Re: Creating words

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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