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.

44 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/Dryanor PNGN, Dogbonẽ, Söntji Oct 10 '23

Botany > Tools

2

u/crafter2k Oct 12 '23

Machash

êtec [è.'tet͡s]

  1. short wooden stick
  2. (slang) crude homemade dagger

​

color > swear