Last updated on October 6, 2021
Words in Constructed Languages (Morphology)
Now that we have the basic feel for what a constructed language sounds like and how to write it for an English speaking reader, we can focus on creating words that actually mean something.
There are a few things to consider when creating words in your constructed language:
Basic Words – Basics for fantasy fiction
Morphology – How are words constructed?
Phonotactics – What sounds can go next to one another?
Semantics – What do words mean?
Basic Words in a Constructed Language for Fiction
When creating a constructed language for your story, you don’t have to be able to write entire sentences with a full grammar. After all, you aren’t writing your book in the constructed language. That is, unless you want to. If you do, you are unlikely to find any readers. There are no subtitles in books.
In the rough draft of my first novel, The Statue of the Mad Caliph, I wrote full sentences spoken by Ushidian characters. I thought I was being clever and showing how the POV character couldn’t understand the language. My beta readers rebelled. It just confused them. I now limit words in my constructed language to a few things.
It makes sense to create foreign words for these things, but not much else:
Names
Places
Unique objects
Idioms
Swear Words
Yes, the first thing most people learn in a foreign language are the swear words. That and how to count. I personally can swear in at least six languages. Of course, most of them are variations on the Romance word merda, mierda, or merde, but you get the point.
If you do want to go through the trouble of constructing a language in detail, I recommend checking out the The Language Construction Kit or the Conlang Wikibook, Both of these have resources and instruction on constructed languages.
Names and Places
Of course, for a writer, names and places are key to creating characters and a setting. Ideally, you want to create names that sound culturally appropriate and actually mean something. You can do this by following the rules of the constructed language and following the guidelines for semantics below.
Objects and Idioms
Having names for unique objects is also a tricky thing. It is very easy to over do this. What is the definition of a unique object? When does a dress or robe become a gunna or rokota? I was trying to distinguish the gunna style dress of one culture from the stola style of another. It probably wasn’t necessary.
Having too many unique items can clutter your writing and confuse your readers. I created words for wizard and sorcerer (maholos and alutsa) and use them frequently. Because the words are foreign, they are supposed to be italicized. Now I’ve got italicized foreign words all throughout all my books, making it harder to read.
If you really want to add flavor to your characters, create some idioms and swear words they use frequently. Idioms are phrases whose meaning cannot be figured out from the parts of the phrase. They are tricky to do and probably won’t be understood by anyone not versed in the language. My favorite when I was looking for German ones was “Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof.” It means I only understand Bahnhof (train station). Basically, it’s like saying “It’s all Greek to me,” which is an English idiom.
The one thing I did do is to put all the magic spells in constructed languages. It adds a bit a magic and mystery to the story while still satisfies my urge to write full sentences in my constructed language.
Morphology
Morphology describes how to construct words in a language. The basic building block of a word is a morpheme. Analytic languages have little to no morphology, like Mandarin Chinese and to some extent, English. That is, they only have morphemes as words. These often have ideographic writing systems as well.
Many other languages add morphemes as prefixes, suffixes, and affixes to a root to create new words. The two types are inflectional or fusional and agglutinative.
Most Indo-European languages are inflectional or fusional. That is inflectional morphemes are “fused” together. For example, the English word ‘language’ itself is made up of the morpheme ‘lang-‘, which derives from Latin for ‘tongue’, and the suffix ‘-age’, which also derives from Latin for ‘that which is associated with or characterized by.’ The extra ‘u’ is added to make a hard ‘g’.
Often, changes in meaning of a word will also change the pronunciation. This is common in German, where the main vowels in plurals will become more closed. E.g. gans becomes gänse (pr. gense with a hard ‘g’). This is the same in English for the same word. Goose becomes geese. What confuses non-English speakers is that moose does not become meese. English!
Agglutinative languages have many easily separable morphemes. Finnish, Turkish, Japanese, and Tlingit fall in this category. The difference between agglutinative and fusional languages is subtle. In fusional languages, one changes morphemes to inflect meaning of the word. In agglutinative languages, one appends prefixes and suffixes to add meaning, leaving the stem intact.
