What languages influence your conlangs?

A forum for all topics related to constructed languages
Khemehekis
mongolian
mongolian
Posts: 3885
Joined: 14 Aug 2010 09:36
Location: California über alles

Re: What languages influence your conlangs?

Post by Khemehekis »

MissTerry wrote: 24 Apr 2022 06:03
Khemehekis wrote: 24 Apr 2022 06:00
MissTerry wrote: 21 Apr 2022 03:38
Khemehekis wrote: 21 Apr 2022 02:40
MissTerry wrote: 14 Apr 2022 07:08 Ancient Vedic Sanskrit. 90% of my conlang's words and roots and affixes are derived from the Sanskrit spectrum [spectrum meaning from ancient Vedic Sanskrit to modern Sanskrit]. Latin was a minor influence, as well as Esperanto. Like Sanskrit, my conlang has a little over 1,500 Dhatus [root/seed words] with which you can build and create new words as needed. I have a bunch of grammatically regular affixes. And about 15,000 base words. All of which can be snapped together to build up to 100,000 words as needed.
Hey, that's great! You can add your conlang to https://www.frathwiki.com/Conlangs_with ... ,000_words
That's an interesting idea! I didn't know that page existed! I requested an account. If I get one, I'll figure out how to add my conlang to that list! Thank you!
Congrats on your new FrathWiki userpage!
Whoohoo! Thanks! I'm going to figure out how to add my conlang to that list you provided! It'll take me a while. I hope to contribute things there.
You're welcome. You're going to have a lot of fun on FrathWiki! I'll be checking out the Recent Changes page to ogle your edits in entranced admiration.
♂♥♂♀

Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels

My Kankonian-English dictionary: 87,413 words and counting

31,416: The number of the conlanging beast!
User avatar
MissTerry
hieroglyphic
hieroglyphic
Posts: 58
Joined: 14 Apr 2022 02:23

Re: What languages influence your conlangs?

Post by MissTerry »

Khemehekis wrote: 24 Apr 2022 06:06 You're welcome. You're going to have a lot of fun on FrathWiki! I'll be checking out the Recent Changes page to ogle your edits in entranced admiration.
I did it! That was cool! I didn't realize my "little" conlang was actually one of the biggest ones out there! Yours is a whopper! One day, Basha Humrayan will have 77,000 words :) Many years from now.
Khemehekis
mongolian
mongolian
Posts: 3885
Joined: 14 Aug 2010 09:36
Location: California über alles

Re: What languages influence your conlangs?

Post by Khemehekis »

MissTerry wrote: 24 Apr 2022 06:32
Khemehekis wrote: 24 Apr 2022 06:06 You're welcome. You're going to have a lot of fun on FrathWiki! I'll be checking out the Recent Changes page to ogle your edits in entranced admiration.
I did it! That was cool! I didn't realize my "little" conlang was actually one of the biggest ones out there! Yours is a whopper! One day, Basha Humrayan will have 77,000 words :) Many years from now.
Yeah, it's rare for a conlang to have a five-digit lexicon size (i.e. over TEN thousand); over FIFTEEN thousand is even rarer.

And I can't wait for the day when Basha Humrayan rivals Esperanto and Kankonian in size. Is the number seven special to Humrayan speakers?
♂♥♂♀

Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels

My Kankonian-English dictionary: 87,413 words and counting

31,416: The number of the conlanging beast!
User avatar
MissTerry
hieroglyphic
hieroglyphic
Posts: 58
Joined: 14 Apr 2022 02:23

Re: What languages influence your conlangs?

Post by MissTerry »

Khemehekis wrote: 24 Apr 2022 06:35
MissTerry wrote: 24 Apr 2022 06:32
Khemehekis wrote: 24 Apr 2022 06:06 You're welcome. You're going to have a lot of fun on FrathWiki! I'll be checking out the Recent Changes page to ogle your edits in entranced admiration.
I did it! That was cool! I didn't realize my "little" conlang was actually one of the biggest ones out there! Yours is a whopper! One day, Basha Humrayan will have 77,000 words :) Many years from now.
Yeah, it's rare for a conlang to have a five-digit lexicon size (i.e. over TEN thousand); over FIFTEEN thousand is even rarer.

