Who knew that building a constructed language would be so much work?

Okay, well, I knew that, because I’ve been struggling with it off and on for years. As often happens with my creative process, it’s a matter of building a workflow that will reliably produce good results. On many previous attempts, I’ve run aground on one step or another and had to stop and rethink – sometimes for months, while I worked on other projects.

So, the workflow seems to have turned out to be something like this:

1. I started by selecting the phonemes and basic word structure for words in an ur-language, reminiscent of Proto-Indo-European. I didn’t make any attempt to closely imitate the full glorious mess that is reconstructed PIE, but I built a set of rules that would lead to PIE-like words.
2. I wrote a Perl script to generate all the legal word roots in the ur-language, including adding some weights to help me get a plausibly uneven distribution in which phonemes were most likely to appear.
3. I dumped all of the generated roots, with their weights, into an Excel spreadsheet. That’s my master lexicon.
4. Now, when I need a new word, I start by browsing through the spreadsheet – possibly also looking at the etymology of similar words in real IE languages, so I can pick something plausible but not identical. I pick a root and assign it a meaning. Most of the roots have verbal meanings, then you get nouns, adjectives, and so on by adding inflectional suffixes.
5. Once I’ve generated one or more new word roots, I hand-copy those into an ur-language lexicon I’m building in a Word document. Each root is the header of a short section, and I spend a few lines laying out the potential verbs, nouns, and other items that are derived from that word.
6. Then I copy the word form I want to use into another Word document, which is the main lexicon for my complete language. There I apply the sound-change rules I’ve developed, give the resulting word or phrase a quick reality check (is it aesthetically pleasing to me, does it duplicate an existing word, and so on), and then save the result.

As of today, this workflow seems to be polished enough that I’ve been able to sit down and rattle off a few dozen new words, phrases, or names in no more than a couple of hours. (As opposed to struggling for days to be confident in a word or two.)

The results are pleasing, at least to me, and that’s the important part. I think I may be able to call this part of the process finished and get to other story-development tasks. I should now be able to generate new names and vocabulary in the fly. And, when my story gets to the point where my protagonist is meeting people from other cultures, it shouldn’t take me months on end to figure out what they will sound like.

Some examples might illustrate how this is working. Here’s a row from my Excel spreadsheet, recording a word-root that’s been particularly productive:

1@em

384

Noun

“earth, the earth”

Likely borrowed from another language

1

Here we have the word root, written in an idiosyncratic code I’m using to make sure all the phonemes require only one character each. The numeric value is the root’s weight, on a scale from 1-1000. Then the part of speech, a gloss of the meaning, any notes, and finally a note as to which “batch” the root was created in (so I can track any changes later).

This then goes into my ur-language lexicon, where the entry currently looks like this:

*h₁d^hem-

• Thematic verb root “to stand”
• Thematic noun root “resolute position”
• Thematic noun root (with neh₂– prefix) neh₂h₁d^hem- “battle line” (literally “where one stands”)
• Athematic noun root (Ø-stem) “the earth”
• Athematic noun root (ed^has­-stem) “human,” literally “child of the earth”
• Athematic noun root (neh₂-stem) “earth goddess”
• Athematic noun root (r-stem) “earth” (mass noun)

How do I pick roots? I basically follow Tolkien’s method, which was to riffle through his list and find something he considered both aesthetically pleasing and suggestive of the meaning. This root *h₁d^hem– certainly isn’t the same one that appears in PIE with that meaning; that would have been something like *d^heg^hom instead. In this case, I think I was inspired by a bit of Hebrew – adamah “red earth, ground.”

Anyway, you’ll see one of the final outcomes of that root in the partial lexicon I’ve laid out below. Basically I copy out the word h₁d^hemneh₂ (root plus an affix that indicates a theonym) and apply a series of (well-defined and organized) minor tweaks. The result: athenná “earth goddess.”

So, without further ado, a first lexicon for the gexan Tremárar, the language that will be spoken by Kráva and her friends in The Curse of Steel.

