Conlangery Shorts 32: Lexember Themes

Podcast – Conlangery Podcast

George talks a little bit about how choosing a theme for Lexember can be helpful for your conlanging.

Original script

Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them. I’m George Corley.

I went on social media recently to ask what people wanted covered before Lexember and got some great suggestions. The one that I’m going to cover today is creating your words based on a theme. Many lexember entrants do themes throughout the month or follow lists of prompt words from places like ConWorkShop, and I think it’s an interesting way to get your juices flowing. I’m going to talk about this mostly as it relates to a naturalistic artlang, since that’s what I have experience with, but I think these sorts of themes and prompts can help with any sort of conlang.

Before we get to that, Conlangery is supported by our Patrons over at Patreon. Thanks to our patrons, I’ve been able to move the site over to its own hosting, which has given me more control and will hopefully take some stress off of the LCS’s hosting plan. You’ll also see that little padlock icon on the site now, which will make you slightly more secure when commenting and using the site and also prevent browsers from yelling at people visiting. By the way, if you pledge $10 or more per month, you can see the scripts for these shorts as they are written.

On another note, the Language Creation Society has just announced its President’s Scholarship. They’re accepting applications from people who are affiliated with educational institutions who either want to do research on conlangs, or who want to teach a conlanging class. I’ll have the link in the show notes for anyone interested in applying. There are two $500 scholarships available, and the deadline for this coming year’s applications is January 15th 2020.

If you’re a naturalisitic conlanger, everything about your language can be an opportunity for worldbuilding, of course, but the lexicon is where I find the deepest worldbuilding potential. Most grammar and phonology is culturally agnostic — it can be influenced by things like politeness culture and literary customs, but just about any grammatical feature can be dropped into whatever culture you wish. That’s not so true for words.

The lexicon is deeply related to how your people view the world. It’s how they divide up and name the parts of the world, and that has fantastic cultural implications. That said, being too heavy handed on the cultural aspects could backfire. What you want to have is an idea of some cultural values and ideas that will guide what words you create and how they are framed, as well as a variety of real world and conworld knowledge to guide you.

Keeping culture in mind and even building it alongside your words can help you when working with prompts or themes to make richer and more interesting choices of words. In 2015, I did a cluster of words related to childbearing, influenced by the birth of my first child on December 17th. This wasn’t the entirety of my Lexember that year, and I did a few words outside of Lexember, but I did have an extended period where I was looking at birth related terms specifically. In doing so, I had to consider what medical knowledge the Istatimik would have, what cultural associations they would have with birth, and the who and how of delivering babies in their culture.

One place where this led to a particular choice was in the derivation of qenrii, meaning “placenta”. This derives from qen, meaning “moon”, and rii, meaning “meat” or “flesh”. I didn’t come up with this from any natlang inspiration, rather I looked at pictures of placentas and saw that they can be seen to look round and quite unsurprisingly meaty — in a less than appetizing way, but the cultural question brought in the “moon”. I decided that the Istatimik would associate themes of birth, femininity, and reproduction with the moon, considering menstrual cycles to be following the lunar cycle.

What words you choose to make can also come through culture building. My children were delivered by doctors, but I imagined that in Istati culture, as in many cultures now and in the past, childbirth would be more commonly be attended by midwives. But then the question becomes who are the midwives? I imagined that most of them would be older women, perhaps too old to give birth themselves but having experienced it. I had a root puuk that I used in the terms for “grandmother” and “clan matriarch”, so it seemed perfect to use this for another term referring to old women. I also decided the term should be an older compound, owing to the long-standing cultural status of midwives — which meant that it, unlike some newer compounds, had been altered by vowel harmony. For the other element, I chose maaṭe “catch” — usually used for something slow-moving — for the act of “catching” the baby as it falls from the birth canal, and thus came the term maaṭepook.

Sometimes you may have ideas for the worldbuilding that aren’t so salient from the form of the word or the dictionary entry. When I created the word nitiq “lanugo” (the fine hairs that cover a newborn’s body) there was not that much depth to the etymology in terms of cultural meanings. Nitiq is also the word for down feathers, as I felt that that was a good metaphor to draw from, but that was about it. However, in my mind, I considered how this would be related to Istatikii elemental beliefs.

