Well, in Japanese you wouldn't be able to just have "nam" by itself since all syllables have to end in a vowel or "n" .....and Tsunami is Japanese if you didn't know.
Thing is, this systematic derivation still produces a conlang that doesn't look or sound natural. Languages evolve, and they also rarely do so in isolation. Meanings of words outright drift. There will be irregular words that don't follow your rules 100%. Words fall out of favor. Languages borrow from each other. I'd like to add the following tips: 1. Don't just develop one conlang; develop several in parallel. They don't have to achieve the same level of detail as your main conlang, perhaps only as stub phonotactic and phonetic rules and a partial lexicon. This allows you an extra source to draw words from. Decide whether these parallel conlangs are localized to one region (providing local place names, etc.) or widespread (where you can import multiple words). By extension, save your old conlangs (even the crappy ones) to use as fodder for new words, and do not be afraid to use obscure natural languages as sources too, with meaning and pronunciation suitably altered. 2. Do reinvent the wheel on occasion. Synonyms happen. Individual meanings and even whole words do fall out of fashion. Neologisms happen. Let them happen, and document where and when they happen. Don't be afraid of rendering some of your previous work obscure. 3. Do make holes in your derivations. Natural languages don't have every spot in their matricies filled (either in their rules or their lexicons). This will serve as placeholders for neologisms to fill, either because the old word never existed or simply fell out of favor. Do occasionally consider not filling these blanks at all. This goes for meanings and words - I would have struck out the "(n) fish" meaning of "namai" (or more likely, note as archaic usage) because the word generalized from fish to any kind of water dweller, but keep the "(v) to fish" meaning. 4. Do introduce some irregularities. Natural languages are not perfectly regular, so don't make your constructed languages perfectly regular, especially in the most commonly used and basic words. Do make the occasional form that is a little out of whack with the rest. Basically, rip a few pages from real linguistics books and apply a few lessons on how languages change in real life. I've found this gives a conlang more weight of history behind it (as it is organically grown and pared down again) than slavishly following a construction kit, because native languages weren't constructed with any construction kit.
I would always suggest making two conlangs at the same time. Reason? Loanwords! Loanwords occur in the language of every culture that is not isolated. I would suggest anywhere between ten and fourty percent loanwords or words of unclear origin.
I built a language for my D&D campaign setting world, so in the spirit of a pen & paper dice rolling game, I rolled the majority of my root words with dice! I set up an onset, nucleus, and coda list associate to various die types, threw in some conditional liquid additional rolls, and began to go through a list of lexical elements I wanted to generate. BAM random word generator!
I just make up Romance language variants. If my players can draw meaning from it, they still have to look out for sarcasm and false cognates -- just because it's called Greenland, that don't mean it's green...
Funny. You can almost see just from the word for 'river' that your fictional country is landlocked. It's the river that gives trade, and it's also the river where you fish, while any civilisation with direct sea access would have fishers going there rather than in the river.
Or maybe the people that speaks it lives inland, and the people that is in power in the country lives near the sea. But then there wouldn't be a mighty Oa Empire.
Didn't ancient civilisations view the sea as inherently dangerous or chaotic? I know that there is a bronze bowl that was used by ancient Israelites to show how God was able to contain even the chaos/sea, at least in theory.
I tend to take a somewhat mixed approach to heavy use of derivation. For example, their might be a whole lot of words derived from "nam" (to use your example), but a number of these would be synonyms or metonyms for non-derived words. So you might have the derived "namai" to refer to fish or other fresh water creatures, but you might also have the root "selo" to refer to the same set of animals or even a subset of them but which covers most of the animals referred to by "namai" (perhaps "selo" excludes fresh water animals that they don't eat). The derived words might also be used in a more poetic or metaphorical sense in opposition to the non-derived "plain" roots. So you might have "nami" (the passage of time) vs. "atik" referring to the same concept, but it doesn't immediately conjure up the idea of time as a river flowing towards the sea. So I tend to use derivation to start with, then fill out the lexicon again with non-derived roots for the same or similar concepts, then shifting the derived words slightly in meaning to a more... poetic register. They might still turn up in everyday speech, but speaking of the passage of time as "nami" rather than "atik" might be considered overly poetic, a sign of education, looked down on, etc. depending on how the culture in question regards the use of such language.
8:38 if you don't wanna have similar sounding words due to derivation, instead of not deriving at all, you could try to make the new word evolve, changing phonologically. For example, namai could easily evolve to manai, naima, nanaa or anything else, thus sounding different enough from the root word, nam.
Acronym process: take a phrase from English and see if it's acronym is comprehensible. Be excellent to each other -> beteo (can be passed off as a greeting and a fun Easter egg) Don't forget to be awesome -> dftba (doesn't work)
I really wanna create my own conlang but I never get further than creating a sound system and a bit of grammar before I'm already bored of the concept and have to come up with a different one
I can relate. I have 10 conlangs currently, and all of them are incomplete due to me losing interest. The same goes for my writings or drawings. I need to work out a plan of action to combat this
With one of my languages, I decided that instead of making the word for "love" less ambiguous by splitting it up into several words, I decided to make it _more_ ambiguous by making the words for love, like, want, and need all the same. I also got rid of second person pronouns, so people can only refer to others in the third person. So lexically, there is no difference between "I need her" and "I love you." Context obviously matters in this language. And of course, it also says a bit about their cultural values if they think that loving, liking, wanting, and needing are all of the same thing.
Can I use the like/love/need/want convergence? I'm making a language for a species vaguely based off of cats, and I feel like this would be perfect for them.
I use something I call the "super-collider" method: basically take a word of the same meaning in two different language, take letters and mix and match into a new word that is easy to pronounce or sounds the most pronounceable by people. You can then set them against a grammatical system you feel comfortable with or are familiar with.
Well my language building is mostly fuck it, this sounds nice, let's stick this sound here, it works well enough, probably not exemplary world building but I don't need many words yet, so I'm fine, for now.
Though a certain logical flow wouldn't hurt to make it not seem like one's wordbuilding off the seat of your pants. Still, it's never a bad idea to only make words as you need them. That's what obsessive fanboys are for; they do all the hard work and you don't need to pay them for their labor of "love" 😆
Seskja 78787 glasses of beer in my *conlang* zeaventeoeachtenthauzendenzeavenhanderteneachtieozeavenenbeorenhllaesst I know its not as long but its still difficult to read compared to the language you wrote that in
Also 777777777777 glasses of beer in German Siebenhundertsiebenundsiebzigmilliardensiebenhundertsiebenundsiebzigmillionensiebenhundert siebenundsiebzigtausendsiebenhundertsiebenundsiebzig Gläser Bier
Oh man, I really missed your videos. Glad you're back! I have some piece of advice on the topic for those aiming for naturalism: -Natural languages tend to use a lot of derivational affixes that have the same meaning, the only difference being the words they can be applied to. So, it's perfectly reasonable to create for example 3 affixes to derivate tools from nouns, and apply each one of them to certain words. -The fact that you have an affix that forms, let's say, nouns from adjectives (perhaps the quality of being, like English -ness), doesn't mean that every adjective in your lexicon must be able to take that affix. You may really want to, because we all are suckers for symmetry, but keep in mind that natlangs are not symmetric.
I use this method: Every consonant and vowel means or is derived by something, so when I need to make a word, I can choose which sounds fit better. For example, M derives from "A Comfortable Place", H derives from "The Sacred World", I derives from "The Sky, the Gods, The Goodness..." and E derives from "The Earth, The Physical Form, Whatever Is Tangible". Mihe, literally "The Good Comfortable Place In The Tangible World", means Home.
I also tend to add "proffesion" to my derivation system. River profession - Fisherman, sailor, etc, depending on your culture. Sky profession - Pilot, aviator, etc Earth profession - Farmer, miner, lumberjack, depending on what your culture considers the most "earthly". Doesn't work for every concept obviously but it work for a lot.
About derivation making everything sounding kinda samey, wouldn’t applying a whole lot of sound changes and then being at a future point in that language’s history obscure some of the connections? The logical historical connections will still be there but they’ll be hidden away under the new phonologies of daughter languages.
