Currently in my constructed-language work for The Curse of Steel, I’m selecting word roots from my script-generated list of all the legal possibilities.

I’m not being particularly systematic here. I started with the roots for several names I had already settled on during early development, and from an earlier word-list that I built before I started getting my computer to help out with all this. (Along the way, I discovered that I had broken some of my own rules about legal word-root formation. Time to make minor tweaks to the word-lists!)

With that finished, I’ve been grabbing words from a variety of sources: color terms, the numerals from one to ten, and so on. I’ve even pulled down my copy of the Silmarillion and started paging through the appendices for ideas – that’s kind of a ready-made list of vocabulary prompts for any naming language! Not that I’m slavishly imitating any one source, but if my final lexicon ends up sounding vaguely Indo-European and vaguely like Sindarin, I suppose I can be accused of stealing from the best.

So far I’ve got about 80 word-roots. The list follows, taken straight from my growing spreadsheet. A couple of notes first.

You’ll notice the word roots incorporate some numerals and special characters. Those are meant to represent some phonemes that would normally be expressed with more than one character. That way, when I pull them over to be processed by another Perl script, I won’t have to fuss too much with parsing those out. If you know anything about PIE phonology, you’ll probably recognize that I’m using a similar set of three “laryngeal” consonants, that will disappear from daughter languages but give rise to a variety of vowel colorations. Other special characters represent aspirated or labialized consonants (e.g., representing the differences among phonemes we might pronounce as g-, gh-, or gw-).

Meanwhile, every word root has a “weight” attached. This is something I built into the script to generate the word roots, to enforce some assumptions about which phonemes are most common.

Ur-Language Root	Weight	Part of Speech	Meaning	Notes
re2n	567	Adverb	Particle for future aspect of verbs
we2	489	Adverb	Particle to indicate negation of verbs
2sper	352	Adverb	“away”
te2n	440	Conjunction	“and”
rey	540	Noun	“chieftain, noble, king”
d2en	440	Noun	“man,” also numeral “ten”
we@	420	Noun	“water”
ke2m	392	Noun	“hand,” also numeral “five”
kest	392	Noun	“head”
@e2n	378	Noun	“tree”
2eng	378	Noun	“iron”	Probably borrowed from another language group
%en	360	Noun	“girl, woman”
1kwes	313	Noun	“lake, pond, pool”
me2r@	302	Noun	“fate, doom”
$2er	252	Noun	“home, dwelling”
ke3lm	196	Noun	“hill, knoll, rock”
ye1	480	Numeral	“one”
kens1	403	Numeral	“seven”
tre1s	403	Numeral	“three”
2tes	392	Numeral	“two”
semt1	358	Numeral	“six”
we2rs	352	Numeral	“four”
let3	244	Numeral	“eight”
pen@3	189	Numeral	“nine”
weyt	N/A	Verb	“to know, to see (visions)”	Not a legal ur-language root, probably borrowed from another language group
1es	640	Verb	“to be” (indicating a state of being)
ken	630	Verb	“to think, to engage in spiritual activity”
ret	630	Verb	“to guard, to protect”
wer	630	Verb	“to die”
ne2r	567	Verb	“to be glorious, to be brilliant”
tren	567	Verb	“to be stiff, to be taut, to be mighty”
mew	560	Verb	“to partition”
re@	540	Verb	“to hit, to strike”
kres	504	Verb	“to mix up, to confuse”
me2r	504	Verb	“to crowd, to form a crowd”
kel	489	Verb	“to be cold, to be chilly”
nek2	441	Verb	“to strip away, to expose”
pret	441	Verb	“to exchange”
terk	441	Verb	“to break”
t2er	440	Verb	“to crash, to smite”
dren2	396	Verb	“to lengthen, to be long”
gre1n	388	Verb	“to sanctify, to make a treaty”
1@em	384	Verb	“to stand”
$er	360	Verb	“to turn”
me3r	360	Verb	“to be large, to be great”
kre2s	352	Verb	“to be black”
ke3	350	Verb	“to bend”
2lew	342	Verb	“to flow (like water)”
kelt	342	Verb	“to hammer, to work with metal”
welk	342	Verb	“to tear”
teym	336	Verb	“to encircle, to finish (a circle)”
de3n	315	Verb	“to give, to receive a gift, to be guest-friends”
dre3	315	Verb	“to have sacred power”
ke3r	315	Verb	“to run”
kre2w	308	Verb	“to make a harsh sound, to croak”
sen2@	302	Verb	“to be old, to be ancient”
2el@	293	Verb	“to be white”
2ewg	293	Verb	“to hear”
te$	280	Verb	“to be wild, to be free”
ske2t	274	Verb	“to hate”
te2lm	274	Verb	“to spread”
#e2n	252	Verb	“to go, to walk”
ke3rs	252	Verb	“to stand tall, to tower”
wer#	252	Verb	“to threaten”
de3w	244	Verb	“to be dark (in color)”
k3el	244	Verb	“to be whole, to be unmarred”
kwe3	244	Verb	“to be loyal”
le3k	244	Verb	“to burn, to set aflame”
we3k	244	Verb	“to speak, to call”
kle2w	240	Verb	“to cut, to slice”
g2els	235	Verb	“to be green”
ske2@	235	Verb	“to darken”
de1#	224	Verb	“to take”
@er#	216	Verb	“to bite”
1rew#	201	Verb	“to be red”
te2$	196	Verb	“to hurt, to harm”
3re$	180	Verb	“to straighten, to direct”
$2ey	168	Verb	“to be blue”
$eyt	168	Verb	“to be white”
de!	140	Verb	“to divide”

I think I’ll probably generate a few dozen more roots, then copy them into a separate spreadsheet where I’ll build actual words. Most of the roots will make perfectly good words without modification, but I’ll also apply some of the word morphology rules I’ve worked out to derive more words. I imagine I’ll have as many as 200-250 words by the time I’m done, enough to form the basis for a decent naming language. Then to build Perl scripts to apply the sound-change rules.

Once that’s done – no doubt with a certain amount of tweaking to suit my aesthetic tastes – I’ll have a system by which I can quickly create and record new words as I write the story. In three different, but clearly related, languages!

Lots of work up front, to save a lot of work and frustration later. That’s what computers are for, right?