The Istatimik exist in a fantasy world and among them are some of the best alchemists in that world. At that time, I had them following an elemental system somewhat taken from the Wuxing, or five Daoist elements. So I felt that they might look for signs in childbirth of affinity to a particular element. Hair is associated with wood, so an excess of nitiq would be associated with strong affinity for wood. Feces is associated with earth, and so things like passing meconium before birth (and surviving — it’s a suffocation risk) might be a sign of a connection with earth. Children born in an intact fluid sac would be strong in water, clearly.

None of those associations made its way overtly into the language. I could have put them in, but not all of your cultural associations and practices have to be explicit in the formation of words. Perhaps this would have an effect on how alchemists talk about these phenomena, but I didn’t really feel it even needed to be in dictionary entries. In this case, it was more that thinking about these concepts while creating the language helped me to solidify what they would mean outside of the immediate word formation. In other words, a theme through a cultural lens absolutely can help you with etymology and polysemy, but it helps just as much with selecting words to create and with broader cultural context.

When I went to the community asking for their experiences and pointers for working with a theme, I got a number of interesting responses. Dylan Moonfire is one of the first people I noticed doing a themed Lexember, and he happened to respond when I was asking for examples. Here is what he said:

When I did measurements two years ago, I basically started with what I thought the culture would have as base units (like a fist for volume) and then used what I had developed in the culture to figure out the derived units from there to refine them into “modern” usage.

With last year, it was geography. So, I focused on the physical area around them. It was a desert culture so there were a lot of words for different types of rock, sand, gravel, winds, etc. However the rivers and forests had relatively fewer because they were used less.

This year, I’m switching to a fantasy nomadic language set in steppes/forests/plains, but the magic is in the land, so the focus is going to be on the concept of land ownership/claims/fallow along with continual travels. Built up around the culture’s concept of “tapping” land.

I really like this idea of the physical environment being something to consider in your conlanging. It’s very grounding to imagine where your cultures are and then understanding from that what words they would need and how they would view the things around them. You don’t need a map for this, you just need to have the basics of what biome they’re in and perhaps what local natural landmarks exist, like a large mountain or a major river. Beyond just the words for the concrete environment, that will also give you an idea of what metaphors they might use and a little bit about what might become culturally important to them.

I also specifically reached out to Zeke Fordsmender, who did a theme a couple years ago about date farming. He gave me a long email detailing how he went about his research and word formation process, which I will include in the show notes under the script for those interested. I’ve extracted a few relevant parts here.

Karyol, the language of the date-palm-growers, is spoken in a country called Twāo by a people called the Twāogowe. But going into Lexember 2017, I didn’t know much about them besides their name. The Twāogowe are actually the ‘bad guys’ in my conworld—they’re imperialists, and the premise of the project has always been (though it still remains unrealized) to produce creoles in each of Twāo’s occupied colonies with Karyol as the superstrate language and local languages as the ad- and substrate languages.

I had been very impressed by conlanger and writer Dylan Moonfire’s 2015 Lexember work; that year he’d come up with 31 different words for units of measure in his conworld, and it struck me that a Lexember theme could be used almost like a writer’s prompt, the sort that a fiction writer might use to invigorate a stagnant idea. Rather than producing vocabulary for concepts I already had in place, I wanted to explore ‘what-ifs’ by letting new ideas develop from the previous days’ work.

The idea to explore date-cultivation specifically I arrived at rather arbitrarily. Other ideas I had were perfume- or glass-manufacture (I ultimately used glass as my 2018 Lexember theme) or river-faring and boatbuilding. But I had in the back of my mind the famously vast Somali vocabulary for camel-husbandry, which I’d seen produced by linguistically savvy people as a response to the linguistically unsavvy trotting out the ‘Inuit 40 words for snow’, and I felt that the rural economy was the most fertile place to begin exploring.