It helps when constructing a language to have a list of common morphemes that you can use to build other words from. For this, you need to think about how morphemes are constructed in a language. Most morphemes are simple syllables.
Constructed Language Syllable Structure
Often, morphemes exist as a simple syllable. Think about syllable structure. Do syllables have to end in a vowel like in Japanese? This might have an impact on how you create a writing system. Some languages don’t allow a syllable to start with a vowel, others require it.
The basic format of a syllable is consonant/vowel/consonant (CVC). Often, a language will omit the beginning or ending consonant or both. Some languages don’t allow consonants at the end of a syllable, such as Japanese. The Hirigana and Katakana scripts are both syllabary scripts.
Non-syllabic Word Structures
In Semitic and other Afroasiatic languages, the roots of verbs and most nouns are based on triliterals rather than syllables. The basic structure is of three consonants (C₁-C₂-C₃). In this system, the speaker inserts vowels, doubles consonants, lengthens vowels, or adds prefixes, suffixes, or infixes to make words.
If you want to go this direction rather than the syllable route, simply set the basic format of a root using consonant/ consonant /consonant (C-C-C). When you get to The step of building words (see below), set your rules based on what vowels, double consonants, and affixes change the meaning of the roots. My recommendation is to get a good feeling for a Semitic language such as Arabic or Hebrew.
Constructed Language: Savannah Speech
When creating morphemes for my constructed language, Savannah Speech, I created a matrix of all the consonants and vowels, leaving a space for an omitted consonant. With 26 phonemes and 12 digraphs, I have 39 beginning or ending consonants or consonant clusters, including a space for no consonant. Taking the square of that (39 beginning times 39 ending consonants) and multiplying by 9 vowels, I would have possible 13,689 syllables.
That was a lot, so I only took ones I thought would be most frequent based on how often I thought a particular consonant or vowel would occur. I ended up with 721 morphemes I decided to use. My next step was to assign meaning to them.
Semantics
Semantics is the study of the meaning of words, phrases, sentences, or text. An individual word can have many meanings. The meaning can be conveyed in the context or by adding affixes or adjectives to clarify.
In a constructed language the creator has full reign to assign meaning to individual words as they wish. Those meanings should be assigned at the level of a morpheme so the language constructor can build words from those morphemes.
When constructing Savannah Speech, I chose a number of semantic categories to choose from, including:
Verbs,
Verb tenses,
Adverbs (again, before, good, bad),
Adjectives (big, little, long, short),Numerals,
Ordinals,
Quantities,
Colors,
Prepositions (above, across, against, around, in, to),
Pronouns (he, she, it),
Demonstratives (this, that, etc.),
Nouns,
Body Parts,Natural Features,
Negation (non-, un-)
Verbs and Verb Tenses
The verb tenses required me to get ahead of myself. That is, I had to think about grammar. I had decided the words would each have a verb embedded in them because many place names are based on somebody doing something either currently or far in the past. I decided on a simple set of verb tenses.
perfective (s/he (verbed))
constant imperfective (s/he is always (verbing))
progressive imperfective (s/he is in the process of (verbing))
repetitive imperfective (s/he (verbs) regularly
imperfective (s/he is (verbing); s/he (verbs))
My next step was to assign the verbs, tenses, and other meanings to the morphemes I had chosen. To some extent, I assigned them based on the frequency of occurrence of each morpheme and the frequency of occurrence of each meaning. The frequency of each morpheme was somewhat arbitrary based on the frequency of the phoneme.
Building Words in a Constructed Language
There are different ways words are created in a language, such as borrowing, derivation, compounding, or blending, among others. I am going to focus on derivation and compounding. That is, creating new words from existing words by adding prefixes or suffixes or by compounding roots together.