YES! I purposefully didn't talk about sound changes because it feels like an entire topic in and of itself. For those you don't know, when you have a conlang 'done' you can apply systemic sound changes to the language to make related languages. Kinda like simulating real life language shift. These sound changes can mask some of the sameness of derivational morphology. Excellent response, pal. :)
David Peterson has video(s) about this topic. And conlanging in general, they're a great toolkit for anyone who is either conlanger and/or interested in linguistics.
That he does. I just figured that a video on this very subject would be in this instance faster than to a) buy the book b) wait the book to arrive (can't remember if he has an e-book version available, possibly) c) find the part with sound change c) read said part (or go to your bookshelf etc). *shrugs*
I like using a LOT of derivation, but not quite like in the video. I'm a native Polish speaker, and we have a pretty insane language when it comes to word formation. In limited cases you can just concatenate related words, and modify the result to be correct, you can always use several words to describe a thing "lava lamp", you can assign the meaning to an existing word, or the one I find the most interesting, you take a root word, and include one of the limitless prefixes or suffixes. An example from Polish: "bić" - (verb) to hit, "bijatyka" - (noun) a fist fight/a fighting game "zbić" - (verb) to take something down (usually by hitting) "pobić" - (verb) to beat something or somebody, both in the hitting sense, and the scoring sense "rozbić" - (verb) to break something, e.g. shatter a glass bottle "zabić" - (verb) to kill and many more These prefixes and suffixes don't mean anything, but they often modify words in a similar way and have a similar tone. E.g. "za-" is neutral and usually implies: ending something, a one-off thing, "next", among others. and "roz-" is somewhat negative and usually imples destruction, dismantling, chaos, an order to do something, etc. All of these verbs with -ć are the infinitive form of the verb. We have several dozens of ways to conjugate verbs to assign different meanings (tenses, actor(s) [incl. gender, m/f/"it"/"all-female"/"some-male"], passive/active, informative role vs an order, "adjectivication"), and verbs can sometimes also be modified with suffixes to turn them into nouns or job names
Artifexian The only thing that could make Avatar *even* better than it already is is if it had realistic fictional languageS or at least regional accents... The chinese characters as a written lingua franca are good, but the spoken language... ouch... Well, at least we conlangers can have fun creating hypothetical conlangs based on the culture :D
For very basic words, like names of family members(mother, sister, brother, father), animals (pig, cow, sheep), tools (spear, sickle, sword) it is good to use a different root/system. Most living languages draw these words from much more ancient languages, so they can often follow different rules.
I forgot! I'm so sorry! I was recently watching a youtube video, and the youtuber said "Links in the dooblydoo", and I've never heard that before, but I remember... 1 voice... I remembered EXACTLY what the voice sounded like, what the speakers (irl) face looked like, BUT I COULDN'T REMEMBER! THEN LIKE A MIRACLE, I REMEMBERED WHO IT WAS! AND THE PRECIOUS MEMORIES OF ME WATCHING YOUR VIDEOS CAME BACK! It was a miracle, to say the least.
Whenever I make a language I ususally try and make a language family with evolutionary history. Then I can use the derivation system, and then have: only some of the words survive in each branch, phonetic changes that make the words more different, semantic changes that make the connections less obvious, loanwords from other languages to spice things up etc. this way the language is much more varied and diverse in it's vocabulary and is also more natural and realistic. (also I get much more languages for all the other neighboring cultures already prepared)
I'm currently constructing a natlang for my worldbuilding project, and this really helps. One thing to note: natural languages derive their affixes from actual words, as you said about concatenation. For example, kasi = water, muku = place, kasimuku = water place/lake). As a language evolves, the root and the new word will diverge, and may eventually become seemingly unrelated. For example, our new word kasimuku could become gasauk, but the original word would become gasa. You could do a reanlaysis type thing, but this is a really good way to do this process naturally
In the ConLang I am working on, I've made an admitably weird system of word construction. Its pretty much a system where I have a list of basic small words that represent basic concepts, nouns and verbs, then to make more complex things, I take 2 or 3 of the basic "roots" and string them together to make a basic description of the object. Like you want to use the verb "to cook", you combine the basic Verb for "to make" with the basic noun for "fire". So essentially you are saying "To make with Fire". Then I will say the conjugation out loud a few times until I come up with more simplified or "slang" versions, cutting out minor sounds until I am satisfied.
I also imagine mathbuilding, numberbuilding, and sciencebuilding will be a very fun process; like, imagine tau instead of pi, electron charge being denoted as positive instead of negative, and imaginary numbers given a sign like negative numbers have.
We do all of our godly numerals in base tau. How unfortunate the peasants are to be so stupid as to not see how superior our system is, let alone see our new clothes.
I feel like this would help not only in language building but language learning. Teaches you to see the patterns and how certain words mean different things in different circumstances.
We don't actually even have a word for rivers specifically. We refer to anything and everything (but typically rivers) as "folyó" which means "thing that flows" or "flow-er" (but not "flower" :). I guess in some (rare) contexts this could parallel "favágó" (literally "treecutter") which is also more general than "lumberjack" and refers to anything, including tools, machines, and indeed on some occasions rivers, which cut trees. I can safely say that no one I know would ever refer to something which flows as "favágó" (unless, of course, the river is specifically mentioned _because_ of its tendency to cut trees, in which case it would not even be a metaphor, that's just what that word means.) Our language is pretty screwed, but it's fun :)
/rim/ means "lake" in my language, however it means any closed body of water, including puddles, and maybe raindrops because 1: they make puddles, and 2: raindrops are surrounded by the air
When it comes to my own fictional language (which I've been working on for quite some time), I honestly just pick a specific sound I like (in this case hard S, V, R sounds and such) and try to use it in ways that sound interesting. I do this while also largely making compound words as I expand the language. For Example: The word "A'vel" means "love", or "to love". The suffix "iir" (eer) means "born of", or "related to" In that way, the word "A'vellir" means "lover", one who is the object of your love.
@@seanmusich2o Fun thing is that's perfect, children (should be) and object of your love as well so you have a strong word that fits the right definitions
8:43 Don’t know why lots of conlangers loves to use Excel for wordbuilding Things could get quite messy overtime… IMHO, Notion is much better with markdown syntax and database (table view) which you could create a little page for each word and tag them (POS, grammatical gender, etc) (Not sponsored)
Artifexian, I asked this question on an older video already but I assume there's a higher chance you'll see it here. I wondered if you consider making a video on geography building. I started making maps for a fictional worlds and started to realize the importance of geographical features such as the location of continents, mountains and oceans on the climate and the people living in this world. Which zones are habitable, which are likely to face various types of natural disasters, which will develop early successful civilizations, where will deserts form etc. I'd be thrilled to see a video on the topic :)
It's excempliarly useful to know when one does conlang, if I recall a previous Artifexian video correctly about how the sounds of words might be affected by the geography of the culture that first spoke it. Personally, I'd love to see how the worldbuilding of the stat system (heaven) determine the worldbuilding of the planet and geography (land) and the conlang and culture is spoken (people). It almost gives a poetic link to how all things are connected and derive from one another a little bit. Though throwing a few oddball words to the lexicon to screw with future linguists does make it feel even more natural and authentic if you think about it.
this is something I am a a little passionate about, being a geology major and cartography geek, if you have any specific pointed questions, I would love to help
Right now I'm kind of struggling with what would be reasonably considered the maximum size for a volcanic island with a caldera. I'm trying to create a sort of XXL Iceland-Santorini hybrid for my civilisation, that's to say a large volcanic island with a major bay inside caused by either a collapse or ancient eruption (but I'm not quite sure how large is too large. I can find some extraterrestrial examples of such formations but I'm not quite sure about the conditions for this to happen). Additionally I'm having problems with defining where and how rivers would form on such an island. (glaciers?) Other than that I'm also trying to locate major deserts on my continents, and I'm trying to understand the effect of having a continent stretch over one of the poles of my planet. I realize these are still pretty generic questions but as I'm trying to divide my world into different areas that are relatively isolated from one another I'm having issues on how to do so.
I'm in awe, this was such a good lesson in so many aspects of language and linguistics I can barely believe it is less than ten minutes long. Now I'm feeling like picking up a notebook and creating a dozen languages just to practice these ideas.