I nailed down only two bits of canon before I started making my words:

1.) That Twāo was a desert nation, and that their colonial ambitions were the result of their own country being deforested; and

2.) That the Twāo heartland was along the banks of what we call the Nile, but that they hadn’t lived there particularly long—less than 1000 years. This was important to some work I’d already done on a Sprachbund I wanted Karyol to be a part of—I wanted Karyol to be invasive but also well-established where it was spoken.

Zeke goes on to describe how he decided that the Twao had been oasis hoppers in the Sahara who later settled along the Nile, his world being an alternate history. There is a lot of worldbuilding detail in his email that I will let y’all read below, including how something alarming about his source material led to new inspiration, but long story short, the Twao chose date palms as a source of food, wood, and valuable trade goods that grows both on the oases that they came from and along the river where they settled down. From there, some research and careful thought brought him a great wealth of words that related to breeds of date palms, the type and quality of fruit, and so many other things involved.

He also discussed the cultural associations he made when he dealt with the polysemy of his words bgōe [ˈbɰɔ: e] refers to “1.) a distinguished and respected man (and specifically a man, and not a woman) or to 2.) a male date palm tree,” specifically because the properties of a male date palm in cultivation can be associated with a distinguished man — the idea being that because farmers keep only a few male date palms in order to fertilize the female trees, they would develop special relationships with them, with rituals to ensure fertility in the fields and a general respect for a venerable old tree that produces good stock.

Recently I have been reading Theories of Lexical Semantics by Dirk Geeraerts. It’s a broad historical review of lexical semantic theory starting back in the 19th century. Geeraerts early on highlights two strains of lexical semantic theory that are relevant here, which go by the names semasiology and onomasiology.

Semasiology focuses on the meaning of single words, particularly in terms of polysemy and semantic change. It’s what you do when you are describing the different senses of a word, or categorize the ways individual words change meaning, such as generalization, specialization, and other kinds of meaning shifts.

Onomasiology, however, sees the lexicon as a connected system. The name onomasiology contains the term onoma, deriving from the Greek for name. Per Geeraerts, this comes from the fact that an onomasiological point of view often discusses how we are finding names for and categorizing things in the world.

Put another way, as semasiological view would consider the mechanism by which computer shifted from “a person who computes as a profession” to “an electronic device designed to perform computations” as a fact about that word, and might say it’s some sort of lateral change along functional lines. An onomasiological view would point out that we invented this new electronic device for doing computations and we needed a word for it, and computer was a logical choice to fill the gap, especially as the profession computer was rapidly becoming obsolete.

Both of these views are important, and I think conlangers should have both in mind when building words. Having a semasiological point of view is useful when you are in the weeds of where this one word comes from and what secondary senses it has. Onomasiology is useful when determining what words you need in the first place, how the meanings of those words relate to the meanings of other words, and how your system generally is defining the world around your speakers. That said, I think that using a theme for your lexember words is a particularly good way to encourage more onomasiological thinking in the process.

You can find interesting ways of looking at lexicons onomasiologically when looking at smaller thematic subsets of a lexicon, such as kinship terms or color terms. Sure, the word uncle has a meaning all of its own, but it’s also part of a network of related terms that all define relationships between each other and with the ego, and it’s a system laden with cultural meaning. I can say that Chinese can translate uncle as 伯伯, 叔叔, 舅舅, 姨夫，or 姑夫, but until I explain the broader system, it doesn’t mean much. Even listing out the meanings — 伯伯 is your father’s older brother, 舅舅 is your mother’s brother, 姑夫 is the husband of your father’s older sister, etc — doesn’t fully explain the system, though it will start to get you there. The thing to understand, ultimately, is that Chinese distinguishes these terms based on birth order and whether relatives are part of your paternal line, distinctions that Chinese makes because they are historically culturally important for understanding who is considered part of your family and who has power within the family.

This is where picking a theme helps with onomasiological thinking — or thinking of the lexicon as a system that defines the world. It might be easy to take a list of words and make your conlang equivalents to them, but if you are picking a theme to riff off of, now you have to start deciding what words you are going to work with. The theme becomes the domain that you are coining words in, and as you build your words, you can build the web of references between them.

