User blog:EmperorZelos/Colouring Voabulary

While I have already said it once This one will be a little more detailed.

A languages vocabulary is coloured by and reflects the history of its speakers, their beliefs of the world, thier needs of what was in the world, what they considered to be important and our inherent ability and desire to use imagery to describe things (Which I'll assume (like all really does) includes all sorts of sapient life)

Let me describe first what I mean with them and provide some examples and after I shall provide ways to do this.

History of speakers includes all of the previously mentioned factors but this one can still show itself, I am currently unable think of a single word example but I can from my experience here in sweden, a former norse mythology country, that if we exclude all strongely religious into monotheistic religions or any specific religion and focus mainly on your avarage joe whom really have no strong ties to any religion they have more of a tendency to say in plural "gods" whenever they refer wrath of such or whatnot, the origin of this is not suprising now is it?

The belief of the world, " To the end of the world", "All corners of the world", while these are phrases they act often as a single unit but can easily be turned through time into single words, but I picked those just because they are reflecting the belief that england have had for a long time. Christianity as the belief of christianity was a square like circle with basicly a dome above and god was above the dome looking down. Hence such phrases came to be and can easily be turned into words through time. Another example is the word "Spirit" which means "Breath" originally, butancient people though that the spirit/soul could be felt (or similarly, i am not 100% certain) through the breath.

The need, this one becomes more obvious as you'll always start naming everything you deem important and needed for survival or whatnot. Tons of words arise from this, Fridge when it was invented and so on, a culture in south america for example had 2 words for water, one which is water you cook/drink and another is water you bath in.

Symbolism, we humans love images. What we can see facinate us, what we can imagen too. This forms new words by using phrases and words as metaphorical expressions of something else, Mood is height (Im feeling up/down), Life is a container (Im feeling empty/full) and so on. these concepts are on their own rather natural but hard to give words to so we tend to use other words to describe them. Evolve = Unfold, Spirit = Breath so on

Now how would one go about giving life and a soul to a vocabulary? I assume here you already know the "Mix around randomly" meaning thing I talked about before of not having meanings of words attatched togather in identical matter as to english or any other language.

Give your people a history and put yourself into their shoes all through time, what are they thinking? how do they view the world?

A culture where the soul is divided and reason is behind the eyes one would have good sight when they are reasonble, hence sight/reason will be interconnected

What is it we need to survive and is standard? If they have many different carts for different purposes then they probably got a name for each and everyone of them if its very important, anything important to everyday life will have its own name (which may be mixed with other meanings, but 2 important things in the same area shant have the same name but seperate where the words might overlap other areas items).

Think of a metaphorical system, Whats mood like? Is it height based or perhaps its volume, time is left and right, so on. Think of new ways to describe it while some are more natural than others there are still plenty of choices.

An example is my own language, in their view time is comming from the center of the planet and exapnds outward (they are aware its spherical) and hence future is downward, upward is the past. Their sight is important to them so they got plenty of words to see with slight changes in meaning.

Avoid direct translations always and add a little flavour and life to it through these, languages dont arrive on their own but in a culture and the culture will ultimately give it a soul through its own coloured vocabulary and method of using words. and as always with languages a few strange offshots that makes no sense is always allowed, no one knows where it came from, perhaps some bastard child decieded to be mean and people just caught on liking it?