My lovely spouse made a singular request of me some months ago--that I should teach her French over the summer. So, naturally, I dusted off my old textbook, and started instructing her in vocabulary, conversation, and pronunciation. One difference between starting off learning a language and starting off designing a language, is that you don’t want to overwhelm new learners with too many gross grammatical rules all at once. Rather, you reveal grammatical patterns little bit by little bit as they become relevant for communicative scenarios.
For example, after having gone over basic cultural information in the first chapter--like how to say “s’il-vous-plait” and “merci”--the second chapter, builds upon that basic foundation to introduce personal descriptors--someone’s age, sex, place of origin, profession, their likes and dislikes--focusing on the kinds of things that a language learner might want to know about their interlocutor and giving them the grammatical to find them out.
Thus to describe anyone in French you’ll need adjectives, and adjectives are subject to the pattern of Gender agreement, so the book introduces that; and then it’s often as useful to talk about what someone doesn’t like as it is to mention what they do, so you’ll need to know how to form the negative; and so on and so forth, if that makes sense. The grammar is primarily a tool.
at’s really important is the vocabulary. When I would have immersive conversations with my spouse, (which is where both parties make an effort to only communicate in target language) I noticed that she struggled primarily with not having a needed word. Specifically, she would want to talk about what she enjoyed in the cinema, and thus would need words corresponding to “actor,” “director,” “score,” “plot,” etc. A whole vocabulary corresponding the the world of cinema. A whole lexical domain.
Let me give you another illustration. You might have possibly heard the old story that the Inuit have an extraordinary number of words for snow? Well, that story has been the subject of considerable debate and ridicule. Basically because it sounds so freaking obvious that linguists, who want to be objective, are suspicious of it on the grounds that it’s a dirty hunch. I mean, on the one hand, it seems fairly commonsensical to affirm that a people who live in a cold region where it snows all the time would have greater lexical elaboration for that frigid fluffy white stuff that falls from the clouds. But then, on the other hand English has got a large number of words for light that start with gl-: gleam, gloam, glimmer, glisten, glint, glaze, glow. And it’s kinda hard to correlate this lexical elaboration with any environmental cause.
A recent article in the Scientific American, however, reports on a computational cross-linguistic study carried out at the University of Sydney that aimed to provide some experimental support for this “dirty hunch.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/linguists-find-proof-of-sweeping-language-pattern-once-deemed-a-hoax/
What the researchers Kishigshuren et al. did was collect a large number of English bilingual dictionaries, and look at how many times a particular concept, represented by a particular English word, would show up in the translations of words in the foreign language.
They have produced a free resource for anyone to use, which I include here, where you can search through their data and find some curious correlations. They have collected 6000 concepts across 616 languages, which is some vastness of scope. There are some fun observations to be made, to be sure. So for instance, the concept “alchemy” has a score of 11 in Burmese, which means that the English word “alchemy” appears in the definition of 11 distinct Burmese words in an English-Burmese bilingual dictionary. But the long and the short of it is, is that Inuit does indeed have a high lexical elaboration for the concept of snow, with a score of, like, 16.
Here is the link to the lexical elaborator.
https://charleskemp.com/code/lexicalelaboration.html
Now, these observations about language learning and lexical elaboration lead a worldbuilding conlanger down an interesting path. You see, if you’re designing a language, and I want it to be believable and immersive, then you’re going to have to flesh out the places in the conlang where there’s gonna be the greatest lexical elaboration, because those are (likely) going to be places of importance to your fantasy culture. You see, while you can’t stick to this generalization all the time, domains with the greatest lexical elaboration are the most important to the worldbuilding.
That might have come as a surprise , as one could make a fairly good case that the basic vocabulary is the most important for worldbuilding. Things like “hand,” “sun,” “water.” Words that every language is gonna have their own version of. Words that you can’t do without. And indeed, you do absolutely need those in designing a conlang. But those words aren’t gonna be what’s driving the worldbuilding forwards. If every language has got words for body parts and weather, and landscape, then your conlang is, of course, gonna have them too, but it will stand out by virtue of its specialized vocabulary.
In my next article, I’ll go over some more example of lexical elaboration in Conlanging.