Conlangery Shorts 32: Lexember Themes
George talks a little bit about how choosing a theme for Lexember can be helpful for your conlanging. Original script Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them. I’m George Corley. I went on social media recently to ask what people wanted covered before Lexember and got some great suggestions. The one that I’m going to cover today is creating your words based on a theme. Many lexember entrants do themes throughout the month or follow lists of prompt words from places like ConWorkShop, and I think it’s an interesting way to get your juices flowing. I’m going to talk about this mostly as it relates to a naturalistic artlang, since that’s what I have experience with, but I think these sorts of themes and prompts can help with any sort of conlang. Before we get to that, Conlangery is supported by our Patrons over at Patreon. Thanks to our patrons, I’ve been able to move the site over to its own hosting, which has given me more control and will hopefully take some stress off of the LCS’s hosting plan. You’ll also see that little padlock icon on the site now, which will make you slightly more secure when commenting and using the site and also prevent browsers from yelling at people visiting. By the way, if you pledge $10 or more per month, you can see the scripts for these shorts as they are written. On another note, the Language Creation Society has just announced its President’s Scholarship. They’re accepting applications from people who are affiliated with educational institutions who either want to do research on conlangs, or who want to teach a conlanging class. I’ll have the link in the show notes for anyone interested in applying. There are two $500 scholarships available, and the deadline for this coming year’s applications is January 15th 2020. If you’re a naturalisitic conlanger, everything about your language can be an opportunity for worldbuilding, of course, but the lexicon is where I find the deepest worldbuilding potential. Most grammar and phonology is culturally agnostic — it can be influenced by things like politeness culture and literary customs, but just about any grammatical feature can be dropped into whatever culture you wish. That’s not so true for words. The lexicon is deeply related to how your people view the world. It’s how they divide up and name the parts of the world, and that has fantastic cultural implications. That said, being too heavy handed on the cultural aspects could backfire. What you want to have is an idea of some cultural values and ideas that will guide what words you create and how they are framed, as well as a variety of real world and conworld knowledge to guide you. Keeping culture in mind and even building it alongside your words can help you when working with prompts or themes to make richer and more interesting choices of words. In 2015, I did a cluster of words related to childbearing, influenced by the birth of my first child on December 17th. This wasn’t the entirety of my Lexember that year, and I did a few words outside of Lexember, but I did have an extended period where I was looking at birth related terms specifically. In doing so, I had to consider what medical knowledge the Istatimik would have, what cultural associations they would have with birth, and the who and how of delivering babies in their culture. One place where this led to a particular choice was in the derivation of qenrii , meaning “placenta”. This derives from qen , meaning “moon”, and rii , meaning “meat” or “flesh”. I didn’t come up with this from any natlang inspiration, rather I looked at pictures of placentas and saw that they can be seen to look round and quite unsurprisingly meaty — in a less than appetizing way, but the cultural question brought in the “moon”. I decided that the Istatimik would associate themes of birth, femininity, and reproduction with the moon, considering menstrual cycles to be following the lunar cycle. What words you choose to