I've just started coming up with derivations and oddly enough my first word was Star. Next up is Song as I want an Alphabet to be know as the Song of the people. (or the peoples' song) But coming out of star a 4-part deity structure was created and a basic afterlife idea
To give more variety to the system, have a couple sets of affixes, which use differently created roots to make words, kind of like how English uses Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Greek.
Really cool. I've always had this problem with conlangs (coming up with a varied yet ledgible lexicon), but I found an alternative way to work with it. In the same way a word has an onset, coda(?), and an offset, I made some of my conlangs use constructed words with a leading concept, a central grounding actualization, and trailing context. For example "star(person)plural" could refer to gods or aliens, "good health(place)" means a hospital with two concepts merged in the front, and "love(action)future" would mean to love someone/thing/place in the future, etc.... It feels a bit like the bastard child of German, Japanese, and the romance languages, but I quite like it XP (plus what language isn't a bastard of some previous language or ten XP)
Thanks, but I found your video on clicks to be very helpful since I was having problems clearly differentiating the three segments, but using clicks for the actualizations really did the trick X3
The parts of the syllable is onset, rhyme (which is made out of nucleus, coda). how grammaticalized is the trailing context. In your example it looks like conjugation. I think it's fine if the concept and context is oblige. Also using sound shifts can make it more interesting. In my proto-lang I have e.g. the word zal' (human) and I derived the word pazal'o (father [pa from papa] [o as gender marking]) from it. After some sound shifts these words become zal and paslu.
With my language, I translate letters, diphthongs, and digraph with new ones. For example. I > ha, d > g, ea> hu. Idea > haghu. H’s are also used changing the sounds of letters and have no inherent sound of their own. This leads to a lot of unique and unintended sounds. If the sounds don’t work create and exception or adjust the matrix
context: the culture im writing my more developed conlang for is a race of semiferal skeleton monsters. i applied this principle to one of my conlangs, and i ended up with the word for 'hunt/hunts' (re) informally meaning any gathering of family. the race im writing for veiws the act of hunting not in the context of survival or ending an animals life (witch does happen), but as a social activity shared with those you trust most. the word for family (yewnreror) also translates literally to 'hunts with me'
Artifexian I'm in college doing Deaf Studies in TCD. It's really interesting, but I'm just in first year. If I start conlanging now, I'll just get horribly confused.
Love this so much! The calendar videos were cool and well-made, but the conlang videos are what got me to subscribe in the first place. Totally changes the way I think about language. Thank you!
i know this video is quite old but just wanted to explain the "weird stuff" you get from translating "river" between english and hungarian. the typical hungarian word for "river" is "folyó" which essentially just means flowing [thing]. this has nothing to do with lumberjacks. however, google translate also gives the more poetic "favágó" as a translation which i've never heard anyone actually use but presumably comes from the fact that hungary, being a landlocked country, has many rivers which run through forests with "fa" meaning tree or wood and "vágó" meaning cutter. thus, a typical river could be said to be "cutting through the trees" thus, woodcutter, thus, lumberjack.
i'm creating a language that was formed from a language isolate pidgin with welsh that got a prestige vocabulary from swedish settlers during the 14th century. as you might imagine, i can't exactly just make a derivation system (nor would i really want to, to be honest). i'm currently trying to build a culture, and mindset for these words to lie in before actually creating a vocabulary, but when i do, i'm gonna have to go through every word in welsh, and swedish, AND make new words for the carryovers of the isolate language. maddening.
Sounds like fish and rivers have remained very important to this culture since long before agriculture, and still hasn't fallen out of focus enough that crops have coopted the meaning of namai.
Ever since I got the hang of adding sound changes to my conlangs I haven't bothered making any without any. It doesn't take too long and it could really patch up your homologousness issue (or make it worse if you add too many mergers, which tends to be any at all). P.S. I'm so glad you're uploading again!
My method of making words goes like this. 1. Go to google images. 2. Google the word I'm trying to make a word for. 3. Say whatever set of sounds comes to mind. 4. Check my phonology. It works incredibly well with nouns, as well as some verbs and adjectives. Course, it's hard to make words like "To do," but I manage.
I usually come up with a derivation strategy of around 5-8 different affixes and a couple of outdated ones to make my language naturalistic. I then derive new words from roots that are informed by my cultures world view. E.g. I had a suffix meaning many of the root and then derived the word for entourage from the root horse since horses are used by wealthy people for protection for the wealthy in the society. I like to make interesting connections between roots and derived words, I think that’s the funnest part of word building.
I'd love for you to do a video covering language evolution, and how to evolve your language and vocabulary over time. It's something I've tried to do with some success, but I always end up with a word that's far too short and can't really be changed any more, or a word that never changes again.
I love the techniques you use for building up derived words from a single root. I tend to only generate words when I need them, not create a word and all it's related terms at that point - with the exception of my triconsonantal languages, which prompted me to do a similar thing as you've done simply through trying to flesh out the derivational processes. But the metaphorical uses you've come up with are excellent. I'll certainly go back with a fine-toothed comb over what I've done in several of my langs after seeing this.
I have a simple little system of: Noun - Verb - Adjective - Where is a word becomes a verb, the suffix "Tsu" is added. If it becomes an adjective, the suffix "She" is added. The nouns have no suffixes.
Thank you for this video, I am struggling with wordbuilding at the moment. I think I should write more about my conpeople to get a better feel for them. Also thank you for not using background music, they usually distract me and makes it hard to focus to the speech.
Ye, the ditching of the background music has had a mixed reception. Some people hate that there's no music, others love it. I'm finding it hard to gauge what the actual opinion of Artifexia is.
Every change has it's supporters and opposers. I _can_ live with bg music in videos, especially if it's not overtly loud compared to the speech. I just prefer them this way.
I think maybe just have the music be quiet so that it's not potentially distracting, that might be a good compromise between the two, although personally I liked it without any music.
I just found you yesterday and at this point ive seen all of your language videos! Please continue to create these. I am currently creating a language based on your videos. Keep up the great work
Yes to the former and no to the latter. I'd imagine it would be at least 1 per month but there's no hard schedule. When a videos done it's done. Quality > quantity.
3:05, about affixation, does the affixes need to have any grammatical meaning or significance or just adding a bunch of letters to the word to change its meaning. Also, root words, these are like the most basic meaning of a word like water, river, hand, etc. I'm really struggling with these, slightly.
I like Esperanto Word building. Roots where prefix and suffix tells you immediately if the word is a noun or adjective, if it's plural or not, if it's past or future... Or outlier words that would immediately tell you if you're being asked a yes/no question.
For derivations, you definitely do need some grammar: Notice he kind of invented a (rudimentary) grammar on the fly: A system for affixation; a system for verbification; etc. But you don't really need to know how declination works to invent your root words. Of course it's important to think before you start: He chose to constrain his phonotactics CCVCC to the simpler CVC to make sure that he can add affixes later; that was a good idea. But yes, it may be wise to put a bit more thought into your grammar before you start, to avoid trouble when it comes to inflection, sentence structure etc.
I'm up at 12AM after watching the first few videos and my brain just has a giant question mark in it. I think it's telling me to sleep and come back later.
This is really helpful. The culture I'm building are very water-based, being from an archipelago. The little cultural twists you have here are great little bits that have got my juices flowing. Seems I need to redo my Lexicon!
+Artifexian I'm guessing taking a root (usually a verb) and putting a preposition before it as a prefix to mean something else: stō (to stay) > cōn-stō (to consist (of)) esse (to be) > in-esse (to be in) -- this one is more literal with adjectives, suffixes are used to derive different meanings: flāv-vs (yellow) > flāv-evs (yellowish) avr-um (gold) > avr-evs (golden) riv-us (brook) > riv-ulus (streamlet) then there are weird ones: anima (spirit) + ad (toward) + verto (turn) > animadverto (to notice, to turn attention towards) -- especially weird because 'ad' would usually go 'anima' There are a bunch of others.
For my language, I created a word for each of the ~61 semantic primes. These are my basic root words, and they give me a fair bit of scope to work with. Has anyone else tried a similar method?