And I can't wait for the day when Basha Humrayan rivals Esperanto and Kankonian in size. Is the number seven special to Humrayan speakers?
7 is actually a special number In Humrayan "conculture." The 7 days of the week are named after the 7 major astronomical gods [the same as ancient Sanskrit and English]. It would just be cool if I can do what you did with your conlang and pick up Basha Humrayan's vocabulary and lexicon up to at least 77,000. How long did it take you to get 78,000 words?
Khemehekis
mongolian
mongolian
Posts: 3885
Joined: 14 Aug 2010 09:36
Location: California über alles

Re: What languages influence your conlangs?

Post by Khemehekis »

MissTerry wrote: 24 Apr 2022 06:46
Khemehekis wrote: 24 Apr 2022 06:35
MissTerry wrote: 24 Apr 2022 06:32
Khemehekis wrote: 24 Apr 2022 06:06 You're welcome. You're going to have a lot of fun on FrathWiki! I'll be checking out the Recent Changes page to ogle your edits in entranced admiration.
I did it! That was cool! I didn't realize my "little" conlang was actually one of the biggest ones out there! Yours is a whopper! One day, Basha Humrayan will have 77,000 words :) Many years from now.
Yeah, it's rare for a conlang to have a five-digit lexicon size (i.e. over TEN thousand); over FIFTEEN thousand is even rarer.

And I can't wait for the day when Basha Humrayan rivals Esperanto and Kankonian in size. Is the number seven special to Humrayan speakers?
7 is actually a special number In Humrayan "conculture." The 7 days of the week are named after the 7 major astronomical gods [the same as ancient Sanskrit and English]. It would just be cool if I can do what you did with your conlang and pick up Basha Humrayan's vocabulary and lexicon up to at least 77,000. How long did it take you to get 78,000 words?
I started in the summer of 1996, so it's taken just over 25 years.

From what I understand, Basha Humrayan, though simplified in an Esperantoesque way, is regularly derived from Sanskrit. It's pretty rare to see a well-done, regularly derived a posteriori artlang with so many words. A lot of the conlangs on the 10,000+ list are auxlangs that borrow words from multiple languages or make up something that "sounds" like the Romance or Germanic root. Then there's Talossan. Even though Talossan has one of the largest lexica of any artlang, and is the most successful and famous micronational language of all time, it is often criticized because Talossan speakers just make up a word that "sounds Occitan" instead of Talossan having a regular derivation from Latin.

Kankonian evolved light-years away from Earth, before Leholans explored our planet, so of course Kankonian is a priori, as are all the other Leholangs.
♂♥♂♀

Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels

My Kankonian-English dictionary: 87,413 words and counting

31,416: The number of the conlanging beast!
User avatar
MissTerry
hieroglyphic
hieroglyphic
Posts: 58
Joined: 14 Apr 2022 02:23

Re: What languages influence your conlangs?

Post by MissTerry »

Wow, 25 years developing one conlang! I like Humrayan enough to put in that many years to develop it!

I started to study Sanskrit because I'm a Buddhist, and because my second natlang uses Sanskrit as its go-to language to make sophisticated words. And so, I figured I would try to study Sanskrit to better understand Buddhism. While studying Sanskrit, I found its grammar hard to learn and annoying, and I said to myself in my mind: "Why can't every language have grammar like Esperanto!?"

And so out of curiosity, I searched for a conlang based on Sanskrit which used Esperantoeque grammar. There was none! Seems like nobody had thought of it yet! So, there being none, I decided to make one. I really liked Esperanto's use of root words and how those root words function. So what I did was isolate root words in Sanskrit, threw away its grammar, and invented my own simplified grammar and affixes [using already present Sanskrit affixes].

