Published in 2013 by the Yonagu Books imprint of Chicago, written by constructed language and worldbuilding expert Mark Rosenfelder (also known online by his handle, Zompist), The Conlanger's Lexipedia is a densely packed, methodically written 422 page guidebook for developing a dictionary for your very own conlang.

Rosenfelder opens the text by explaining that actually coming up with words in a conlang is the most tedious, slow, grueling part of the process. Developing rules for a conlang is the playful and fun part, an opportunity to explore peculiar corners of the field of linguistics, like split ergativity, lenition and eclipsis, and verb deponency. The core problem of building a lexicon for a conlang, is that most conlangs do not actually get used by their own creators, and very few conlangs ever have any users beyond their creator, meaning all that laborious word selection tends to "go to waste" in the mind of a solitary conlang developer, who will never have cause to actually employ the product of their effort.

Rosenfelder attempts to introduce fun back into the process of lexicon generation, by teaching the reader how to integrate the act of word formation into the subtler and more delightful act of worldbuilding. Every word in every natural language contains some implicit assumptions about the world we live in, and often these assumptions are very well hidden in some of our most commonly-used words.

Consider, for example, the word "goodbye." This is just a truncation of the phrase "God be with ye." A language with "goodbye" is a language with a history of theism.

The word "dollar" shares a root with the word "dale," in the sense of a valley. A language with the word "dollar," therefore, is a language with economic connections to a place that has valleys (and by extension, mountains).

The word "check" comes from the game of Chess. This one surprised me! The modern sense of "check up, check in, check out" is a much later development, and the sense of putting a King into check is the older usage. It descends from Shah, Persian for a king or general. A language with the word "check" accordingly has the game of Chess in its culture.

This kind of depth and history is present in every word. Worldbuilding is tucked away neatly in every etymology. The history of colonisation and rebellion, migration and genocide, cultural erasure and restoration, is indelibly imprinted on the words we use every day of our lives. For a lifelong lover of words like me, there is no finer prey to hunt than these buried threads connecting the minds of humanity across continents and millennia. This rapt wonder is what Rosenfelder nurtures in the reader, and in doing so he instills a sense of agency upon the floundering novice conlanger. If J.R.R. Tolkien captured lightning in a bottle when he created an entire narrative world just to justify his several conlangs by giving them peoples and histories and elaborate causality, then Rosenfelder is a master glassblower, showing the rest of us how we may also bottle our own bit of lightning, or at least capture that essential spark of authenticity and realism that keeps a conlang alive.

The Conlanger's Lexipedia is a masterwork, but it is far from Rosenfelder's only effort at making conlanging and worldbuilding a more accessible pastime, and linguistics a more comprehensible interest. The Syntax Construction Kit (2018), for example, makes the bold (and entirely correct) choice to transcend Noam Chomsky's efforts at unifying the field of syntax, delving into relational grammars and other approaches which contrast Chomsky's models of generative grammar and universal grammar. In my opinion, everything by Rosenfelder to date is to be recommended; the quality of the research and the efficacy of the explanations are both unmatched in any other conlanging resource I've yet encountered.


Iron Noder 2024, 21/30

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