Conlang: How to Make Good Words
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- čas přidán 31. 05. 2024
- Some thoughts about how to make words in conlangs.
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Email: lichenthefictioneer@gmail.com
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Here are some further resources:
/ introducing_lexember_2021
fiatlingua.org/wp-content/upl...
www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php...
starlingdb.org/cgi-bin/respon...
drive.google.com/file/d/14ZFq...
/ how_do_you_guys_create...
In my opinion, my favourite easter egg in any conlang, is that the Klingon word for "fish" is "Ghoti" (you know where that came from)
Lau(gh) Lauf
W(o)men Wimen
Na(ti)on Nashon
@@AndIChoseToSpeakFAX the "o" is from "women"
@@fursona_au_chocolat thx
I almost fainted when I realized "nuqneQ," the greeting "what do you want," is literally: "Knock knock." I never see anybody mention that one.
I dont
Ah yes, my personal nemesis : creating a lexicon which goes further than allowing me to say "I see a man"
Edit : love how every once and there I have a random translation into a conlang sent to me here
Visrié gorh
@@malachiosborn9452 Azghe azo támà
Renní keles / seŋgriš wašmaq rek.
In objesh it's nananananananansnanaaannNnananNnnNNNNaaa. Ananananananananananansnansnsna. Anna's nsnananaannaan
Main ek ahdmi dekhta hoon…wait
As a kid I made “imaginary languages” and “secret language” now I do the same thing, just a fancier word. I love conlangs.
i thought my interest in conlang was something entirely new but you've made me realize I've done the exact same thing when I was a child
What I like to do is write down a normal, everyday conversation between people who speak my conlang, and then translate it into said conlang. Maybe two neigbours talking about current events, or someone buying food from a market and having a little convo with a vendor, or maybe a family having a discussion at the dinner table. It helps flesh out both the world and the language at the same time. I once wrote a series of very horny love letters between a noblewoman and her secret lover, which was fun, because I got very creative with euphemisms for genitals XD
Sounds awesome XD I try to do something like this too.
lmfao series of very horny love letters
Great idea!
Oh I do this too!!! The first time I did this I accidentally created my first in-conlang pun so I figured I must be doing something right
Du bist Ben.
Another interesting way to generate words: try acting as if other languages borrowed your words, then reanalyze the results
This is how "anime" came to be. Japanese took "animation" shortened it to "anime" and that word was reincorporated into english.
Another example: karaoke. Japanese took "orchestra" turned it onto "oke" and put "empty" (kara) in front. Then the word was taken back into english with the pronunciation changed drastically once more
I know that fire sound effect is meant to be like sitting by a fire while you tell us about conlangs, but I interpreted it as more like you're recording in a house that's burning down...
Great video by the way! I'm currently making my first conlang and these tips definitely helped me to have a clear way to create it.
agreed, and if you could eq it so the higher frequencies not to sharp as it kind of hurts my ears
mahbe that was the intent
While it was clearly fire, my broken-ass brain interpreted it as the crackling noise on an old wax-cylinder phonograph. An association with my intro to linguistics class while I was studying mechanical engineering in school…
It's so distracting I literally couldn't finish the video 😭
I didn't realize there was any background noise until you pointed it out
An interesting cross language reanalysis example: in portuguese it's common to call a burger a "xis" (aka the name of letter x), and then attach a word representing the type of burger to the ending, like x-ovo (burger with an egg) or x-frango (chicken burger). The funny thing is that xis comes from the english cheese, as in cheeseburger.
agora quero um x-tudão
X-salada o mais icônico
oh my goodness, I never noticed that! I've always wondered where the x came from
I'm imagining a dumb joke where I'd say to my friends "I brought a x-ovo for lunch", and then they'd be all surprised when I take an egg splattered with cheese on top from my lunchbox.
@@sadzpea *ovo* vhat's this?
@@kasane1337 Ovo = Egg. *A X-[something] in Portuguese means a hamburguer style sandwich with some kind of specific filling and cheese.
The word for "cat" in my language is modeled after gibberish I would say to my cat.
