An image with multiple ways of saying "hello" and "welcome" in a variety of conlangs

Day 23: January 23, 2024


Image of two mice holding a banner with the Day 23 prompt text around them
Conlang Year, Day 23 prompt

Goal: Create five proto-forms for fauna

Note: Creating roots for fauna means thinking about how your speakers categorize different fauna.

Tip: It is often the “pests” we interact with most, such as fleas, ticks, gnats, and mosquitos.

Work focus: Create/Make/List


The vocabulary creation fun continues! Today’s goal is to create at least five proto-roots for fauna. As with the note on flora, you can have some fun with thinking about ways your speakers may categorize the fauna around them. For example, they may have a root for all animals that get around by hopping (versus those that fly or scamper or climb), and referring to any of them more specifically requires a compound form.

If you’re not sure where to begin with the fauna, think about the fauna your speakers interact with most. In our world, what we interact with most usually ends up being some kind of “pest,” such as a gnat (I’ve got one flying around the room as I type) or a roach. (I use the scare quotes because I realize that they can be incredibly important to our ecosystem, but the interactions we have with them are usually categorized as being pestered by them.)

After today, you’ve got two more days of root creation. Yet another reason I’ve spread these out across so many days is that some conlangers get what I call “lexicon fatigue,” where it can feel difficult to create a new root after just having created a whole list of them. For some conlangers, it can begin to feel like generating new roots becomes darn near impossible as their brain feels like it’s stuck in a rut and falling back on forms that all start sounding the same. I tasked you with creating a smaller amount of words each day to let you tackle a handful and then move on with the rest of your day before you sit back down to it the next day.

By the end of this stretch of vocab creation, you’ll have a nice list of animate nouns, inanimate nouns, and (after the next two days) some basic verbs. Those will be vital as the foundation for some of the upcoming grammar decisions you’ll need to make.