Word 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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