At first I thought using Sanskrit in an Esperanto manner was silly, but I liked the idea personally. But, when I one day looked deeper into Sanskrit I discovered the Dhatus [the 1,500 root words]. Each dhatu had a fixed meaning, and these dhatus could be snapped together to form new words with new meaning, and a set list of affixes can be appended to those dhatus and words made from dhatus! I discovered that thousands of years before Esperanto was invented, the Brahmin Sages had already come up with a concept similar to Esperanto already! [Which has provocative implications: that Sanskrit was an ancient conlang invented by Brahmin Sages. It has been suggested and speculated that Arabic and Hebrew were themselves invented ancient languages]. That was when I decided using Esperanto style grammar with Sanskrit wasn't so silly after all, and I decided to go all out on my idea and dedicated time to create Basha Humrayan.

It's a fun project. I'm sure you have lots of fun with Kankonian!
Khemehekis
mongolian
mongolian
Posts: 3885
Joined: 14 Aug 2010 09:36
Location: California über alles

Re: What languages influence your conlangs?

Post by Khemehekis »

MissTerry wrote: 24 Apr 2022 15:41 Wow, 25 years developing one conlang! I like Humrayan enough to put in that many years to develop it!
Yeah. We had a thread for Kankonian's twentieth, and later twenty-fifth, birthdays, wherein I posted last summer. Here's the (loooooong) twenty-fifth birthday story (be aware before reading, though, I am a freak, with some rather singular idiosyncrasies; don't read if it's going to put you off).

I hope to see Humrayan celebrating its own quarter-century anniversary. How old is it already?
I started to study Sanskrit because I'm a Buddhist, and because my second natlang uses Sanskrit as its go-to language to make sophisticated words. And so, I figured I would try to study Sanskrit to better understand Buddhism. While studying Sanskrit, I found its grammar hard to learn and annoying, and I said to myself in my mind: "Why can't every language have grammar like Esperanto!?"
Oh, cool! We could use some more Buddhists (and Asians) on this board. (I myself am deist by faith and Jewish by ethnicity -- neither of which we have too many of in the online conlanging community.)

And if you're asking yourself "Why can't every language have grammar like Esperanto!?", you might want to get in touch with this board's Larryrl, who creates languages with Esperantoesquely simple grammar. Then there's Reyzadren -- he hates Esperanto because it's too complex, not because it's too simple, and has aimed for creating one of the simplest grammars of all conlangs in his Griuskant.
And so out of curiosity, I searched for a conlang based on Sanskrit which used Esperantoeque grammar. There was none! Seems like nobody had thought of it yet! So, there being none, I decided to make one. I really liked Esperanto's use of root words and how those root words function. So what I did was isolate root words in Sanskrit, threw away its grammar, and invented my own simplified grammar and affixes [using already present Sanskrit affixes].
It's always nice to have an original conlang idea!
At first I thought using Sanskrit in an Esperanto manner was silly, but I liked the idea personally. But, when I one day looked deeper into Sanskrit I discovered the Dhatus [the 1,500 root words]. Each dhatu had a fixed meaning, and these dhatus could be snapped together to form new words with new meaning, and a set list of affixes can be appended to those dhatus and words made from dhatus! I discovered that thousands of years before Esperanto was invented, the Brahmin Sages had already come up with a concept similar to Esperanto already! [Which has provocative implications: that Sanskrit was an ancient conlang invented by Brahmin Sages. It has been suggested and speculated that Arabic and Hebrew were themselves invented ancient languages]. That was when I decided using Esperanto style grammar with Sanskrit wasn't so silly after all, and I decided to go all out on my idea and dedicated time to create Basha Humrayan.
Oh, cool! What did the Brahmin sages call their con-creation?
It's a fun project. I'm sure you have lots of fun with Kankonian!
Yep. I have lots of fun expanding Kankonian's lexicon, finding concepts I don't already have a word for, asking myself, "Should I make this word from scratch, derive from existing roots, put together Classical (like Ciladian) roots, borrow from another Leholang, or make this an eponymous word?" I have to research the meanings of some words I want to add to Kankonian (I'm not a computer nerd/geek, and once it took way too long for me researching to try to understand the meaning of the English term "to unbox"), which sometimes gets time-consuming, but I've had 25 years to develop those 78,000 words, so it's not like I'm spending all my free time working on the Kankonian language. One of my favorite things about creating Kankonian is creating words that 'sound like" the concept perfectly (I listed some of these, such as bwolwo (eye) in a different thread recently).
♂♥♂♀

Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels

My Kankonian-English dictionary: 87,413 words and counting

31,416: The number of the conlanging beast!
User avatar
Reyzadren
greek
greek
Posts: 684
Joined: 14 May 2017 10:39
Contact:

Re: What languages influence your conlangs?

Post by Reyzadren »

Khemehekis wrote: 24 Apr 2022 22:34And if you're asking yourself "Why can't every language have grammar like Esperanto!?", you might want to get in touch with this board's Larryrl, who creates languages with Esperantoesquely simple grammar. Then there's Reyzadren -- he hates Esperanto because it's too complex, not because it's too simple, and has aimed for creating one of the simplest grammars of all conlangs in his Griuskant.
Just a small correction. I don't aim to create one of the simplest grammars of all conlangs. My conlang already was like that even long before I found out about Esperanto on the Internet. When I first read about it, I was like "But that other natlang that I speak already has this feature. And nobody I know is going to follow those other difficult rules. Dumb language" and I shelved it to the back of my mind. It wasn't until I joined CBB that I also encountered other people that dislike it for all sorts of other reasons.

Having a simple conlang is a big plus for me, but it isn't the end goal: It simply is itself in its own world. Other than that, you are absolutely correct.
Image conlang summary | Image griushkoent thread
Khemehekis
mongolian
mongolian
Posts: 3885
Joined: 14 Aug 2010 09:36
Location: California über alles

Re: What languages influence your conlangs?

Post by Khemehekis »

Reyzadren wrote: 25 Apr 2022 00:20 Just a small correction. I don't aim to create one of the simplest grammars of all conlangs. My conlang already was like that even long before I found out about Esperanto on the Internet. When I first read about it, I was like "But that other natlang that I speak already has this feature. And nobody I know is going to follow those other difficult rules. Dumb language" and I shelved it to the back of my mind. It wasn't until I joined CBB that I also encountered other people that dislike it for all sorts of other reasons.

Having a simple conlang is a big plus for me, but it isn't the end goal: It simply is itself in its own world. Other than that, you are absolutely correct.
I understand. Sort of like the way I didn't set out to make The Bittersweet Generation the longest musical ever; it just ended up being really long.
♂♥♂♀

Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels

My Kankonian-English dictionary: 87,413 words and counting

31,416: The number of the conlanging beast!
User avatar
MissTerry
hieroglyphic
hieroglyphic
Posts: 58
Joined: 14 Apr 2022 02:23

Re: What languages influence your conlangs?

Post by MissTerry »

Khemehekis wrote: 24 Apr 2022 22:34
Oh, cool! What did the Brahmin sages call their con-creation?
The Sanskrit language itself just may very well be a conlang created by the Brahmins in ancient times:

This is a complete list of all Sanskrit Dhatu or Root words. All words in sentence are derived from these root words. The meaning of Dhatus is fixed and hence their meaning is carried over to Sanskrit words created from Dhatus.

Hence, the only dictionary ever required in Sanskrit is this list of Dhatus and their meanings. By understanding the rules of Sanskrit grammar, one can easily comprehend the meaning of Sanskrit words by looking at their dhatu roots.

source: https://www.hitxp.com/articles/linguist ... ictionary/
The 1,500 Dhatus, plus affixes, and rules of grammar = the ancient Sanskrit language. Sophisticated looking words in Sanskrit are just various Dhatus linked together with affixes.
Khemehekis
mongolian
mongolian
Posts: 3885
Joined: 14 Aug 2010 09:36
Location: California über alles

Re: What languages influence your conlangs?