Choose domesticated animals and you have to decide what animals your conpeople raise, what the animals are used for, and what features will be salient. Will they have detailed distinctions of horses based on sex, age, and function as English does, or will they end up with similarly detailed vocabulary for camels (like Somali) or reindeer (like Saami).

Pick architecture and now you have the opportunity to research historical building technologies. Do your people have concrete? Arches? Adobe? Steel reinforcement? How does their environment shape their architecture? Are there frequent earthquakes or floods? Is it a warm, cold, or temperate climate? Do they have cultural considerations about which direction buildings face, or buildings that follow a specific plan that requires specialized vocabulary, like the cathedrals of Europe with their naves and apses?

All of this feeds into the two questions you need to ask: What things are in the speakers’ world, and how do they understand those things? With the right approach and the right theme, you can turn a conlanging exercise into a rich worldbuilding exercise. I had considered ending this episode with my own list of themes that I would present for Lexember conlangers would follow, but I think ultimately each conlang is unique, and you may know better what semantic categories you need to develop better than me. So if you’ve got a theme or several, or if you’re following one of the lists, I hope this has been helpful for y’all to figure out where to go from there. As always, I will be watching Lexember posts on Twitter and Tumblr and trying to highlight some favorites. I hope that I’ll also be able to participate.

Thank you all for listening, and happy conlanging!

Zeke’s Email

George,

Karyol, the language of the date-palm-growers, is spoken in a country called Twāo by a people called the Twāogowe. But going into Lexember 2017, I didn’t know much about them besides their name. The Twāogowe are actually the ‘bad guys’ in my conworld—they’re imperialists, and the premise of the project has always been (though it still remains unrealized) to produce creoles in each of Twāo’s occupied colonies with Karyol as the superstrate language and local languages as the ad- and substrate languages. I actually discovered your podcast rather accidentally in the summer of 2014 when I was doing some googling about concreoles, and found you’d just released Episode 101 ‘Pidgins and Creoles’. Sometime in 2014, though, my conlanging and my world-building became uneven activities—I had devoted a lot of time to the culture of the occupied peoples, which I explored in part in Lexembers 2015 and 2016, but even as the Karyol grammar was expanding, I had very little written about who its speakers were. It got to the point where I was having trouble developing a mature and internally-consistent lexicon. For example, I knew that Karyol verbs would pay more attention to lexical aspect than to—for example—manner, so that ‘to cut into’ (karta) and ‘to sever’ (cyiha) would be separate words, but not ‘to cut with a knife’ (ritumu karta/cyiha) and ‘to saw’ (reacwa karta/cyiha). But I didn’t know how their level of technology would require them to make distinctions like ‘to amputate’, ‘to engrave’, ‘to mine’, etc etc. In fact, my actual impetus for determining where in time Twāo would be was that I had developed a complex lexicon for discussing flint-knapping, which I had completely fallen in love with, and I was pulling my hair out trying to determine if these words had a home in Karyol or not. I knew the Twāogowe weren’t a Neolithic people, but I just didn’t know how removed from the Neolithic they were. Did they have more in common with the ancient Egyptians or with the British Empire? Could the flint-knapping words exist in Karyol, maintained by semantic drift and metaphor, or had these words fallen by the wayside centuries or millennia before?

I had been very impressed by conlanger and writer Dylan Moonfire’s 2015 Lexember work; that year he’d come up with 31 different words for units of measure in his conworld, and it struck me that a Lexember theme could be used almost like a writer’s prompt, the sort that a fiction writer might use to invigorate a stagnant idea. Rather than producing vocabulary for concepts I already had in place, I wanted to explore ‘what-ifs’ by letting new ideas develop from the previous days’ work.

The idea to explore date-cultivation specifically I arrived at rather arbitrarily. Other ideas I had were perfume- or glass-manufacture (I ultimately used glass as my 2018 Lexember theme) or river-faring and boatbuilding. But I had in the back of my mind the famously vast Somali vocabulary for camel-husbandry, which I’d seen produced by linguistically savvy people as a response to the linguistically unsavvy trotting out the ‘Inuit 40 words for snow’, and I felt that the rural economy was the most fertile place to begin exploring.