I just wanted to let you know how much I learned from this video. Seriously, this gave me a brand new perspective of word building that makes my method look like utter trash. Thank you.
On the "Do the opposite of what english does lexicon-wise" point, I like combining things that we English-speakers would consider different, into one word, and splitting things that we would consider part of a whole, into separate words. For example: In my conlang, the word 'Nua' means both excitement, and fear; Whereas 'happy' is split into 'Net' and 'Nik'. 'Net' means joy, elation, glee, while 'Nik' means content, comfortable, or fulfilled. Like how Japanese combines the word for blue and green, while Russian splits blue into 'goluboy' and 'siniy'.
As someone quite interested in conlanging and creating concultures but having literally zero formal training whatsoever in linguistics beyond "Imma look this up on wikipedia", these videos are quite helpful! Though, I still have a lot of trouble wrapping head around some concepts XD One attempt at conlanging, Tstiktlet ("Tree-Speech") is more or less a bizarre language created from looking up Native American languages and liking the sound without comprehending the grammar, and borrowing at least one actual word fromC heyenne (the name Ayashe). From this one name, I've ended up with the prefix "aya" as a diminutive, as the name itself means "Little One", and so I;ve applied it to means "this thing small" for any applicable noun so "ayatsik"=sapling, small plant, bush, "ayayasqa"=cub, puppy, etc Probably clunky, but I'm still learning!
Been working on it for almost a year now on and off, and still don't even have the IPA down, (I know what sounds it has, but can never remember the symbols, I rarely have time to sit down and write it all out), and the grammar's the main issue for me; its OSV but I always trip up writing anything more complicated than simple "I did X" (or in this case, X I did) sentences. Any plans to look more into odder, much less English-y grammars in the future? :3
My favorite derivative is the system I used for my language, Gidurguyt. I metathesize verbs to create noun forms, then build different adjectives by appending a suffix. Daris: To Refine Sarde: Metal, A finished State, A Polished Craft Sardef: Refined, Finished, Improved Cusare: One who specializes in ornamentation, a dandy,
Ok, so I'm a beginner and pretty much learned from your vids and a few other here and there... from Xindaf and so on... I am a programmer who learns engineering in faculty and is passionate about storytelling and loves Tolkien... I am also passionate about music, drawing, making up small, scalable board games when I have nothing else to play on long train trips... yeah, I'm weird. I made a software to organize my lexicon. Also, I went and adopted the little I remember from my french class in high-school, about classifying verbs by their termination... which I applied to all the words in my conlang. Then some concepts from my native language, Romanian ( which you might find interesting - it's a dish of dacian base, some latin cheese, slavic and turkish salami and salad and some other few influences. For example you'd say "My name is Andrew" like so "Numele meu este Andrei" , so we have a SVO system, possessive pronouns are usually after the noun, but it is also a very versatile language, and you can pretty much mess it up a lot and it still makes sense. Check it out! Cheers!
a thing I've been doing for my first (personal) conlang is choosing a base word (more than not it's just random consonants) and then words similar or a part of will have vowels tacked at the end, for example Dt → Angle Dte → Direction Dteci → North Dtecu → South Dteca → East Dtecoi → West Dteqi → Front Dtequ → Back Dteqa → Right Dteqia → Left Dtefau → Up Dtefai → Down and also Ft → Feeling Fti → Happy Fta → Neutral Fte → Surprised Ftae → Scared Ftou → Disappointed Ftai → Excited Fto → Mad Fton → (In) Agony Ftan → (In) Pain Ftix → Paralyzing Ftiu → Peaceful/Tranquil/At ease Ftie → Relieved Ftio → Enjoying along with MANY other examples, even sometimes using the 'n word (which literally means not) as a suffix
Tsunami
Tsu *nam* i
Coincidence? I think not.
Yaakov19 woah
Nami means wave in japanese
Nam is thai for water
Coincidentally, naam means water in most of Tai languages.
Well, in Japanese you wouldn't be able to just have "nam" by itself since all syllables have to end in a vowel or "n"
.....and Tsunami is Japanese if you didn't know.
Thing is, this systematic derivation still produces a conlang that doesn't look or sound natural. Languages evolve, and they also rarely do so in isolation. Meanings of words outright drift. There will be irregular words that don't follow your rules 100%. Words fall out of favor. Languages borrow from each other. I'd like to add the following tips:
1. Don't just develop one conlang; develop several in parallel. They don't have to achieve the same level of detail as your main conlang, perhaps only as stub phonotactic and phonetic rules and a partial lexicon. This allows you an extra source to draw words from. Decide whether these parallel conlangs are localized to one region (providing local place names, etc.) or widespread (where you can import multiple words).
By extension, save your old conlangs (even the crappy ones) to use as fodder for new words, and do not be afraid to use obscure natural languages as sources too, with meaning and pronunciation suitably altered.
2. Do reinvent the wheel on occasion. Synonyms happen. Individual meanings and even whole words do fall out of fashion. Neologisms happen. Let them happen, and document where and when they happen. Don't be afraid of rendering some of your previous work obscure.
3. Do make holes in your derivations. Natural languages don't have every spot in their matricies filled (either in their rules or their lexicons). This will serve as placeholders for neologisms to fill, either because the old word never existed or simply fell out of favor. Do occasionally consider not filling these blanks at all. This goes for meanings and words - I would have struck out the "(n) fish" meaning of "namai" (or more likely, note as archaic usage) because the word generalized from fish to any kind of water dweller, but keep the "(v) to fish" meaning.
4. Do introduce some irregularities. Natural languages are not perfectly regular, so don't make your constructed languages perfectly regular, especially in the most commonly used and basic words. Do make the occasional form that is a little out of whack with the rest.
Basically, rip a few pages from real linguistics books and apply a few lessons on how languages change in real life. I've found this gives a conlang more weight of history behind it (as it is organically grown and pared down again) than slavishly following a construction kit, because native languages weren't constructed with any construction kit.
I would always suggest making two conlangs at the same time.
Reason?
Loanwords! Loanwords occur in the language of every culture that is not isolated. I would suggest anywhere between ten and fourty percent loanwords or words of unclear origin.
This seems like really helpful information! I'm surprised nothing like this was mentioned in the video.
In english, fish can actually mean any water animal too. (for example, jellyfish, starfish, those aren't actually fish.)
@@fronk850 I’m not, because unfortunately Artifexian doesn’t really care about naturalism
@@alexanderjoseph5380 when alone fish is only for fish, but in compounds it can refer to anything in the ocean yeah
Your word for cold should include that bilabial trill!
BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
NO.
bbwarnam / (n.)snow, ice, hail
(v.)to snow, to hail
@@redd_orsmthn hail god
Because brrrr?
I built a language for my D&D campaign setting world, so in the spirit of a pen & paper dice rolling game, I rolled the majority of my root words with dice! I set up an onset, nucleus, and coda list associate to various die types, threw in some conditional liquid additional rolls, and began to go through a list of lexical elements I wanted to generate. BAM random word generator!
That's a cool idea! Hope artefexian sees this
that's really cool
I just make up Romance language variants. If my players can draw meaning from it, they still have to look out for sarcasm and false cognates -- just because it's called Greenland, that don't mean it's green...
i have never seen a cooler way of making words than this
Funny. You can almost see just from the word for 'river' that your fictional country is landlocked. It's the river that gives trade, and it's also the river where you fish, while any civilisation with direct sea access would have fishers going there rather than in the river.
I ment the fictional country they speak this language in.
You know I hadn't consider this at all but I think this speaks volumes about why good conlanging is important...it tells us something about the world.
Unless the seas are actually as safe as earth's seas, and nothing big and aggressive lives in them.
Or maybe the people that speaks it lives inland, and the people that is in power in the country lives near the sea. But then there wouldn't be a mighty Oa Empire.
Didn't ancient civilisations view the sea as inherently dangerous or chaotic? I know that there is a bronze bowl that was used by ancient Israelites to show how God was able to contain even the chaos/sea, at least in theory.
I use the system:
- Basic
- Person
- Place
- Collection
- Abstract
- Adjective
- Animal
I'm using Artifexian's system
Fun fuct, Nam means water in thai
Fun fact fact, menam means river in Thai. Literally, mother water XD
yes
Fun fact, 'Nam means the Vietnam War in America.
tsuNAMi
uvun fuckud ut. lol
Your vids are so well made man.