Post by Khemehekis »

They're all verbs?!? [O.o]
♂♥♂♀

Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels

My Kankonian-English dictionary: 87,413 words and counting

31,416: The number of the conlanging beast!
User avatar
MissTerry
hieroglyphic
hieroglyphic
Posts: 58
Joined: 14 Apr 2022 02:23

Re: What languages influence your conlangs?

Post by MissTerry »

Khemehekis wrote: 25 Apr 2022 02:41 They're all verbs?!? [O.o]
I know. It's weird. I guess that's where the grammar and affixes come in :)
Khemehekis
mongolian
mongolian
Posts: 3885
Joined: 14 Aug 2010 09:36
Location: California über alles

Re: What languages influence your conlangs?

Post by Khemehekis »

Also: How long have you been working on Humrayan?
♂♥♂♀

Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels

My Kankonian-English dictionary: 87,413 words and counting

31,416: The number of the conlanging beast!
User avatar
MissTerry
hieroglyphic
hieroglyphic
Posts: 58
Joined: 14 Apr 2022 02:23

Re: What languages influence your conlangs?

Post by MissTerry »

Khemehekis wrote: 25 Apr 2022 03:15 Also: How long have you been working on Humrayan?
About three years. I'm a homebody. I like to stay home and do boring things. So I read. And when I get bored of reading I play around with my conlang.
Khemehekis
mongolian
mongolian
Posts: 3885
Joined: 14 Aug 2010 09:36
Location: California über alles

Re: What languages influence your conlangs?

Post by Khemehekis »

MissTerry wrote: 25 Apr 2022 03:27
Khemehekis wrote: 25 Apr 2022 03:15 Also: How long have you been working on Humrayan?
About three years. I'm a homebody. I like to stay home and do boring things. So I read. And when I get bored of reading I play around with my conlang.
Does your reading inspire anthropological/cultural or biological or whatever elements of your conworld?

Also: Three years? That's means your conlang is scheduled to celebrate its twenty-fifth birthday in in 2044!
♂♥♂♀

Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels

My Kankonian-English dictionary: 87,413 words and counting

31,416: The number of the conlanging beast!
User avatar
MissTerry
hieroglyphic
hieroglyphic
Posts: 58
Joined: 14 Apr 2022 02:23

Re: What languages influence your conlangs?

Post by MissTerry »

Khemehekis wrote: 25 Apr 2022 03:30
MissTerry wrote: 25 Apr 2022 03:27
Khemehekis wrote: 25 Apr 2022 03:15 Also: How long have you been working on Humrayan?
About three years. I'm a homebody. I like to stay home and do boring things. So I read. And when I get bored of reading I play around with my conlang.
Does your reading inspire anthropological/cultural or biological or whatever elements of your conworld?

Also: Three years? That's means your conlang is scheduled to celebrate its twenty-fifth birthday in in 2044!
2044?! My goodness... that's a long time from now :) At least by then I'll be smarter. Which means my conlang in 2044 will be better. Do you look back at the early stages of Kankonian and cringe or think to yourself: "Geez... what was I thinking?" I wonder if Kankonian evolved along with your mental, spiritual, and intellectual development over those 25 years? Would you say it has?

I like to read books on weird stuff like occultism, tarot cards, esoterica. Things I read don't usually inspire my conlang or conworld. What actually inspires my conlang is daydreaming. I'll daydream and see visions of Humraya society, and that usually inspires growth in my conlang and conworld.
Khemehekis
mongolian
mongolian
Posts: 3885
Joined: 14 Aug 2010 09:36
Location: California über alles

Re: What languages influence your conlangs?

Post by Khemehekis »

MissTerry wrote: 25 Apr 2022 03:55 2044?! My goodness... that's a long time from now :) At least by then I'll be smarter. Which means my conlang in 2044 will be better. Do you look back at the early stages of Kankonian and cringe or think to yourself: "Geez... what was I thinking?" I wonder if Kankonian evolved along with your mental, spiritual, and intellectual development over those 25 years? Would you say it has?
I'd definitely say it's evolved along with my intellectual development. When I started out, I didn't realize all the grammatical questions I'd have to answer. I made a seven-page grammar and called it a day. Then, when Kankonian was about 7 years old, I thought, "Wait a minute! I need a way to express object complements, like 'I painted my nails blue'! I need to figure out how 'yes' and 'no' work! I need to figure out structures like 'I want you to stay'! I need to find out how to express more complex verb forms, like 'was going to'!" That was the biggest makeover.