@16:00 'you're the burglar, go burgle something' - Tolkien was first and foremost a linguist. I'm sure he was well aware of what he was doing there
16:10 Banana > Banan-er > to banan
16:24 I love the hamburguer example because we reanalized again in portuguese. The word "cheese" sound a lot like the name we give the letter X, /ʃis/ so in brazil, we turned cheeseburger into X-burguer. And then we replaced "burguer" with the flavor. X-bacon, x-salada, or my favorite X-tudo (everything burguer)
Some more tips I have are:
* avoid single-word definitions; in fact, have both a field for a more detailed definition as well as one for how that word might be translated into the metalanguage
* more controversially, always role-mark arguments of a verb; for instance, the definition for *triłit* in Ŋarâþ Crîþ v9 is ‘(S) recommends (I) to do (O)’. In fact, I even do this for some nouns, such as *nalda*, which has the definitions ‘the boundary between the interior and exterior of (GEN)’ and ‘a bound on the quantity of (GEN)’.
* whenever you coin a word, look up the definition of the metalanguage equivalent in the dictionary to get a feel for the senses in which it can be used
I entirely agree with all of this. For example, in the entry for 'sell' I have all the roles specified as "(seller)=ERG (buyer)=ACC gives (item)=INSTR (money)=LOC". In fact, all this is one of the entries under 'give', because there is no single word for 'sell'; it's lexified as "give (someone) (something) for money".
Please explain in layperson. I would like to understand your comment.
@@kinpandun2464 Basically, "don't let your words be one-to-one translations of specific words in your native language", "look up alternate meanings for natural words to figure out alternate meanings for your words", and "mark down exactly how a word is used grammatically". The examples are of different ways that a verb can interact with its nouns - when you talk about "selling" something, which participant is the direct object? The person you're selling to, or the thing being sold?
Another thing to think about if you really want to complicate matters... synonyms aren't always synonymous. I've had this argument several times. My favorite example is "damp" and "moist". Ostensibly, they both mean "slightly wet". And they do have overlapping usage. But there is a difference in connotation. You will NEVER hear a chef brag about how "damp" his cake is.
Yeah. To me "damp" means "was dry but got wetted", "moist" means "is wet of its own accord"
If your pet rock gets left out in the rain, it's damp.
If the rock was just mined out of the bottom of a cave, it's moist.
@@samwallaceart288 That's actually an interesting distinction. Although people do sometimes "moisten a towel".
7:19 a good example of exactly this is Korean; "to die" is 죽다, "to kill" is 죽이다
I like to use onomatopoeia for inspiration. In iallasaani a lot of nouns also double as sound words:
'Bappo' both means apple, and the sound of something small and round hitting something
'Pillip' means fish and the sound of something wet flailing around
'Gashguchi' means eel, and a general slimy sound
I love this! Great excuse for a bunch of marginal phonemes.
Bappo also is the euphemism Brian used on Family Guy to try to convince Stewie that giving him herpes wasn’t actually so bad
Mao - Cat
@@catalinasutliff2867 Meow Zedong
fun fact about french:
"connaître" is built from "co" and "naître", first being a prefix for stuff done together, and "naître" meaning "being born". "connaître", in the beginning, therefore meant "copulate". When you know that fact it's very fun to say you know a bunch of people, because then you have that fact in the back of your brain all the time
Funnily enough, that is simply a coincidence, because naître comes from Latin nascor (to be born/I am born) while connaître comes from cognosco, which is made up of co+gnosco (a different root)
@@CommonCommiestudiosAnd that, my friends, is backformation at play! Honestly clever
8:20 I always use The Hobbit as a translation-task (or the UN Charter Of Human Rights for certain conlangs)
A man of culture! And thanks for the idea^^
The Hobbit strikes me as a looooong translation-task :P
@@Lichenthefictioneer It is and I've never finished it, but, regardless of the hubris of trying, it generates a lot of words in a lot of different contexts (and also lots of transliterations and words for hobbit)
Same!
As we saw from our Conlang Census, people think Lexicon and Evolution are the hardest parts of conlanging... Awesome video!
I know you 😄
And when we needed him the most, he comes back in splendiferous glory! :D
for wordlists: you can use toki pona's content words as a base for words you need, it's a great set of basic words. toki pona was designed to have the most simple and elementary words.