His channel is awesome (btw I subbed)
The world feel so small when I found a two TH-camrs I watch watch each other.
Oh, it's you!
@@ValkyRiver Huh? You of all people?!
@@ValkyRiver Small world isn't it?
I tend to take a somewhat mixed approach to heavy use of derivation. For example, their might be a whole lot of words derived from "nam" (to use your example), but a number of these would be synonyms or metonyms for non-derived words. So you might have the derived "namai" to refer to fish or other fresh water creatures, but you might also have the root "selo" to refer to the same set of animals or even a subset of them but which covers most of the animals referred to by "namai" (perhaps "selo" excludes fresh water animals that they don't eat).
The derived words might also be used in a more poetic or metaphorical sense in opposition to the non-derived "plain" roots. So you might have "nami" (the passage of time) vs. "atik" referring to the same concept, but it doesn't immediately conjure up the idea of time as a river flowing towards the sea.
So I tend to use derivation to start with, then fill out the lexicon again with non-derived roots for the same or similar concepts, then shifting the derived words slightly in meaning to a more... poetic register. They might still turn up in everyday speech, but speaking of the passage of time as "nami" rather than "atik" might be considered overly poetic, a sign of education, looked down on, etc. depending on how the culture in question regards the use of such language.
Some great points here.
Was "atik" intentionally taken from the Hebrew word for ancient?
Every time you upload, it's like Christmas, except its not a disappointing gift I'm receiving.
Oh snap!
And it is now
tell you what, doing a year of linguistics at uni has helped me so much with conlanging, goodness
I bet.
Yes even one intro class will help you a lot
Glad to know for when I go.
WARNING Artifexian has uploaded
This is not a drill! I repeat, this is not a drill!
Whoop! Whoop!
Correct! It's a bilabial trill!
The Emergency Alert System has been activated
This is a Trrrrrill! I repeat, this is not a Trrrrrrrrrrrrrrrill!
@@1224chrisng Is it a trill or not?
8:38 if you don't wanna have similar sounding words due to derivation, instead of not deriving at all, you could try to make the new word evolve, changing phonologically. For example, namai could easily evolve to manai, naima, nanaa or anything else, thus sounding different enough from the root word, nam.
Acronym process: take a phrase from English and see if it's acronym is comprehensible.
Be excellent to each other -> beteo (can be passed off as a greeting and a fun Easter egg)
Don't forget to be awesome -> dftba (doesn't work)
Strong chance /dftba/ is a Klingon word. :P
@@Artifexian I concur
Artifexian or Georgian
Thanks, I’m SO USING THIS
We do this in Hebrew all the time
I really wanna create my own conlang but I never get further than creating a sound system and a bit of grammar before I'm already bored of the concept and have to come up with a different one
Preach. Can't tell you how many times I have gone through this same cycle.
I combat this by switching between two every few months so that I'll do each eventually.
@@keegster7167 Thou hath enlighteneth me.
I always build new languages similar to the previous with concepts I find pleasing, so I can make the excuse “language evolution 🤩”
I can relate. I have 10 conlangs currently, and all of them are incomplete due to me losing interest. The same goes for my writings or drawings. I need to work out a plan of action to combat this
With one of my languages, I decided that instead of making the word for "love" less ambiguous by splitting it up into several words, I decided to make it _more_ ambiguous by making the words for love, like, want, and need all the same. I also got rid of second person pronouns, so people can only refer to others in the third person. So lexically, there is no difference between "I need her" and "I love you." Context obviously matters in this language. And of course, it also says a bit about their cultural values if they think that loving, liking, wanting, and needing are all of the same thing.
Can I use the like/love/need/want convergence? I'm making a language for a species vaguely based off of cats, and I feel like this would be perfect for them.
@@axolirvin971 you should not need permission to get inspired by someone else's idea!
I use something I call the "super-collider" method: basically take a word of the same meaning in two different language, take letters and mix and match into a new word that is easy to pronounce or sounds the most pronounceable by people. You can then set them against a grammatical system you feel comfortable with or are familiar with.
lmfao good idea
Well my language building is mostly fuck it, this sounds nice, let's stick this sound here, it works well enough, probably not exemplary world building but I don't need many words yet, so I'm fine, for now.
Totally! Whatever works. There's no one correct way of doing it. :)
Though a certain logical flow wouldn't hurt to make it not seem like one's wordbuilding off the seat of your pants. Still, it's never a bad idea to only make words as you need them.
That's what obsessive fanboys are for; they do all the hard work and you don't need to pay them for their labor of "love" 😆
minimooster Me too.
Seskja
78787 glasses of beer in my *conlang*
zeaventeoeachtenthauzendenzeavenhanderteneachtieozeavenenbeorenhllaesst
I know its not as long but its still difficult to read compared to the language you wrote that in
Also 777777777777 glasses of beer in German
Siebenhundertsiebenundsiebzigmilliardensiebenhundertsiebenundsiebzigmillionensiebenhundert siebenundsiebzigtausendsiebenhundertsiebenundsiebzig Gläser Bier
Oh man, I really missed your videos. Glad you're back!
I have some piece of advice on the topic for those aiming for naturalism:
-Natural languages tend to use a lot of derivational affixes that have the same meaning, the only difference being the words they can be applied to. So, it's perfectly reasonable to create for example 3 affixes to derivate tools from nouns, and apply each one of them to certain words.
-The fact that you have an affix that forms, let's say, nouns from adjectives (perhaps the quality of being, like English -ness), doesn't mean that every adjective in your lexicon must be able to take that affix. You may really want to, because we all are suckers for symmetry, but keep in mind that natlangs are not symmetric.
I use this method:
Every consonant and vowel means or is derived by something, so when I need to make a word, I can choose which sounds fit better. For example, M derives from "A Comfortable Place", H derives from "The Sacred World", I derives from "The Sky, the Gods, The Goodness..." and E derives from "The Earth, The Physical Form, Whatever Is Tangible". Mihe, literally "The Good Comfortable Place In The Tangible World", means Home.
I also tend to add "proffesion" to my derivation system.
River profession - Fisherman, sailor, etc, depending on your culture.
Sky profession - Pilot, aviator, etc
Earth profession - Farmer, miner, lumberjack, depending on what your culture considers the most "earthly". Doesn't work for every concept obviously but it work for a lot.
About derivation making everything sounding kinda samey, wouldn’t applying a whole lot of sound changes and then being at a future point in that language’s history obscure some of the connections? The logical historical connections will still be there but they’ll be hidden away under the new phonologies of daughter languages.
YES! I purposefully didn't talk about sound changes because it feels like an entire topic in and of itself. For those you don't know, when you have a conlang 'done' you can apply systemic sound changes to the language to make related languages. Kinda like simulating real life language shift. These sound changes can mask some of the sameness of derivational morphology. Excellent response, pal. :)
David Peterson has video(s) about this topic. And conlanging in general, they're a great toolkit for anyone who is either conlanger and/or interested in linguistics.
Osmorosvo He also has a book about conlanging. A vehemently anti-onion book about conlanging.
That he does. I just figured that a video on this very subject would be in this instance faster than to a) buy the book b) wait the book to arrive (can't remember if he has an e-book version available, possibly) c) find the part with sound change c) read said part (or go to your bookshelf etc). *shrugs*
I like using a LOT of derivation, but not quite like in the video. I'm a native Polish speaker, and we have a pretty insane language when it comes to word formation. In limited cases you can just concatenate related words, and modify the result to be correct, you can always use several words to describe a thing "lava lamp", you can assign the meaning to an existing word, or the one I find the most interesting, you take a root word, and include one of the limitless prefixes or suffixes.
An example from Polish:
"bić" - (verb) to hit,
"bijatyka" - (noun) a fist fight/a fighting game
"zbić" - (verb) to take something down (usually by hitting)
"pobić" - (verb) to beat something or somebody, both in the hitting sense, and the scoring sense
"rozbić" - (verb) to break something, e.g. shatter a glass bottle
"zabić" - (verb) to kill
and many more
These prefixes and suffixes don't mean anything, but they often modify words in a similar way and have a similar tone. E.g. "za-" is neutral and usually implies: ending something, a one-off thing, "next", among others.
and "roz-" is somewhat negative and usually imples destruction, dismantling, chaos, an order to do something, etc.
