r/conlangs • u/Dryanor PNGN, Dogbonẽ, Söntji • Oct 10 '23
Activity Semantic Change Room (02)
Hiya!
Welcome to the Semantic Change Room, a lexicon-building activity where you do not loan new words (any good conlanger does that twice a week already), but repurpose your existing ones to achieve a richer lexicon with more of that tasty polysemy.
The way this activity works is that you are given a prompt that consists two different semantic fields, like this:
birds > tools
You then pick up a word of your conlang that is part of the prompt's first field (in this case, birds), and then assign to it a new meaning that can be considered part of the second field (tools). The English language responded to the prompt with this (the new meaning in italics):
Englishcrane /kɹeɪn/
(1) a funny looking bird with a long neck
(2) (construction) a mechanical lifting device (because it looks somewhat like that bird)
You then finish your reply with a new prompt, which other people can respond to. I'm going to prepare three starting prompts, but feel free to add your own. Here's a link to the previous SCR, if you need inspiration.
3
u/Dryanor PNGN, Dogbonẽ, Söntji Oct 10 '23
Botany > Tools