Of course, every language should have a word meaning "to interact with the official toki pona book" (i'm joking, i get what you mean and mi toki kepeken toki pona kin)
@@Alexandra-ip2by lmao, sina pona a a
this is false. toki pona, while minimalistic, really doesn't have a vocabulary optimized to be as simple as possible or have the most basic words. for example, you can't express a relative clause, but there is a unique word for fruit/vegetable when "kasi moku" (food-plant) would suffice
@@that_orange_hat that's. like completely missing the point lmao, it's a great base to go off of for vocabulary, not grammatical features. I think you lack experience and perspective tbh
@@lipamanka sorry? i lack experience and perspective? tenpo sike tu la mi sona e toki pona! i'm a fluent toki pona speaker, i just understand that although an interesting conlang, it's not like there was intense study put into the most fundamental vocabulary lol
I've been working on a conlang of mine for like 4 years now, and very often used such tactics as deriving words from some roots of other words I already had, but I never wrote down those etymologies, so now I'm just completely lost in a lexicon of nearly 1500 words but barely any extra etymological linking between them 💀
That sounds like peak naturalism to me
Omg... me too! I create words from the words already existing in the language, and I still forget how this word was made to be!! It gives me a lack of originality 🤧😂💔
@@codekillerz5392 whoa... beautiful 😨
So pull a Tolkien and work backwards from the words you have, to reconstruct your roots. Maybe it wasn't the same roots you originally used 4 years ago but that really doesn't matter. It just gives your devoted readers something to argue about after you kick the bucket.
Since I'm creating a full language I use the Swadesh list as reference, but only to take the words I know I need. Most of the time I end up combining words and then splitting them based on use over time and functionality in language.
Nivaclé's derivation system and simulative suffixes are so robust that they're noticeably repellent of loans, because most concepts can just be derived.
7:43 another problem with the Swadesh list (if your making a naturalistic conlang) is that it presumes the words listed to be core vocabulary and unchanging. This is untrue, the word ‘woman’ is a good example. In English it came from a compound that replaced the original word: OE wīf mann (women person) > ME woman. Incidentally, the original word ‘wīf’ changed semantically itself to modern English ‘wife’. Similar things happen all the time in many natural languages.
I just made the word "bird" in my conlang "þwóhöł" from the sound they make when they fly (þwoþwoþwoh), and the living noun ending -öł (pronounced like German ö + welsh ll). Then i derived "to fly" from that, making it "þwóhìt".
man i sure wish there was a voice notes version of this whole comment section 😔
As for "random inspiration", one of my friends once saw so much advertisement from random companies with nonsensical names that he started keeping a list of them, and ended up with over a hundred such names. I ended up using a few of them as words.
my technique:
1. go to wiktionary
2. look up a word that most languages should have (like "yes" or "flower")
3. go to the translation page and scrape every language's word for said thing
4. process those words to fit your phonology-tactics
Done!
For me, i use the just do it method for choosing sounds, though i don’t think them up; i usually just speak gibberish until i find something i like and or fits with the meaning of that word.
And i also obscure natlang words, though this is also mixed with random inspiration in the form of references or jokes hidden in the lexicon (though at times it is a bit too obvious).
And also if you were wondering what i edited, i added paragraphs instead of it just being a block of text (along with a few grammatical mistakes).
Gonna start a conlang now. It's quite easy for me to just come up with any random sound, so before I do that, I'm just gonna set out random rules of the language as it comes to mind. Then as I develop it further, I'll contextualize it and see what would drift, how common words are, if any of the rules would be too inconvenient for native speakers, if specific applications of the rules difficult to speak, etc.
fantastic content! ive never heard of conlang before but now im all in thanks to you
5:54 Sound a bit weird, but I also find inspirations in baby's/toddlers , because they try to speak your language, but it's always just not good enough, or they say other thing, so I think, O, yes, i cant put that in my conlang🤣
i love this
i eozz beisas bikin be zle birzz denginz, iz liz iioazzin akznoilda. i kafelin iz liz zoe irs koz i bilos ze debngaza azoe tin li-i.
Translation:
(I just finished making my two first conglangs, it was an interesting experience. at the beginning it was very hard but I managed to complete every thing woo-hoo.)
The words in my conlang that I really like are the ones that are immediately associated with their meanings
in one of my conlangs, I needed a word for school, so I made the word д人, which sounds like the english word "hell"
You are an amazing one who serves the algorithm! Love your stuff!
I've finally become happy with phonology/phonotactics, and have turned to word creation. My trouble is not the process, but that none of the words I create sounds like a good fit. They do not feel real.
Nice. Kinda related, sometimes for fun i take two words from two diff langs that sound similar & i try to come up with a list of meaning changes to see how one word could come to mean the other one, & i think this could be great inspiration for semantic drift & things like that
2:42 Subtitles : « … or maybe… *I died?* »
One for the algorithm ;) Your videos are always top notch! So much good advice in here!