Words begin as simple concepts, with other words or affixes added to them (in agglutinative languages) or to a sentence around them (in analytic languages). Often, this relies heavily on grammar. At this stage, you should have a basic idea of your constructed language’s grammar.
In derivation, a speaker will add an affix to a root. The affix is usually an adjective or adverbial morpheme changing the meaning of the root, like misspell is a derivation of the root spell with the prefix mis-, meaning wrong, added.
Compounded words have two roots combined to create a new word with a different meaning. For example, the English word footpath is a compound of the two nouns foot and path. This is very much like derivation. In this case, foot is like an adjective describing the path, but it is a root unto itself.
Pronouncing New Words
One thing to think about is which syllable in a word or sentence gets an accent. Readers will always want to know how a word, phrase, or sentence is pronounced. It helps to pronounce the word out loud to yourself. If you have a set of rules for pronunciation, sounding the word out can tell you if it fits the rules or not.
Phonotactics
Also, think about phonotactics. Phonotactics are the rules for what sounds can go next to each other. Most languages have rules about this. For example, English doesn’t use ‘ts’ at the beginning of a word, but it is very common in Russian. Russian also has ‘shch’, but most other languages don’t. English uses ‘str’, but few non-Germanic languages use it.
Some sounds are allowed at certain places in a word, but not in others. For example, English allows ‘tl’ in the middle and end of a word (settlement or battle), but not the beginning. ‘Tr’ is allowed at the beginning or middle of a word (transit or contract), but not the end.
If certain non-standard sound combinations or placements are in words borrowed from other languages, speakers will often change the sound to fit their own language’s phonotactics. For example, Arabic Arabic al-jabr and al-Khwarizmi became algebra and algorithm.
Constructed Language: Savannah Speech
When creating words for Savannah Speech, I took a number of real world people and place names and looked up their meaning translated into English. I then took those meanings and translated them into new languages.
For example, take Mesopotamia. It is Greek for “between the rivers”. I thought about how that would be expressed in Savannah Speech. Decciding that a basic root should be a verb, I translated it as “(it) stands between two rivers”. I used the following roots and affixes: čön- (between), kö- (two), g̲ōn- (river), re- (stay, stand), and -ẖu (constant imperfective (s/he is always (verbing))). čön-kö-g̲ōn-re-ẖu
Because the /r/ is pronounced in the back of the throat and the /n/ is pronounced near the front, these two sounds can’t go together, but are pronounced / ng̲ /. Therefore, I end up with čönkög̲ōng̲éẖu between-two-rivers-stands. That’s still a mouthful, so it might be pronounced čönkög̲ōn, or between-two-rivers, with the verb ending implied. I might use that as a city name.
Savannah People: Töpfumaardaaškhōhu
I now need a name for the Savannah people. They might be called People of the Savannah, but what does savannah mean? It comes from the American Taino people. Zabana meant “a tract of low-lying marshy ground. That doesn’t really capture the description of this biome, which is a wide treeless plain. I want this word to be self-descriptive and nobody likes to describe themselves by a negative or what they lack. If I came from that area, I would think of it as a wide grassy plain, so the culture is that of the People of the Wide Grassy Plain.
I haven’t yet assigned any morphemes to any of these semantic meanings except for grass (tö-). I will assign: škhō– (inhabit), pfum– (wide), maar– (plain). My basic word form follows this schema: [ADJ]-[O]-[S]-root-[ADV]-TENSE, or grassy-wide-plain-(they)-inhabit-constant imperfective, or tö- (grass), pfum– (wide), maar– (plain), daa– (they), škhō– (inhabit), –ẖu (constant imperfective). The accent goes on the verb škhō: Töpfumaardaaškhōhu. The word for people or inhabitants would be daaškhōẖu. A traveller from an area would be daaškhōnuš. Someone who used to live there would be daaškhōng̲on.
I will go on to create new names for places. I won’t go through the process, but you can see them on my map of Körung̲ung̲éẖu. Next, I’ll create place names in the Hillfolk and Silvan languages.
