In this case, I found this page from a year or two ago that I never got around to filling in, and here we get to some conlang process stuff. Typically when I want to make new vocabulary, I do it at my computer with the spreadsheet open so I can search the lexicon for similar words. But real languages have homonyms (words that sound alike, and sometimes are spelled alike) and synonyms (lots of words that have similar meanings), and a language that has engulfed several others will naturally have many of both.
In order to simulate that, I took my printed lexicon to a coffee shop and made do with what I could look up by hand… a process that is necessarily imperfect, because I can’t search every page, and sometimes I alphabetized something incorrectly, or defined the word slightly different. It’s very easy to think ‘Okay, did I make a word for ‘clean’? No? What about ‘pure’? or ‘clear’?” and search for all those things. With the paper copy, you make do, and if you don’t find it, you make up…!
I figured this was a golden opportunity to add some necessary confusion and density and complexity, and so it was.
My target for this session was words for sickness and health, because those are important topics for Kherishdar 5. That required me to ask what the Ai-Naidar believe about health and how they describe the various ways bodies fail. Interestingly, there’s evidence of old ways of treating disease mingling with newer ways, which is why there are multiple words for diagnosis. Here’s the list:
- A new word for ‘break’, because I couldn’t find the one already in the lexicon (fesh) comes from toril: tor, which is both the number 15 and ‘to break’ in the sense of something ‘not being functional.’ This gives us the word for deaf, which means nonfunctional ears: torfoni.
- There was already a word for blind (halet), and mute (duini). But we also get haaletris, which means anosmia (the inability to smell)… literally, ‘empty nose’. (I had no word for nose. Now I do: etris). Similarly there was no name for being unable to taste, so I found one, yuthojet, which means tasting numbness.
- I wanted words for what you do to take care of sick or hurt people, something like nurse or minister, and for that I stumbled onto the word for whole (it) and wholeness (iteth) and to make whole (itet). Nursing someone back to health from physical injury/sickness is metitet, then, to make the body whole again.
- Figuring out words for diagnosis and prognosis was… an adventure. I had to ask… what do they think diagnosis and prognosis are? And came back with the idea that originally it was a prediction of the course of someone’s fate, which led me to some old words: rol, to predict, and then an entertaining split: an older word, marol, prediction, and a modern word, rolijz, which is also a prediction but in a sciency context. So prognosis is sometimes referred to as qormarol (the prediction of your life’s breath), and sometimes metnotsil (the future of your body), with the latter being more modern and the former more poetic. Diagnose, on the other hand, is a solely modern word, a verb/noun, metqare, which is to grasp the pattern of the body.
- Physical injuries are norvak (n/v). Sickness and diseases already had words: mosehh is an unspecific, unnumbered noun for sickness, whereas poq is a more modern word and can refer to anything that impedes the body’s function.
There are a bunch of words and concepts I don’t have yet, but this was an interesting grouping, and it led to there being two words for break, one of which is also a homonym (tor being both a word and a number).
It’s been a while since I’ve paid attention to Kherishdar and particularly the language, and it was comfortable to come back. If there’s anything you want to hear from them, let me know… they’re pretty close lately.
