SO I went through the Project Opal tag and WOW. Great worldbuilding, I can picture it. How do you come up with names and words in the language? I focus on the real world with my writing so not much is left up to me to decide.
Iām glad you asked! Which Iām realizing is a phrase I use a lot!
So! The language spoken by people in the Vandeth Desert is called Vandeth. You asked about names and words, so Iāll talk about names and words.
I knew I wanted to use a constructed language (or conlang, for short) for the Vandeth people. After a previous project proved extremely time-consuming and not at all worth it, I decided to create Vandeth using a top-down method. I started by just making up words, then seeing what they had in common, finding rules they follow. Every word I made after that would follow those rules. And when I needed grammar rules, I made those up, and continued following them.
Some of the most important things are vowel inventory, consonant inventory, and phonotactics (what sequences of sounds are allowed to go together). Vandeth uses the standard /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/ vowels, and thatās it. (Theyāre pronounced consistently, unlike in English.) I wonāt write out all the consonants, but at this point Iām no longer adding any new ones.
Now, the phonotactics. This is mainly about syllable shapes. In Vandeth, the most common vowel shape is CV. After that is CVC. A very rare syllable shape is VC. Even rarer is CVV and CCVV. I also try to have a good balance of how often certain sounds appear and where. Hard, sharp sounds are more common, while soft, round sounds are rarer. What makes a sound hard, sharp, round, or soft is kinda vague. Itās a bit of a kiki/bouba situation. But to me, a word like āluvimoā doesnāt sound like Vandeth at all, but āshivakiā does.
But how do I even come up with new words? Well, I first look at the words I have and consider if it can be derived from any of those. At one point, I wanted a word for āgossipā. I looked at the words I had, and I noticed blai, āstainā and saksa, a verb stem meaning āto talkā. In Vandeth, words go after the word they describe, and when a word is derived from two others the words swip-swap. So the word for āgossipā ends up being blaisaksa. As another example, the word geital is a combination of gi, ātwoā, and keital, which used to be āgikeitalā before it was shortened to be easier to say. The reason for this is that a geital is the same length as a keital but twice the length. The word keital itself actually comes from the verb stem kei, āto wearā, and the noun tal, āshadowā.
And what about names? Well, usually itās just a word. Or it should be. I gave a throwaway character (an infant) the name Kimi, which in Vandeth means āpearlā. Itās kind of a cutesy name. Most often I just pick sounds that are Vandeth-y. Itās really important to me that Vandeth names (Vennem, Kalami, Mela) sound distinct from Delgane names (Lynn, Elvi, William, basically any English name) and names from other languages (Sóf, Markhi, Lili).
Donāt even get me started about grammar. Thereās lots of linguistics and affixes involved, and admittedly, I havenāt made a whole lot of full sentences so the grammar is actually not super fleshed out. Thereās enough for deriving words, though. Maybe I should just start translating random things, or have people send things to be translated via asks. Hmm⦠Anyway.