Personal Names

• akretetha “child of the bear,” from h₂kreted^has
• alikóra “white horse,” from h₂eld^h “white” + keh₃ras “horse”
• alitha “white one,” from h₂eld^has
• araiadan “kingly man,” from h₁rey “to rule, to be kingly” + dh₂en man”
• aregdani “protector of men,” from h₁reg^h “to protect” + dh₂eny “men”
• arevga “red one,” from h₁rewg^has
• arevírai “protector of warriors,” from h₁reg^h “to protect” + weh₁ray “warriors”
• axesa “ruler, governor,” from h₁g^hesas
• derga “cave lion,” from d^herg^has “plains lion”
• dóva “dark one,” from deh₃was
• drúthan “sacred tree,” from dreh₃ “having sacred power” + d^heh₂n “tree”
• dúvelka “dark wolf,” from deh₃w “dark” + welkas “wolf”
• kólma “unmarred one,” from kh₃elmas
• kráskora “black horse,” from kreh₂s “black” + keh₃ras “horse”
• kráva “raven,” from kreh₂was
• kúndan “loyal man,” from kweh₃n “to be loyal” + dh₂en “man”
• lóka “one who burns,” from leh₃kas
• múraxesa “great ruler,” from meh₃r “great” + h₁g^hesas “ruler, governor”
• múrvira “great man,” from meh₃r “great” + weh₁ras “warrior, man”
• náran “glorious one,” from neh₂ran
• náretha “child of glory, child of the sun, from neh₂red^has
• pelikórai “lover of horses,” from ph₁el “fond of, holding a preference” + keh₃ray “horses”
• resa “the best one, the excellent one,” from resh₁as
• resavíra “excellent warrior,” from resh₁ “best, excellent” + weh₁ras “warrior, man”
• resaxesa “excellent ruler,” from resh₁ “best, excellent” + h₁g^hesas “ruler, governor”
• róvira “royal or noble warrior,” from reh₃weh₁ras
• tívetha “child of a god,” from teh₁wed^has

Theonyms (Names for Deities)

• athenná “earth goddess,” from h₁d^hemneh₂
• gerio “god of death,” from g^heryos “death god”
• kádir tívar “sky-father, god of the bright heavens,” from keh₂deh₁r teh₁war “father of the sky”
• kávrio “bull god,” from keh₂wryos
• skádna “goddess of shadows,” from skeh₂d^hneh₂ “shadow goddess”
• tálanna “goddess of grain,” from teh₂lmneh₂ “land goddess”
• tario “thunder god,” from th₂eryos
• tekuná “horse goddess,” from tek^wneh₂

Ethonyms (Names for Peoples)

• ravathen “by the (sacred) grove,” from rewh₂d^hen
• ravatheni “those by the sacred grove,” a tribal name, plural form of ravathen
• sanadmára “elven folk,” from senh₂d^h “old, ancient” + meh₂ras “host, tribe, folk”
• sanatha “ancient one, elf,” from senh₂d^has “ancient one”
• tremára “the mighty folk,” from tren “mighty” + meh₂ras “host, tribe, folk”
• trenvíra “mighty man, member of the tremára,” from tren “mighty” + weh₁ras “warrior, man”

Place Names

• alevo kanta “Kanta river,” from h₂lewos (kanta is borrowed from a local hydronym)
• alevo krá “black river,” from h₂lewos kreh₂s
• kólami angar “iron hills,” from keh₃lmy h₂eng^hr “hills of iron”
• kórsani konan “blue mountains,” from keh₃rsany kh₃enn
• mara násetar “Western Sea,” from merh₂ neh₂setr “sea of the west”
• múrtalmoi “the great lands,” from meh₃r “great” + teh₂lmoy “lands”
• teimar nár “glorious hill-fort,” from teymar neh₂r
• teimar velkri “hill-fort of the wolves,” from teymar welkri
• verkanta “over (the river) Kanta”

Miscellaneous

• gexan tremárar “language of the mighty folk,” from geg^hh₂en “language”
• tás ravami “I love (or desire) you,” from teh₂s rewh₂mi

Not bad for a couple of months’ work. Not to mention that the back of my brain has been coming up with all manner of neat ideas for the setting and the story. The trick is to organize your world-building time so it actually contributes to the end result and keeps your creative mind engaged.