All of these verbs with -ć are the infinitive form of the verb. We have several dozens of ways to conjugate verbs to assign different meanings (tenses, actor(s) [incl. gender, m/f/"it"/"all-female"/"some-male"], passive/active, informative role vs an order, "adjectivication"), and verbs can sometimes also be modified with suffixes to turn them into nouns or job names
Yes! You're not dormant for the entire academic year!
Nope. Events have changed in my life. Except more videos.
+Artifexian expect not except. The one is telling someone to wait in anticipation while the other is about not including something.
Absolutely magical to me, a non-linguist! Thank you, this is fantastic!
No problemo. Glad you enjoyed.
Abso-bloody-lutely
MY CABBAGES!!!
Love avatar. Am rewatching it at the moment. It's still excellent.
Coincidentally I just rewatched that episode today!
I appreciated that Avatar joke so much.
Artifexian The only thing that could make Avatar *even* better than it already is is if it had realistic fictional languageS or at least regional accents... The chinese characters as a written lingua franca are good, but the spoken language... ouch... Well, at least we conlangers can have fun creating hypothetical conlangs based on the culture :D
For very basic words, like names of family members(mother, sister, brother, father), animals (pig, cow, sheep), tools (spear, sickle, sword) it is good to use a different root/system. Most living languages draw these words from much more ancient languages, so they can often follow different rules.
I forgot! I'm so sorry! I was recently watching a youtube video, and the youtuber said "Links in the dooblydoo", and I've never heard that before, but I remember... 1 voice... I remembered EXACTLY what the voice sounded like, what the speakers (irl) face looked like, BUT I COULDN'T REMEMBER! THEN LIKE A MIRACLE, I REMEMBERED WHO IT WAS! AND THE PRECIOUS MEMORIES OF ME WATCHING YOUR VIDEOS CAME BACK! It was a miracle, to say the least.
Whenever I make a language I ususally try and make a language family with evolutionary history. Then I can use the derivation system, and then have: only some of the words survive in each branch, phonetic changes that make the words more different, semantic changes that make the connections less obvious, loanwords from other languages to spice things up etc. this way the language is much more varied and diverse in it's vocabulary and is also more natural and realistic. (also I get much more languages for all the other neighboring cultures already prepared)
Thank you for this. Wordbuilding is probably the part of conlanging I've had the most trouble with when trying to conlang.
I'm currently constructing a natlang for my worldbuilding project, and this really helps. One thing to note: natural languages derive their affixes from actual words, as you said about concatenation. For example, kasi = water, muku = place, kasimuku = water place/lake). As a language evolves, the root and the new word will diverge, and may eventually become seemingly unrelated. For example, our new word kasimuku could become gasauk, but the original word would become gasa. You could do a reanlaysis type thing, but this is a really good way to do this process naturally
And here I thought that making the word for "Sibling" and "friend" the same was a cool idea. This video has helped me more than you could ever think.
The Pariah
That does seem like an interesting idea.
CodeKillerz Cheers.
In the ConLang I am working on, I've made an admitably weird system of word construction.
Its pretty much a system where I have a list of basic small words that represent basic concepts, nouns and verbs, then to make more complex things, I take 2 or 3 of the basic "roots" and string them together to make a basic description of the object.
Like you want to use the verb "to cook", you combine the basic Verb for "to make" with the basic noun for "fire".
So essentially you are saying "To make with Fire".
Then I will say the conjugation out loud a few times until I come up with more simplified or "slang" versions, cutting out minor sounds until I am satisfied.
I also imagine mathbuilding, numberbuilding, and sciencebuilding will be a very fun process; like, imagine tau instead of pi, electron charge being denoted as positive instead of negative, and imaginary numbers given a sign like negative numbers have.
Also...BASE 12 everything. #TheOneTrueBase
Mathbuilding and number building boggles my mind.
We do all of our godly numerals in base tau. How unfortunate the peasants are to be so stupid as to not see how superior our system is, let alone see our new clothes.
Mixed radix numeral systems it's where it's at. I'm telling you, it's The Next Big Thing!
Artifexian base 8 is countable on your fingers
I feel like this would help not only in language building but language learning. Teaches you to see the patterns and how certain words mean different things in different circumstances.
Can we all take a moment to appreciate how far Hungarian drifted off
We don't actually even have a word for rivers specifically. We refer to anything and everything (but typically rivers) as "folyó" which means "thing that flows" or "flow-er" (but not "flower" :). I guess in some (rare) contexts this could parallel "favágó" (literally "treecutter") which is also more general than "lumberjack" and refers to anything, including tools, machines, and indeed on some occasions rivers, which cut trees.
I can safely say that no one I know would ever refer to something which flows as "favágó" (unless, of course, the river is specifically mentioned _because_ of its tendency to cut trees, in which case it would not even be a metaphor, that's just what that word means.)
Our language is pretty screwed, but it's fun :)
/rim/ means "lake" in my language, however it means any closed body of water, including puddles, and maybe raindrops because 1: they make puddles, and 2: raindrops are surrounded by the air
When it comes to my own fictional language (which I've been working on for quite some time), I honestly just pick a specific sound I like (in this case hard S, V, R sounds and such) and try to use it in ways that sound interesting. I do this while also largely making compound words as I expand the language.
For Example:
The word "A'vel" means "love", or "to love".
The suffix "iir" (eer) means "born of", or "related to"
In that way, the word "A'vellir" means "lover", one who is the object of your love.
@@seanmusich2o Fun thing is that's perfect, children (should be) and object of your love as well so you have a strong word that fits the right definitions
8:43 Don’t know why lots of conlangers loves to use Excel for wordbuilding
Things could get quite messy overtime…
IMHO, Notion is much better with markdown syntax and database (table view) which you could create a little page for each word and tag them (POS, grammatical gender, etc)
(Not sponsored)
Artifexian, I asked this question on an older video already but I assume there's a higher chance you'll see it here. I wondered if you consider making a video on geography building. I started making maps for a fictional worlds and started to realize the importance of geographical features such as the location of continents, mountains and oceans on the climate and the people living in this world. Which zones are habitable, which are likely to face various types of natural disasters, which will develop early successful civilizations, where will deserts form etc. I'd be thrilled to see a video on the topic :)
It's coming. It may be awhile but it is coming.
That's a very exciting prospect. Keep up the good work :)
It's excempliarly useful to know when one does conlang, if I recall a previous Artifexian video correctly about how the sounds of words might be affected by the geography of the culture that first spoke it.
Personally, I'd love to see how the worldbuilding of the stat system (heaven) determine the worldbuilding of the planet and geography (land) and the conlang and culture is spoken (people). It almost gives a poetic link to how all things are connected and derive from one another a little bit.
Though throwing a few oddball words to the lexicon to screw with future linguists does make it feel even more natural and authentic if you think about it.
this is something I am a a little passionate about, being a geology major and cartography geek, if you have any specific pointed questions, I would love to help
Right now I'm kind of struggling with what would be reasonably considered the maximum size for a volcanic island with a caldera. I'm trying to create a sort of XXL Iceland-Santorini hybrid for my civilisation, that's to say a large volcanic island with a major bay inside caused by either a collapse or ancient eruption (but I'm not quite sure how large is too large. I can find some extraterrestrial examples of such formations but I'm not quite sure about the conditions for this to happen). Additionally I'm having problems with defining where and how rivers would form on such an island. (glaciers?)
Other than that I'm also trying to locate major deserts on my continents, and I'm trying to understand the effect of having a continent stretch over one of the poles of my planet. I realize these are still pretty generic questions but as I'm trying to divide my world into different areas that are relatively isolated from one another I'm having issues on how to do so.
I'm in awe, this was such a good lesson in so many aspects of language and linguistics I can barely believe it is less than ten minutes long. Now I'm feeling like picking up a notebook and creating a dozen languages just to practice these ideas.
I've just started coming up with derivations and oddly enough my first word was Star.
