Now that we know the ins and outs of the grammar, we're ready to start making words.
But before you go crazy pulling words out of thin air, there's a few things that you should be aware of.
As I said last time, at this point you're free to start coining root words,
basic irreducible concepts that couldn't conceivably be derived from some other word.
Okay, but how can we go about making more complex words?
the most basic solution is compounding,
where two words occur together with such frequency that they become conjoined
This is where your basic word order comes into play.
Let's say we wanted to make a compound of tree and place to make a noun that means:
"The place where there's trees' or perhaps 'a forest'. In this case tree is modifying place
(We're not talking about a place-tree),
so tree and place will occur together in the same word order as a noun and an adjective would,
so in our language tree will come first.
But sometimes a word can become so frequently compounded with other words that it loses its core meaning altogether,
becoming something that we call
A derivational affix, a bit that you stick on to a word to change its meaning.
So looking at our words, we've already got tree-place,
but what about if we wanted to make a word for 'a place where there's fire', or a fire pit?
Well, we can pull the exact same trick we did for tree-place to make fire-place, and why stop there?
What about grass-place for field or home-place, house, or any number of other possibilities?
If this occurs frequently enough then eventually our word 'place' may cease to be an independent word,
but instead become in derivational suffix that means 'the place associated with whatever noun and it attaches to'.
We can use a similar trick for verbs using something called
noun incorporation.
Noun incorporation occurs when a verb and it's object combine into a new word.
Let's take our verb 'to hunt'. Using this we can create the basic sentence 'The person hunts fish".
Over time we could imagine the noun getting sucked into the verb to produce the new meaning "The person fish-hunts".
Where "fish-hunts" has become a new verb that means 'to hunt fish'.
But what if we want to change a word's part of speech? What if we want to create, say, a noun from a verb?
We have our word for 'to hunt', but what if we wanted to make a word for 'a hunter'?
Once again recall our basic word order.
The verb will always be the last word in the sentence but adjectives come before the nouns that they modify.
Because of this the sentence 'person hunt' will be interpreted as 'the person hunts',
but in the reverse order 'hunt person', 'hunt' may be interpreted as a
modifier of 'person' meaning 'a person who hunts'.
Then if this strategy is used frequently enough, the word 'person'
becomes a suffix that turns a verb into a noun that means 'a person who habitually
performs the verb', much like the '-er' suffix in English.
Not only that, but we can combine our strategies;
Take our word for 'to fish' which we derived from noun incorporation.
We can now apply our 'person' suffix to produce the noun 'a person who habitually hunts fish', or perhaps, 'a fisherman'.
It's very common for a language to have nominalizing affixes that encode the meanings of
"An instance of the verb happening", "the person who customarily performs the verb", "the typical object of the verb",
"The place where the verb happens", and
"The tool used to accomplish the verb",
But feel free to get creative and include any other possibilities you can think of.
Processes like these are indispensable when creating new vocabulary.
Every time you go to create a new word
always ask yourself
if you can find a way to derive it from another already existing word first. If all else fails
you can create a new root for it.
Some other things to think about are idioms, common sayings, and conceptual metaphors,
all ways that your culture interprets the world around them. For example, in English, we think of time as
going forward, as in expressions like "to look forward to", and our temporal adverbs
"Before" and "after", are derived from old words that mean "in front of" and "behind" respectively.
But it doesn't have to be this way. In Mandarin, for example, time is perceived as going down,
so the word 下 Xià means both "below" and "afterwards".
How your culture conceptualises things like this can have a heavy impact on how words are created and grammaticalized.
Plus it will help make your conlang a lot more distinct from your native language.
Think about what your culture views as important and what's common in their environment. What kind of associations could these things elicit?
For example, if you have a culture that lives in a barren desert, they'll likely regard rain with a high level of importance,
and so you might see them equating rain with miracles or fortuitous events.
Or if your culture lives on a chain of islands surrounded by a shallow sea and they rely heavily on rafts or boats for transport,
they could equate storms or rough waters with hard times.
We've already said that the culture that speaks our sample language lives in a tropical forest.
They're surrounded by vegetation and foliage,
so what if they associate the growing of plants with other things like time, states of being, or even emotions?
We could even have different types of plants associated with different emotional states.
Feel free to play around with these sorts of ideas as they'll surface in interesting ways in your conlang, and
Even inform some ideas about your culture.
Alright, now we've got a pretty solid foundation for all aspects of our proto-language
Feel free to just keep on making words and expanding the grammar as much as you like.
But remember, this is just the proto-language, and it's high time
we start moving this language forward into the future
Join me next time where we'll take another look at our language's sound system and investigate how it's going to change over time.