I nailed down only two bits of canon before I started making my words:

1.) That Twāo was a desert nation, and that their colonial ambitions were the result of their own country being deforested; and

2.) That the Twāo heartland was along the banks of what we call the Nile, but that they hadn’t lived there particularly long—less than 1000 years. This was important to some work I’d already done on a Sprachbund I wanted Karyol to be a part of—I wanted Karyol to be invasive but also well-established where it was spoken.

Based on just those two notions, I decided that the Twāogowe had previously been nomadic oasis-hoppers, and that I needed to find a commonality between living along the side of an oasis and living along the side of a major river to develop my idea of what their economy would look like. I felt they couldn’t be pastoralists: their version of the Sahara is wetter than ours, but still too dry to build a booming economy on herding goats back and forth. But palm trees grow well both in Sahara oases and along the Nile. The processed trees can be used as building supplies, textiles, basket-fibers. The sap can be fermented, and cultures who do this in our world attach a lot of importance to palm wine. The dates themselves can be both a staple food to those who grow them but also a luxury to those who don’t, and I could easily see how trading them could be prosperous. And, I learned, there were dozens if not hundreds of different cultivars and several different but closely related species, some of which produced lumber suitable for building, others which did not; some which produced fruit similar to but different from dates, i.e., the douma palm. There was a mature science of propagating the plants through cutting and grafting; and an even older superstitious pseudoscience concerned with which plants would be most suitable to graft. Controlled fertilization required intimate human intervention, and this was dangerous work: not only because the height of the tree but because the flowers are protected by thick spines, long and sharp and sturdy enough to puncture a truck tire; one-footed date-palm farmers are far from a rarity. There was absolutely enough material to explore Twāogowe technology and to make it interesting and fun; I also didn’t know anything about horticulture, and I thought of it as an opportunity to explore a facet of the world I’d never really given pause to consider before. Ultimately, I didn’t place Twāo in time as specifically as I did in Lexember 2018 when I explored their manufacturing technologies, but I really felt I developed a good sense of who these people are.

My favorite aspect of conlanging is developing a polysemous lex, and my technique doesn’t change much from project to project. I have a broad collection of dictionaries, and I’ll select a couple as inspiration for a particular language. Karyol uses Mous, Qorro, and Kießling’s Iraqw-English Dictionary, Leslau’s Concise Amharic Dictionary, Newman’s A Hausa-English Dictionary, Gamta’s Comprehensive Oromo-English Dictionary, and Dent and Nyembezi’s superb Scholar’s Zulu Dictionary. In the case of the one-way dictionaries, I’ll also use Wiktionary or an online dictionary to search English-to-target-language. When developing a polysemous sense, I’ll look up an English word’s different senses in one of the target languages; in the case of Karyol, I usually start with Zulu. I’ll then look up all the different senses listed under the English in the Zulu-to-English side. I’ll then take those senses and look them up in the other dictionaries; I usually do two or three passes. When I have a dense collection of senses, I’ll identify what I want to be the primary metaphor, and then eliminate the senses that I can’t tie back to this metaphor.

My primary source material for information on date cultivation were two articles written by Paul Popenoe around the time of World War I, Date Growing in the Old World and New and The Propagation of the Datepalm: Materials for a Lexicographical Study in Arabic. The papers are actually fantastic: the former explains in exacting detail traditional agricultural methods from North Africa to farmers growing dates in the American Southwest, and the latter is an exploration, to some extent linguistically sound, to some extent folk-etymological, of the Arabic vocabulary of date-cultivation. Paul Popenoe, however, was not a fantastic person. He was not only a horticulturalist but also a eugenicist and a proponent of the compulsory sterilization of the intellectually disabled. It’s really chilling to think of him considering people in the same way he might have considered a plant that needed pruning. I didn’t discover this about him, though, until after I had already prepared most of Lexember; at that point, not only had I read and reread these articles myself, I’d also recommended them to another conlanger working with plant words for Lexember. It was sick and awful feeling when I finally decided to look him up on Wikipedia. The shock I registered when I read about his beliefs about genetic ‘betterment’ I wrote into the project, as I’ll discuss below.

