E-Book Overview
The Language Construction Kit and Advanced Language Construction explained how to create grammars for constructed languages. But after creating a grammar, there's the 800-pound gorilla of the lexicon to deal with.
This book gives you everything you need to know to create words. The first stop is etymology: it contains thousands of etymologies from a wide variety of languages. Borrow them or let them spark your own ideas!
It's easy to let the lexicon be a coded version of your native language. The Lexipedia contains tips on how to avoid this, including plenty of fascinating examples from non-English languages.
You want to know which words to create first. The Lexipedia includes the 1500 words most commonly found in fantasy and science fiction, sorted by frequency.
Many parts of the lexicon require real-world knowledge to handle. The Lexipedia contains just enough information on biology, physics, and human cultures to help you out.
Plus, there's a discussion of the basic tools of the word creator: categories, metaphors, and derivation.
Though aimed at conlangers, the Lexipedia will be instructive and entertaining for anyone who's interested in words.
E-Book Content
by Mark Rosenfelder
Yonagu • Chicago • 2013
© 2013 by Mark Rosenfelder. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, except for review purposes. Kindle edition 1.0
Contents Introduction 6 How to 14 Fantasy Frequency Wordlist All about classes 48 Using etymologies 81 Metaphors 91 Derivation 96 Thematic section 111 Animals 113 Art 127 Astronomy 135 The body 138 Buildings 148 Clothing 154 Color 157 Conflict 164 Containers 167 Dimensions 169 Directions 177 Effort 181 Elements 183 Emotion 195 Events 199 Existence 202 Food 204 Government 211 Grammar 220
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Kinship 225 Knowledge 235 Law 238 Life and health 241 Light 246 Locatives 250 Love 257 Measurement 259 Metals 261 Mind 263 Movement 276 Nature 284 Numbers 287 Physical acts 290 Physics 293 Plants 301 Possession 308 Religion 312 Shape 317 Sensation 321 Sex 327 Sin 329 Society 332 Speech 338 Substances 342 Time 360 Tools 369 Trade 374 Valuation 379 War 383
Water Work Index
389 393 396
Introduction For those who didn’t read the back cover, this book is a guide to understanding and creating lexicons. I’ve written two books, The Language Construction Kit and Advanced Language Construction, that focus on grammar. If you want to know what sounds can be made, how case works, what you can do with verbs, what’s a pidgin, how to create logographs, or how to wrangle morphosyntactic alignment and master polysynthesis, that’s where you go. Arguably the sounds and the way the morphology and syntax work are the heart of the language, what makes it itself. But as every language learner eventually finds out, with some dismay, there’s also the 800-pound gorilla of the vocabulary. For the conlanger, this raises new questions— or it should: • How many words do I need? • Which ones should I create first? • Am I just making a complicated cipher of English? • How are new words created in natural languages? • What structure does the lexicon have? • What do I need to know about things to make words for them? This book answers all these questions, and where that’s not enough, it asks its own questions and then answers those.
How not to do it Suppose you need to translate this sentence: The king’s court rejected the new queen for her faith. You find you don’t have any of the content words, so you fire up your word generator and get: dlatla atlesi učitlo iprikoga speti briiau and match them up to the terms you need: dlatla king atlesi court učitlo reject iprikoga new speti queen briiau faith With a little grammatical manipulation you have Učitlo-ño-e atlesi dl