As #Lexember approaches, I’d like to offer some advice, especially to beginning conlangers, on giving your conlang’s vocabulary character and richness. This advice is particularly relevant for naturalistic(-ish) conlangs.

“Too little” vs. “Too much”

At one point we were all that novice conlanger who had just generated a list of every phonotactically possible CVCV combination and set about assigning definitions straight from “baba” down to “yuyu”. Obviously, that’s not a very pleasing or even necessarily realistic technique. So we discover that not every concept needs to have a basic vocabulary entry. We can use compounds! Unfortunately, sometimes it’s possible to go overboard. I once remember reading a post by a novice conlanger who complained that they were following the “rules” about avoiding monomorphemic vocabulary terms, and as a result were getting unwieldy compounds like “fire-earthbump fire-waste” for “lava”. That, of course, is probably unreasonable.

Lesson 1: Don’t go overboard on compounds for basic vocabulary terms. It’s okay to have monomorphemic words, even for more complex concepts.

Canonical morpheme shapes

So you’ve figured out your conlang’s phonotactics and syllable structure. Say you permit sCrVCs syllables, at most. However, this doesn’t mean that any old word could end up being sCrVCs. Languages frequently have “canonical morpheme shapes” - specific phonemic patterns that words, often of a particular class, typically fall into.

For example, Yoruba allows only ©V syllables, so theoretically it could have a CV or CVCV noun. But it doesn’t. In Yoruba, virtually all nouns are VCV or sometimes VCVCV.

Likewise, English permits up to four (or was it five?) consonants at the end of a word-final syllable, but in any case this never happens in the base form of a noun. You only see it in plurals, like “strengths” /stɹɛŋkθs/ or “twelfths” /twɛlfθs/.

Now, “canonical morpheme shapes” - and even syllable structures themselves - are not absolute. Onomatopoeic words often violate these constraints, as well as, very commonly, loanwords. For example, the Yoruba word alabasta, from English, not only breaks the VCV noun pattern, it also flagrantly violates the basic phonotactic rules of the language!

Lesson 2: Limit certain kinds of words - especially the base form of words - to certain phonemic patterns to keep your conlang from being an auto-generated jumble. Violate these patterns judiciously through onomatopoeia, borrowing, and other phenomena for added character.

Phonesthemes, sound symbolism, and ideophones

These concepts can help add some liveliness and fun to your conlang.

A phonestheme is a “systematic pairing of form and meaning in a language”, but it is not a morpheme. How is this possible? Some examples can help.

Take the English words "glitter", “glisten”, “glow”, “gleam”, “glare”, and “glint” - all of them have to do with light or vision, yet the sequence “gl-” doesn’t actually mean anything - nor does “-itter”, “-isten”, “-ow”, and so on. Phonesthemes can be motivated by resemblance to real-world sounds, such as the “-ack” of “smack”, “crack”, and “whack”, or they can be more abstract, like “gl-”.

Ferdinand de Saussure argued in 1912 that a particular group of Latin adjectives developed in a certain way because of sound symbolism. Adjectives that contained aV diphthongs, such as caecus, blaesus, claudus, calvus, and mancus all stood for some kind of “infirmity” or “deviation”, just as the /a/ deviated towards the semivowel or continuant. This case, similar to a phonestheme, shows that sound symbolism can itself be quite arbitrary and abstract.

Lastly, one should also consider ideophones - “words that evoke an idea in sound, often a vivid impression of certain sensations or sensory perceptions”. Examples include boing, tick-tock, wow, and ta-daa in English, and doki doki, kira kira, and shiin in Japanese. Ideophones are often onomatopoeia or interjections, but they can have other grammatical uses, too - such as with twinkle and swish.

Lesson 3: Make your conlang’s vocabulary more vivid by using phonesthemes, sound symbolism, and ideophones.

Immediate models of analogical change

Linguistic change is not always regular. For example, sound change is a regular process that produces irregularity, and analogy is an irregular process that produces regularity. Analogical changes involving non-immediate models (i.e. words that don’t normally occur right next to each other) tend to affect whole classes of words or morphological paradigms, while analogical changes that involve immediate models (i.e. words that frequently occur near each other) “are typically found in frequently recited routines, such as sequences of numbers, days of the week, months of the year, or phrases used so frequently they can almost be taken as a unit” - Historical Linguistics: An Introduction, Lyle Campbell, 1999

So, for example, the English words male and female used to be male and femelle, but the vowel in female changed to match the vowel in male, even though the words etymologically have nothing to do with each other. Or, for example, the Old English word brȳdguma “bride-man” became Middle English bridegome, but then became bridegroom because of its association with the unrelated word groom.

Lesson 4: Use analogical change to add some interesting quirks and patterns to your conlang’s vocabulary.

Loanwords

How much do I have to say about loanwords? They’re words from one language that enter another language. Use them! They’ll often start out retaining their foreign phonemic structure, but over time they’ll be hammered out and blended into the phonology of the borrowing language.

Don’t be afraid to use loanwords for “basic” vocabulary entries. English has plenty of basic loanwords! Both of our words “person” and “human” are loanwords!

Furthermore, loanwords can happen between any two linguistic varieties, even closely-related dialects! For example, English has the word “whore”, and in African American English it underwent a sound change: r-dropping. It was then loaned back into Standard American English as “ho” (or “hoe”), with a somewhat different meaning and connotation than “whore”. (Sorry for that example, but whatever.)

Lesson 5: Use loanwords! Loan words between your language’s dialects! Loanwords add life!

Okay, that’s all I’ve got for now and I’m tired of writing! I hope this was helpful for all the conlangers out there!