Next up is Song as I want an Alphabet to be know as the Song of the people. (or the peoples' song)
But coming out of star a 4-part deity structure was created and a basic afterlife idea
To give more variety to the system, have a couple sets of affixes, which use differently created roots to make words, kind of like how English uses Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Greek.
Nice addition. :)
Really cool.
I've always had this problem with conlangs (coming up with a varied yet ledgible lexicon), but I found an alternative way to work with it.
In the same way a word has an onset, coda(?), and an offset, I made some of my conlangs use constructed words with a leading concept, a central grounding actualization, and trailing context.
For example "star(person)plural" could refer to gods or aliens, "good health(place)" means a hospital with two concepts merged in the front, and "love(action)future" would mean to love someone/thing/place in the future, etc....
It feels a bit like the bastard child of German, Japanese, and the romance languages, but I quite like it XP (plus what language isn't a bastard of some previous language or ten XP)
I've never heard of this method advocated before but I think it sounds really cool. Well played, pal. :)
Thanks, but I found your video on clicks to be very helpful since I was having problems clearly differentiating the three segments, but using clicks for the actualizations really did the trick X3
The parts of the syllable is onset, rhyme (which is made out of nucleus, coda).
how grammaticalized is the trailing context. In your example it looks like conjugation. I think it's fine if the concept and context is oblige. Also using sound shifts can make it more interesting. In my proto-lang I have e.g. the word zal' (human) and I derived the word pazal'o (father [pa from papa] [o as gender marking]) from it. After some sound shifts these words become zal and paslu.
With my language, I translate letters, diphthongs, and digraph with new ones. For example. I > ha, d > g, ea> hu. Idea > haghu. H’s are also used changing the sounds of letters and have no inherent sound of their own. This leads to a lot of unique and unintended sounds. If the sounds don’t work create and exception or adjust the matrix
Yes! It's another one of these fine delicacies
Whoop! Whoop!
context: the culture im writing my more developed conlang for is a race of semiferal skeleton monsters.
i applied this principle to one of my conlangs, and i ended up with the word for 'hunt/hunts' (re) informally meaning any gathering of family. the race im writing for veiws the act of hunting not in the context of survival or ending an animals life (witch does happen), but as a social activity shared with those you trust most.
the word for family (yewnreror) also translates literally to 'hunts with me'
I really want to do a signed conlang, but I'd only confuse myself with the real sign language I'm currently learning (Irish SL). Maybe later.
Aw, if you ever do, send it on to me. Would be very interested in seeing a signed conlang.
Artifexian I'm in college doing Deaf Studies in TCD. It's really interesting, but I'm just in first year. If I start conlanging now, I'll just get horribly confused.
Love this so much! The calendar videos were cool and well-made, but the conlang videos are what got me to subscribe in the first place. Totally changes the way I think about language. Thank you!
Hey Artifexian, could you do a culture building video, i find that to be the toughest part of world building.
i know this video is quite old but just wanted to explain the "weird stuff" you get from translating "river" between english and hungarian. the typical hungarian word for "river" is "folyó" which essentially just means flowing [thing]. this has nothing to do with lumberjacks. however, google translate also gives the more poetic "favágó" as a translation which i've never heard anyone actually use but presumably comes from the fact that hungary, being a landlocked country, has many rivers which run through forests with "fa" meaning tree or wood and "vágó" meaning cutter. thus, a typical river could be said to be "cutting through the trees" thus, woodcutter, thus, lumberjack.
Edgar: good morning interweb
Me, watching this at 2 am: chacha real smooth
i'm creating a language that was formed from a language isolate pidgin with welsh that got a prestige vocabulary from swedish settlers during the 14th century. as you might imagine, i can't exactly just make a derivation system (nor would i really want to, to be honest). i'm currently trying to build a culture, and mindset for these words to lie in before actually creating a vocabulary, but when i do, i'm gonna have to go through every word in welsh, and swedish, AND make new words for the carryovers of the isolate language. maddening.
&C. Hi how are things that you have the same thing with you have a lot g37gdyhcdt5
I wonder if one couldn't extend that verb (namai) as like...to harvest. But I do like what you did, too.
Yup! Very doable.
Sounds like fish and rivers have remained very important to this culture since long before agriculture, and still hasn't fallen out of focus enough that crops have coopted the meaning of namai.
It really does does say a lot about the culture, doesn't it? I like that language can do that.
Ever since I got the hang of adding sound changes to my conlangs I haven't bothered making any without any. It doesn't take too long and it could really patch up your homologousness issue (or make it worse if you add too many mergers, which tends to be any at all).
P.S. I'm so glad you're uploading again!
Can you do a video about "managing" your language?
I can't figure out a good way to store words and meaning
I really think a simple spreadsheet is the way to go. I use google sheets.
I use Google Docs for _everything_
Your brain
Creeper Pro
That is an awful way to do it
My method of making words goes like this.
1. Go to google images.
2. Google the word I'm trying to make a word for.
3. Say whatever set of sounds comes to mind.
4. Check my phonology.
It works incredibly well with nouns, as well as some verbs and adjectives. Course, it's hard to make words like "To do," but I manage.
Ah, yes! Here's the conlanging I subbed for!
Glad you stuck around for it.
:)
"Lost luggage"
I haven't tried making any of the stuff in the series but this is really interesting and now I want to see the full language and/or world made
Our lord has descended
Hehe.
Hallelujah
Artifexian, is it okay that one of my religions I made has 1032 gods? That seems like a little bit too many
Ethan G26 -Amen- *NAM*
@@parthiancapitalist2733 It doesn't matter if it fits.
I usually come up with a derivation strategy of around 5-8 different affixes and a couple of outdated ones to make my language naturalistic. I then derive new words from roots that are informed by my cultures world view. E.g. I had a suffix meaning many of the root and then derived the word for entourage from the root horse since horses are used by wealthy people for protection for the wealthy in the society. I like to make interesting connections between roots and derived words, I think that’s the funnest part of word building.
You came back!!! I'm so happy
I did.
I'd love for you to do a video covering language evolution, and how to evolve your language and vocabulary over time. It's something I've tried to do with some success, but I always end up with a word that's far too short and can't really be changed any more, or a word that never changes again.
1:24 I start mashing sounds together until I get a basic root I'm happy with, "Nam"
Any memer ever: *Vietnam flashback*
I love the techniques you use for building up derived words from a single root. I tend to only generate words when I need them, not create a word and all it's related terms at that point - with the exception of my triconsonantal languages, which prompted me to do a similar thing as you've done simply through trying to flesh out the derivational processes. But the metaphorical uses you've come up with are excellent. I'll certainly go back with a fine-toothed comb over what I've done in several of my langs after seeing this.
Touching upon the sound change point brought up in one comment, you should make a video on doing sound shifts on a conlang.
On the list.
This video and your Selecting Sounds one are the two most helpful videos I have ever found on language construction.
Do you have a discord server or some other way where I can talk to you about conlanging?
I don't. Best place to catch me is on my sub: www.reddit.com/r/artifexian/
I have one if you'd like to join, we got nearly 100 people on it and we are all rather welcoming!
Conlang Critic has one which is quite good
Hahaha Sarky xd
Igor R. Neves No, we're from all over the world! Come join us :) discord.gg/ra5hDh2
I have a simple little system of:
Noun -
Verb -
Adjective -
Where is a word becomes a verb, the suffix "Tsu" is added. If it becomes an adjective, the suffix "She" is added. The nouns have no suffixes.
Thank you for this video, I am struggling with wordbuilding at the moment. I think I should write more about my conpeople to get a better feel for them. Also thank you for not using background music, they usually distract me and makes it hard to focus to the speech.
Ye, the ditching of the background music has had a mixed reception. Some people hate that there's no music, others love it. I'm finding it hard to gauge what the actual opinion of Artifexia is.
Every change has it's supporters and opposers. I _can_ live with bg music in videos, especially if it's not overtly loud compared to the speech. I just prefer them this way.
Artifexian. I could go either way really
I think maybe just have the music be quiet so that it's not potentially distracting, that might be a good compromise between the two, although personally I liked it without any music.
As an aspiring linguistic, your conlang related content never fails to make me smile
Also, I love to see the progress of your animations
Yay! So happy for a new video!