I also referenced Ancient Mesopotamian Agriculture (1952) which I used to figure out how a desert orchard without the benefit of electricity might function and to decide how to handle words for ‘pollen’ and such. I also managed to track down a working date farm in the southwest US that had extensively photographed their greenhouses and orchards and posted these photos online, which gave me a good idea of what these things looked like, both the plants themselves as well as grafting techniques and other horticultural strategies that I was familiar with before. Finally, some of the more abstract notions I developed came from a recent reading of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough; I hadn’t read the book expressly for Lexember, only out of my own interest in comparative religion and mythology, but the text was fresh on my mind and absolutely directed a couple of my lexes in less concrete directions.

Insofar as the lexes themselves go, I feel there are a few in particular that make the Twāogowe stand out among real-world peoples who cultivate dates.

Lexember 4^th was bgōe [ˈbɰɔ: e], a word that refers to either 1.) a distinguished and respected man (and specifically a man, and not a woman) or to 2.) a male date palm tree. If memory serves, I recall reading that one male date tree can fertilize up to 400 female trees, and as such date orchards are primarily filled with female trees (łoagyol, the same word used for a mare or female camel) with only a couple of male trees sequestered from the females to prevent unplanned fertilization. Dates take several years to mature, and I reasoned that these male trees would need to have established pedigrees, like stud dogs or stallions; you wouldn’t want to spend years growing a tree that turned out to be a dud. Farmers, I imagined, would probably have a deep emotional connection to their most fecund bgōe. But I remembered reading in The Golden Bough that agricultural peoples tend to have ambivalent relationships with their crop-spirits, for they can provide, but they can also refuse to allow a field to be fruitful. For these reasons I pictured Twāogowe legwēto (‘date horticulturalist’, Lexember 25^th) to revere their bgōe as the living embodiment of date-spirits, celebrating them with wine and cake, both because of their emotional attachment to an abundantly-producing tree, but also to appease the tree and to keep it producing.

Lexember 12^th was nea [ˈnɛ æ], 1.) the small, seedless, deformed fruit of unfertilized female date flowers; 2.) a blind monster from Twāo myth who eats teeth and who’s associated with the dangers of unorthodox thinking.

Nea-the-monster’s association with the unconventional stems from common-sense-thinking about date fertilization; by grafting a new female tree from a healthy mother-tree and by fertilizing it with the pollen of a bgōe with certain known characteristics, one is able consistently to produce healthy dates. By letting the trees fertilize naturally, the unconventional approach, a significant portion of one’s yield is bound to be the inedible seedless deformed nea-fruit. Nea-the-monster’s association with teeth stems from my own observation that, with a good bit of imagination, the unfertilized date flowers look like strings of teeth. Further, I imagined that any nea-fruit that was inadvertently produced would be used to make a kind of moonshine, and that people who drank too much of such liquor would be associated themselves with a variety of health problems, including blindness (as we ourselves talk about blind shiners) and tooth decay.

Finally, Lexember29^th was ubua, the word in which I registered my disgust and the kind of man Popenoe was. ubua is 1.) A datepalm grown from a seed (as opposed to one produced by grafting); 2.) a dateplam one in unable to identify, either because he’s an unskilled gardener or because he’s too far away to inspect it; 3.) a foreign laborer.

You’ll remember that the Karyol-speakers are the bad guys in this conworld, imperialists who see their colonial subjects as a means to an end. I felt their thinking might very well stray occasionally into territory as dark as Popenoe’s. Sense (3.) is a metaphorical extension of the previous two senses—a foreign laborer is one who is wild, ‘grown from a seed’, someone whose work ethic and his personal character can’t be known; and like a wild-grown datepalm, which will almost undoubtedly produce inferior fruit, a foreign laborer might be useful in the short term but has no long term value (just as datepalm lumber, except for the douma palm, is suitable for building fencing and scaffolding but isn’t strong enough to build lasting structures).

~

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to write all this down. I took notes while I was working on the words two years ago, but most of this was just pulled from memory—and it’s great to get it down before it disappears. Hope it’s something you can use, too.

Best,

Zeke