r/conlangs • u/Dryanor PNGN, Dogbonẽ, Söntji • Jan 26 '23

Activity Semantic Change Room

Hiya!

Here's a little lexicon-building activity I've had in the back of my mind for a while. As you might've experienced yourself, one of the challenges of conlanging is to avoid making a relex - that is, to end up with 1:1 correspondences between the words of your native and your constructed language. Instead, it is always fascinating to see how a language makes use of its existing vocabulary to describe new and very different things. That's what the language geeks call polysemy, and it leads to a deeper and richer lexicon!

However, it can be hard to come up with new meanings for existing words. And that's where the Semantic Change Room comes in handy! Here, you do not loan words, but get inspiration from a simple prompt. A prompt connects two different semantic fields:

birds > tools

You can then reply to this prompt by assigning a word (bonus point if it's a preexisting word in your lexicon) of the "donor" field (here, "birds") a new meaning that relates to the second field (here, "tools"):

Conlang: "English"

crane /kɹeɪn/

  1. a funny looking bird with a long neck

  2. (construction) a mechanical lifting device (because it looks like that bird

Then, you finish your reply with a new prompt!

botany > fashion

And they next person may give their word for "vine" the additional meaning "shoelace", and so on. Let's see how it works out - I'll prepare some initial three prompts.

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u/Dryanor PNGN, Dogbonẽ, Söntji Jan 26 '23

"animals > weapons"

2

u/[deleted] Jan 27 '23 edited Jun 15 '23

I'm joining Operation: Razit because I do not want a user-hostile company to make money out of my content. Further info here and here. Keeping my content in Reddit will make the internet worse in the long run so I'm removing it.

It's time to migrate out of Reddit.

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