Week 6: Where words come from

Building a lexicon — core vocabulary, derivation, and getting a thousand words out of two hundred roots. Herbert borrowed heavily, and it is worth asking how

29 March 2027

Frank Herbert’s Dune is built on borrowed language. Arabic runs through the Fremen material at every level — in the vocabulary, in the honorifics, in the religious register. Even Chakobsa, the Fremen battle tongue, takes its name from a real hunting language associated with the Caucasus. The 2021 film’s languages were developed further by David J. Peterson and Jessie Peterson, working on top of what the novels had already fixed.

Borrowing at that scale raises a question this course should not skip, so we will spend twenty minutes on it. There is a real difference between drawing on a language you have studied and know something about, and taking syllables from a language you know nothing about because they sound foreign. The first is how languages have always worked. The second is a habit worth being conscious of, and you will be asked in the portfolio to write down what you took and where from.

The practical side is more straightforward. Every language has a core vocabulary that gets used constantly and resists borrowing — kinship, body parts, small numbers, the basic verbs. Build that first, from your own roots. Then build derivation: rules that make new words out of old ones. Two hundred roots and six productive derivational rules will get you further than a thousand words invented one at a time, and unlike the thousand, they will be internally consistent.

Outline#

• core vocabulary: the concepts every documented language has words for
• derivation, compounding, and a lexicon that grows from its own roots
• Herbert’s Arabic, and the line between drawing on and taking from
• what to write down about your own borrowings, and why the portfolio asks