Re: creating words (was Re: "Language Creation" in your conlang)

Jörg Rhiemeier sikyal:

> > > [trouble finding words for my conlangs]
> >
> > This is also my problem. Yivrian has been around for nearly a decade now,
> > and is yet to breach 1000 vocabulary items.
>
> And yet you managed to compose a creation myth in it.  I was deeply
> impressed when I saw it!
Thank you! Writing texts, of course, has been my other major impetus to
create words. In that sense, I'm actually more satisfied with the
Ninety-Nine Sayings
(http://www.glossopoesis.org/index.php?module=subjects&func=viewpage&pageid=51),
because I needed a greater variety of "everyday" vocabulary for it, and it
shows the beginnings of a genuine Yivrian poetic style.

> >      The Weekly Vocabulary lists
> > have been a great help in this respect, but my vocab still grows slower
> > than I'd like. However, I'm reaching the point where my vocabulary is
> > starting to accrete on itself and grow more quickly--I have enough roots
> > that I can make new etymologically plausible words quite quickly, and
> > compounds and expansions of existing words can cover a lot of the
> > subtleties.
>
> Finding roots is the most difficult part of word-creation, I think.
> I have ample ideas for interesting etymologies that fail to materialize
> because I simply can't settle on those goddamn *roots*!  I guess that
> once I have a list of several hundred lexical roots covering most
> realms of discourse, things will start moving more swiftly.
Indeed. What are your sound-changes like? It used to be that the hardest
part was finding words that fit with the Yivrian sound, but oddly enough
settling on my sound changes made this easier, because I could make up
just about any root in the world and have it turn out okay once I put it
through the wringer :). Anyway, I'm currently getting by with less than
300 PY roots, and I don't imagine that I'll *ever* need more than 1000 or
so.

> > > Hence, I find it easier to come up with a posteriori languages
> > > such as Germanech; but on the other hand, I have numerous ideas
> > > I want to use in my languages that don't fit into an a posteriori
> > > scheme based on something I know (essentially Germanic and Romance).
> >
> > Since historical development is a big part of my conlanging, my future
> > language projects look more and more like a posteriori projects based on
> > my current langs.
>
> My conlanging also involves historical development.  I am currently
> working on Proto-Elvish, from which the individual Elvish languages
> will be derived.
I did my first language backwards: Yivrian existed long before
Proto-Yivril, and I mangled the language backwards to find the
proto-language. Doing it forwards (as I will with future languages) leads
to more consistency, but can be more time-consuming.

What's the time-depth between Proto-Elvish and the projected daughter
languages?


--
Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://blog.glossopoesis.org

"We're counting on our virtues,
Cause it's too hard to count the dead."
 - Jason Webley

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