During that makeover, I also changed a lot of words that didn't really sound like their meanings, I had just came up with them on the spot because I was subconsciously thinking about another language. For instance, at first the Kankonian word for tall was gran. Then I realized I was thinking of the French word. I closed my eyes and tried to really think about what sounds best express the concept of tallness. I came up with ilt. I know ilt does share an L and a T with English "tall" and Romance "alt", but ilt sounds like "tall" in a way gran doesn't, you know what I mean? Also, thimiya, while not apparently based on any natlang word, really didn't sound like "cube" to me. I changed the word for "cube" to hozos, and I like the new word a lot better. And then there was pri, the original word for "about" (in the sense of "on the topic of"). I had forgotten my Esperanto at the time I coined pri, then a few years later I checked and discovered that "pri" was the Esperanto word for "about"! I had subconsciously remembered this forgotten word! I changed pri to the a priori hous (even though with concepts as abstract as "about", words can't "sound like" the concept as strongly as more concrete words can.)

I also shortened some words that I thought were too unreasonably long for such common, simple concepts. I shortened the word for "old" from tzaimonol to tzmofuz, for instance. I kept hamasaki for "paw", but also added the shorter synonym afk (useful for compounds).

New words for plants, animals, foods, drinks, drugs, and the sort were added as my imagination grew, and I placed them on many planets in the Lehola Galaxy from whose languages Kankonian could borrow words. I was able to come up with new forms of music, new musical instruments, new sports, new religious concepts, new technological concepts, and lots and lots of new placenames, and Kankonian got words for all of them as my ability to think up original worlds blossomed over those 25 years.

There were some changes to other conlangs, too. I decided Shaleyan's grammar was too boring, for instance, and gave its morphosyntactic alignment and syntax in general a complete overhaul. This is what Shaleyan looks like now: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7380&p=304981
I like to read books on weird stuff like occultism, tarot cards, esoterica. Things I read don't usually inspire my conlang or conworld. What actually inspires my conlang is daydreaming. I'll daydream and see visions of Humraya society, and that usually inspires growth in my conlang and conworld.
Cool! A lot of my Lehola stuff comes not from daydreaming, but from actual dreaming (as in, the oneiric kind).
♂♥♂♀

Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels

My Kankonian-English dictionary: 87,413 words and counting

31,416: The number of the conlanging beast!
User avatar
MissTerry
hieroglyphic
hieroglyphic
Posts: 58
Joined: 14 Apr 2022 02:23

Re: What languages influence your conlangs?

Post by MissTerry »

It's good to know that Kankonian evolved in tandem to your own intellectual development over the years. Good because, right now, I prefer to just play around with my own conlang, have fun with it, and not be too focused on the boring side of conlanging like sophisticated grammar, glossing (I don't even know how to do that), etc. All that will develop many years from now. Like how you went back and re-engineered and smoothened out Shaleyan.

I wish I can have oneiric dreams about my conworld! One can learn a lot from dreams and daydreaming. A majority of what I know and understand about the world, myself, and philosophy comes directly and indirectly from the conworld in my daydreams. It's a bottomless rich source and resource of knowledge and wisdom, when we understand that our unconscious/subconscious mind is all-knowing and is itself connected to Deity (the Mind of the Universe), and so, in dreams and daydreams, that unconscious mind speaks to us through symbols, allegories, mythos, stories, imaginal worlds. It's like our conworld is a conduit that transfers insights from the depth of our unconscious mind. In that sense, I value conlanging and conworlding more than any book I have read or studied. I know you understand what I'm trying to say.
Khemehekis
mongolian
mongolian
Posts: 3885
Joined: 14 Aug 2010 09:36
Location: California über alles

Re: What languages influence your conlangs?

