Goal: Brainstorm options for measuring and marking time
Note: Consider how your speakers divide time on a regular basis.
Tip: Think about concepts like day, week, month, season, and year.
Work focus: Learn/Brainstorm/Try
Brainstorming options for measuring and marking time goes beyond having temporal adverbs like “now” and “then” in your language and asks how your speakers view time in the conworld you’ve created for them. Do they experience days and nights? If so, do they group the days/nights they experience into weeks and/or months? Do they experience seasons and seasonal shifts? If so, how many, and what kinds of weather patterns, fauna behaviors, flora growth are associated with each? Do they mark time by counting years? Are their years somewhat equivalent to our own?
Going in the opposite direction, do your speakers divide days into different periods of time, such as morning, afternoon, evening, and night? Do they divide those periods into even smaller units, like hours, minutes, and seconds?
Remember that today is a brainstorming day. You don’t need to create all these words right now, and you may only be able to sketch out larger details for the time being (time is a complicated concept, after all!). As you’re coming up with ideas, though, make sure they fit in with what you’ve created in your world so far. For instance, if you created a world where the sun never sets, you may want to think about time differently than having it divided into days.