Month: May 2018

dedalvs:

This is a flowchart I created for how I create words in Dothraki. Walking through step by step, a concept like “computer” is not culturally appropriate, since this kind of technology doesn’t exist in the world the Dothraki inhabit, so such a concept is immediately rejected.

A concept like “book” is plenty common in that world, so it passes the first hurdle. Given that the Dothraki have no writing, paper, book binding, etc., though, a concept like “book” would never have a native term, so it too is rejected (to be filled in later via borrowing—in this case from High Valyrian).

A concept like “weather” is certainly in-universe, and while it might be borrowed in some language, most of the time it won’t be, so it will have a native term. It’s a rather complex concept, though, so I wouldn’t create a new root for it. Instead, when it came to coming up with this concept, I decided to derive it from thew word chaf, which refers to wind. Chafasar is something that means like “a collection of winds” or “all winds”, and the idea is that the concept of weather is based on how the winds are behaving (either at the moment or generally), with the idea that this then extends to everything else having to do with weather (sun, snow, rain, etc.). Thence came the word chafasar, used for words like “weather” and “climate”, or basically how things are feeling outside.

A concept like “blood”, on the other hand, is definitely in-universe, almost definitely native to any language, and, will probably be a basic term (it’s not in English, though!). For that reason, a created the root qoy, and had it mean “blood” as far back as Dothraki goes. (Though note: In the real world, this was a backformation from a word George R. R. Martin created: qiya, which means “bleeding”. I decided to use this opportunity to create a semi-regular derivational process where you raise the vowel of a mass noun and add –a to make a word that means “oozing that substance”. For example, thom is “juice”, and thima means “leaking”.)

I wrote this down specifically to illustrate in a talk, but otherwise this isn’t written anywhere (and the same is true for all my languages). It’s just a mental checklist. There have been several people who have asked how to create words, and while this might help, I get the sense that the parts where they get stuck are either step 0 (coming up with a concept), for which I can’t offer any insight (you have to come up with words for everything in a language, so just think of something and do that!), or the very last step (creating a root), for which I also can’t offer any insight (just make sure it’s phonologically licit then do whatever you want. Unless you’re doing something specifically onomatopoeic or phonosemantic, there’s no reliable relationship between form and meaning. Anything you come up with is fine).

I found that I wanted to share this recently but didn’t have an easy way to find it, so I’m posting it here so I can find it in the future. (After all, it’s easy to find something specific on Tumblr, right…? *dies laughing*)