Post by Khemehekis »

MissTerry wrote: 25 Apr 2022 05:01 I know you understand what I'm trying to say.
I do!

As Einstein famously said: "Imagination is more important than knowledge".

Also: More than 16,500 words in 3 years is a better track than I'm on! When Kankonian was 3 years old (in 1999) it had 5,000 words. By the end of 2004 (when it was 8 years old), Kankonian had crossed the 10,000 mark. It was 2010 when I reached 20,000 words. The 30,000 word mark came in 2012 (16 years old -- a living conlang with a driver's license!) 50,000 words? That would be late 2015, when Kankonian was 19 years old.
♂♥♂♀

Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels

My Kankonian-English dictionary: 87,413 words and counting

31,416: The number of the conlanging beast!
User avatar
MissTerry
hieroglyphic
hieroglyphic
Posts: 58
Joined: 14 Apr 2022 02:23

Re: What languages influence your conlangs?

Post by MissTerry »

Khemehekis wrote: 25 Apr 2022 05:09
MissTerry wrote: 25 Apr 2022 05:01 I know you understand what I'm trying to say.
I do!

As Einstein famously said: "Imagination is more important than knowledge".

Also: More than 16,500 words in 3 years is a better track than I'm on! When Kankonian was 3 years old (in 1999) it had 5,000 words. By the end of 2004 (when it was 8 years old), Kankonian had crossed the 10,000 mark. It was 2010 when I reached 20,000 words. The 30,000 word mark came in 2012 (16 years old -- a living conlang with a driver's license!) 50,000 words? That would be late 2015, when Kankonian was 19 years old.
It's hard for me to make new words for my conlang, but at the same time it's easy. Hard because I can't just make up arbitrary words to be new words in my conlang, because the conlang is supposed to be a sister language of Sanskrit, like how Spanish is a sister language of Italian having come from the same ancestral Latin. And so, to make new words, I would first look through what words, roots, and affixes I already have to see if I can make the news words I need out of them. If I can't, then I have a handful of old digitized Sanskrit dictionaries I go through to find radicals, roots, and new particles (affixes) to assimilate into my conlang. If that doesn't work, than I have no choice but to use my creativity and imagination and resort to inventing an arbitrary root or radical to use. Which is why I classify my conlang as a "sister language" and not a dialect proper of Sanskrit.

Image

Image

Once you understand that Sanskrit functions just like an invented conlang, then it becomes easy to make new words:

The root "Ar" means "To Praise/Laud." Add the suffix +Ya meaning an abstract noun, and you get "Arya" which means "That which is praised" or "That which is praise worthy" or "That which is known/notorious," or "That which is noble/honorable." And that word "Arya" is where English and Germans get the word "Aryan."

The root "Man" means "To Think." Add to that the suffix +Usha/+Ussa meaning "One who is / that which is" and you get the word "Manusha/Manussa" which is the word for "Human/Person" (literally meaning "That which thinks / one who thinks") and is genetically related to the German word "Mensche," and to the English word "Man." The Sanskrit root "Man" is also genetically related to the Latin "Mens" from where we get our English word "Mental."

For me, it's fun, because I'm fascinated with etymology, and as I go through my Sanskrit dictionaries trying to create new words for my conlang, I actually learn a lot about where our own English words ultimately come from!

The challenging part is to take those ancient roots, radicals, and particles, and to create words to describe things in our modern civilization such as: jet propulsion, quantum physics, quantum entanglement, atomic fusion, nuclear bomb, hypersonic missiles, airplanes, buses, tin foil, microwaves, screw drivers, nuts and bolts, hotdogs, pizzas, tacos, martian rovers, space probes, television, the internet, internet forums, computers, hard drives, the metaverse, and so on :) My conlang at the moment lacks the ability to talk about the modern world! But I'm working on that. Right now I'm forced to invent a class of arbitrary radicals to use in order to affix to those ancient roots and words to create neologisms that can talk about our modern civilization.
Post Reply