This was a breath of fresh air to watch, pleasant and informative. I've been having a lot of trouble making a lexicon for my Constructed language, 'Vorska'. Still, for some reason, this video injected some much-needed energy into the will to keep creating and going. Thank you. SUBSCRIBED!
the word in my conlang for monster is tÿeehwel which is litterally the word 3 and leg combined.
very good video. i always run into a problem in which when creating words i feel the need to oversimplify and compound the words to a point at which really simple concepts in english, like doorknob, become really difficult to explain in my conlangs because i just dont want to add more words than absolutely necessary
Great, informative video as always!
I *want* to use generators and lists, but ultimately I just shuffle around words and typos take inspiration from natlangs to translate words that I previously saved because I liked them. I do not know if the lack of methodic-ity is why I never finished a conlang but oh well
I take the opposite approach often though, instead of going for bases, I translate little pieces of text and poetry (ultimately I want to creat my own, but creating a different kind of poetry is hard and requires nuance in a conlang that as aforementioend, i did not finished) and work from there "inwards"
Thank you, Lichen. This is extremely helpful.
The aim of my current conlang project is to be something that I can speak (to myself) and think in and is therefore based around the languages I've learnt and uses ideas from them as well as many of my own.
Nuu moe i' no' meer vorð'sè śkrijf ije må!
Informing and chucklable, 10/10
Hm, that was a great 6 minute and twelve second video explaining how to make words, what a nice little resource.
_moves mouse_
What
"one who serves the algorithm" earned a like and sub right there.
That alliteration at the start can only be made with an amazing lexicon.
On the terms of Easter eggs, I have several words in my conlang named after people I know irl. Also my word for “takes in” is “ēkskrīt“ /ˈɛːkskɾiːt/ which is pronounced almost the same as English excrete. So I can say I ēkskrīt pulled pork, and it sounds nasty but in reality makes perfect sense
that's very fun to pronounce
@@Mrs._Fenc thanks ig lol
@@Mrs._Fenc my favorite sounding word in my main conlang is īonbemor /ˈjo̞nbe̞mo̞ɾ/ which means city state. What’s your favorite word to pronounce in yours?
@@steakfilly5199 Uh.. Uhm... Let's just say there's a reason why I clicked on this video. lol
@@Mrs._Fenc oh ok lol
idk what conlangs even are or what they are really for but this got recommmended to me and now i wanna make one
This video is a gem. Thank you.
I have some old french and german language textbooks from school and i often turn to those for vocab lists and sample sentences to translate
I'll be with you on this journey my dude. I expect a lot of great things
Very useful video. I'm going to comment for the algorithm.
Зачем украинский флаг в названии?
Навіщо український прапор у назві?
Now I have jargon for all the stuff I already do anyway, and a few new tricks to add to my toolbox, besides that.
Subscribed, for sure.
3 ways to make a good word
1)make word from good etymology
2)you can randomly generate it
3)steal.. i mean borrowing
2:18 I thought he said “invent of obscure natlangs” 😅
What I like to do is based words off noises the thing makes. Mostly when it comes to animals. Like cat being ñoú
I have several go-to dictionaries for my conlangs, that have words that sound right for my languages' phonologies. I mostly use Sumerian and Basque because they are very little known, and then scramble up the meanings and sounds a bit.
A major reason I'm so interested in language and conlanging is my internal dialogue and understanding of the world don't line up perfectly with my native languages.
"Is English more efficient, French more precise?" I have this conversation with my family all the time with English, French, ASL, toki pona and North American creoles that we speak. It's actually incredibly frustrating how often me or my pa want to say something and then have to go research our own languages and on-the-spot clong up a way to say it.
Do you speak toki pona with your family?
@@tuluppampam yes, they're not fluent but there's some toki ponists in their 50s over here. It turns into "spanglish pona" most often when we're at work.
@@EchoLog that is one of the strangest things I've ever heard
That seems like a lot of fun for anyone interested in learning toki pona
@@tuluppampam it's a language that's very close to being just the semantic primes - and it's culturally very politeness and happiness oriented. Those traits make it very easy to blend with another language into a new creole (what it already is).
Basically it's the best second language, a terrible 6th or 10th language, but the best 2nd.
I love the idea of contorting existing words to create roots in a conlang-- sound symbolism can be powerful!
excellent content!
