just companions of the same theme). Look at thematic dictionnaries for an idea of what I mean. Christophe. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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John Cowan <jcowan@...>