Me too. :)
What is the stress rule of Oa? My languages mostly have the first syllable
I just found you yesterday and at this point ive seen all of your language videos! Please continue to create these. I am currently creating a language based on your videos. Keep up the great work
So are you back for the foreseeable future? If so do you have a schedule?
Yes to the former and no to the latter. I'd imagine it would be at least 1 per month but there's no hard schedule. When a videos done it's done. Quality > quantity.
Well, then I think it is about time to welcome you back!
Huzza!
3:05, about affixation, does the affixes need to have any grammatical meaning or significance or just adding a bunch of letters to the word to change its meaning. Also, root words, these are like the most basic meaning of a word like water, river, hand, etc. I'm really struggling with these, slightly.
Not necessarily. In some languages each affixation has a particular meaning, and in others they don't. Yes, root words are exactly as you describe.
Artifexian Thankyou, luckily my vocabulary is still pretty small and basic, so at least know i can make more complex words, hahaha.
Thanks again!
He posted!
He did!
I like Esperanto Word building. Roots where prefix and suffix tells you immediately if the word is a noun or adjective, if it's plural or not, if it's past or future... Or outlier words that would immediately tell you if you're being asked a yes/no question.
2:18 LMAO "bowl-having-two-handles"
Shouldn't you make a grammar before a lexicon? Just to make sure your words fit it? Apart from that, great video as always
Some do, some don't. If heard equally valid arguments for both grammar before lexicon and grammar after lexicon
For derivations, you definitely do need some grammar: Notice he kind of invented a (rudimentary) grammar on the fly: A system for affixation; a system for verbification; etc. But you don't really need to know how declination works to invent your root words.
Of course it's important to think before you start: He chose to constrain his phonotactics CCVCC to the simpler CVC to make sure that he can add affixes later; that was a good idea. But yes, it may be wise to put a bit more thought into your grammar before you start, to avoid trouble when it comes to inflection, sentence structure etc.
Make your roots only, then grammar, then vocabulary
The processes can go in any order or side by side, it just depends on what works best for your language.
I'm up at 12AM after watching the first few videos and my brain just has a giant question mark in it. I think it's telling me to sleep and come back later.
You’re back!
Yup. Have been for while but youtube is REALLY bad at notifying subscribers. Grrrrrr
This is really helpful. The culture I'm building are very water-based, being from an archipelago. The little cultural twists you have here are great little bits that have got my juices flowing. Seems I need to redo my Lexicon!
Me: Let's go to nam
American boomers: aaaaaaaaah!!!!!!
Took a moment, but made me exhale sharply through my nose a little bit.
Tip: If you're building multiple languages, consider borrowings and calques.
Nearly every time i make a conlang my words follow the latin method of derivation
Which is?? I'm not familiar, sorry.
+Artifexian
I'm guessing taking a root (usually a verb) and putting a preposition before it as a prefix to mean something else:
stō (to stay) > cōn-stō (to consist (of))
esse (to be) > in-esse (to be in) -- this one is more literal
with adjectives, suffixes are used to derive different meanings:
flāv-vs (yellow) > flāv-evs (yellowish)
avr-um (gold) > avr-evs (golden)
riv-us (brook) > riv-ulus (streamlet)
then there are weird ones:
anima (spirit) + ad (toward) + verto (turn) > animadverto (to notice, to turn attention towards) -- especially weird because 'ad' would usually go 'anima'
There are a bunch of others.
King Keegster yeah although normally i skip using the exceptions as it can be fairly complected.
For my language, I created a word for each of the ~61 semantic primes. These are my basic root words, and they give me a fair bit of scope to work with. Has anyone else tried a similar method?
Artifexian is getting pretty namnam on TH-cam!
Are you considering making a math-notation system, I would love to see your take on that... Great channel, keep up the good work!
It's quite amazing that someone who makes videos on "world building" makes video on "word building." 😂
The two go hand in hand.
I just wanted to let you know how much I learned from this video. Seriously, this gave me a brand new perspective of word building that makes my method look like utter trash. Thank you.
never clicked on a popup that my computer makes that I actually hate and don't know how to turn off so hard
Hehe. Thanks for watching, pal. Hope you enjoy. :)
Reece Crump
My computer does that too. You can disable it in your settings, somewhere
That's helpful.
I know what you mean though, settings are a maze.
4:15 I almost read that as "nani."
YEEEES
:)
On the "Do the opposite of what english does lexicon-wise" point, I like combining things that we English-speakers would consider different, into one word, and splitting things that we would consider part of a whole, into separate words. For example: In my conlang, the word 'Nua' means both excitement, and fear; Whereas 'happy' is split into 'Net' and 'Nik'. 'Net' means joy, elation, glee, while 'Nik' means content, comfortable, or fulfilled. Like how Japanese combines the word for blue and green, while Russian splits blue into 'goluboy' and 'siniy'.
:)
:)
:^)
XD
As someone quite interested in conlanging and creating concultures but having literally zero formal training whatsoever in linguistics beyond "Imma look this up on wikipedia", these videos are quite helpful! Though, I still have a lot of trouble wrapping head around some concepts XD
One attempt at conlanging, Tstiktlet ("Tree-Speech") is more or less a bizarre language created from looking up Native American languages and liking the sound without comprehending the grammar, and borrowing at least one actual word fromC heyenne (the name Ayashe).
From this one name, I've ended up with the prefix "aya" as a diminutive, as the name itself means "Little One", and so I;ve applied it to means "this thing small" for any applicable noun so "ayatsik"=sapling, small plant, bush, "ayayasqa"=cub, puppy, etc
Probably clunky, but I'm still learning!
Works for me.
Been working on it for almost a year now on and off, and still don't even have the IPA down, (I know what sounds it has, but can never remember the symbols, I rarely have time to sit down and write it all out), and the grammar's the main issue for me; its OSV but I always trip up writing anything more complicated than simple "I did X" (or in this case, X I did) sentences.
Any plans to look more into odder, much less English-y grammars in the future? :3
My favorite derivative is the system I used for my language, Gidurguyt. I metathesize verbs to create noun forms, then build different adjectives by appending a suffix.
Daris: To Refine
Sarde: Metal, A finished State, A Polished Craft
Sardef: Refined, Finished, Improved
Cusare: One who specializes in ornamentation, a dandy,
Found from reddit. This is high quality interesting stuff and I've subbed! Time to binge!
Ok, so I'm a beginner and pretty much learned from your vids and a few other here and there... from Xindaf and so on...
I am a programmer who learns engineering in faculty and is passionate about storytelling and loves Tolkien...
I am also passionate about music, drawing, making up small, scalable board games when I have nothing else to play on long train trips... yeah, I'm weird.
I made a software to organize my lexicon.
Also, I went and adopted the little I remember from my french class in high-school, about classifying verbs by their termination... which I applied to all the words in my conlang. Then some concepts from my native language, Romanian ( which you might find interesting - it's a dish of dacian base, some latin cheese, slavic and turkish salami and salad and some other few influences.
For example you'd say "My name is Andrew" like so "Numele meu este Andrei" , so we have a SVO system, possessive pronouns are usually after the noun, but it is also a very versatile language, and you can pretty much mess it up a lot and it still makes sense. Check it out!
Cheers!
Your language is gonna be so cool when it’s finished, I’d love to learn it.
a thing I've been doing for my first (personal) conlang is choosing a base word (more than not it's just random consonants) and then words similar or a part of will have vowels tacked at the end, for example
Dt → Angle
Dte → Direction
Dteci → North
Dtecu → South
Dteca → East
Dtecoi → West
Dteqi → Front
Dtequ → Back
Dteqa → Right
Dteqia → Left
Dtefau → Up
Dtefai → Down
and also
Ft → Feeling
Fti → Happy
Fta → Neutral
Fte → Surprised
Ftae → Scared
Ftou → Disappointed
Ftai → Excited
Fto → Mad
Fton → (In) Agony
Ftan → (In) Pain
Ftix → Paralyzing
Ftiu → Peaceful/Tranquil/At ease
Ftie → Relieved
Ftio → Enjoying
along with MANY other examples, even sometimes using the 'n word (which literally means not) as a suffix