I think the swadesh list is probably a good place to start for a basic lexicon, even when taking your mentioned caveats into account. As it includes a lot of very basic words, you can also start building compound words from those, as quite a lot of contemporary words are just compounded words from other languages (for English). It would also be neat to have a list of proto-Indo-European words, both for generation purposes, but also as sort of a basic list of roots to start from.
wow grate content and exelent lenguage use. TY for this
I like the note you add at 11:33 about most conlangers finding making relexes undesireable, but go ahead if you want, just be aware.
A lot of people conflate the idea that something isn't popular to it being bad, so I really appreciate that you make a point of mentioning that the opinion is a cultural norm but not adding a value judgement to people wanting to try it out.
Regarding translation and loanwords, one anecdote I read once (maybe in a youtube comment?) was a persons first language arabic parents replacing the 'al' at the start of a word with 'the' in speech, so a word like "alzheimer's" becomes "the zheimer's".
Very nice video!
Как всегда, отличная работа
Thx this helped a lot
I had no idea this is a thing, this is very cool.
A method I like is choosing phonotactic constraints, then trying to make words through onomatopoeia that fit the constraints
19:49 French acting all innocent with *aujourd’hui* (today)
au jour d’aujourd’hui… on the day of this day of this day lol
2:43 « I died »😂
The best words sound like their meaning, which makes them easier to remember and easier to understand. English has a lot of these - Ocean. Spiky. Bubble. Soothing. (to name a few)
For words I need I start thinking about what words will definitely be needed, I happened to start with translating fruit. Then for some I agreed that referring to color is good, so I started making colors, I also try to make example sentences, I randomly thought of a word and decided it HAD to be the word for "to fly" so then I figured out how to make my first sentence structure and thought of what words I'd need for that :D
I think that the very first rule for creating words is the length. The second is using realistic sound combination, and consistent combination frequency patterns.
I don't do whole conlangs, but 1.5 is a method I use a lot for names. Here are a couple of my favorites:
My family likes to mispronounce Cereal. From that I got "Cyrril."
Someone playing games on CZcams was having trouble navigating around a door. From their quote "Door negotiation" I got Dornigoche.
Baby talk with my cat turned "Stretch" into "Skwetch" which is a great name for a goblin or kobold.
What a mirrenseksek video!
Thanks!
Showing interest
6:25
That ..... that's not a microwave.....
What if u want to make a separate word to replace suffixes/prefixes
My technique is to create an analytic protolanguage with ~100 basic words, generate compounds and use a basic grammar, and then evolve that language into 3 or so descendant languages, with the ocassional word borrowing if the history allows for it.
A big problem I've run into in my conlang is making words managable. I'm using method 3, as I want the language to give the impression of being Indo-European in descent and particularly close to scandinavian and celtic languages, so I start each word by reducing it to its PIE roots, referencing Irish, Gaelic, or scandinavian versions of the word, and putting together those root concepts. But this frequently leads me to make several base words that I instinctively combine to form more complex words, and those rapidly get cumbersome.
Okay, I don't know about "burgle", but "sculpt" as a verb definitely follows a pattern of deriving the verb from the past participle, and -or was a Latin suffix. I haven't researched it, but I'm confident that both "sculpt" and "sculptor" are derived from the same verb "sculpere", using Latin derivational morphology: sculpere > sculptus (stem sculpt-) > sculptor. No back-formation required.
how does one remember all of these words? is there a place that conlangers use to store them?
Ok, so the first thing I'm doing with my mermaid language is translating The Little Mermaid.
Man you're impressive
Another option is to take a root word and put it through a series of phonetic transformations.
One time, I couldn’t remember what spreadsheets were called so I began calling them schladers.
Liver being one of my favorite foods, that bit threw me off 🤣
Well when it comes to coining words, I usually (not always) try to make the word invoke the concept that it represents
I wanna make a conlang but i dont know where to start? Im kind of a beginner nerd when it comes to linguistics and etymology so idk how to just… do it.
Whats with the cracking sound ? And why do you change your mic after 1 minute ?
You’ve never heard the crackling of wood on fire?
@@serimus Yes, I am aware of what that sound is. What I'm saying is that it doesn't achieve anything but being annoying to me.
3:50 doing an East-Asian-inspired conlang and working with Proto-Altaic and wasn't sure if it was the right move considering I knew it isn't really accepted but at least wanted to try!
did you use Ai art for the beginning pictures?
I did! It's from dream.ai/create
I didn't even know i wanted to make up a language until i watched this video
Amazing video, but I suggest replacing the fire crackling with some music, it sounds a little annoying at times
Me with the either 0 or 400iq of baby babbling to make the easy words to start