Week 3 Workshop: Building words

You pick a morphological type, commit to it, and build ten words that obey rules you wrote down before you started

11 March 2027

Before the session#

Watch Star Trek VI. Pay attention to the courtroom scenes specifically — not for the plot, but for how much grammatical work the subtitles are doing that the spoken Klingon is not doing.

Bring your inventory from last week. You cannot do this session without it.

In the session#

We start with glossing. You will be given ten words in a language none of you have seen and asked to work out where the morpheme boundaries fall. It is slow at first and then becomes straightforward, and the rest of the session depends on it.

Then you choose your type and defend it in one sentence to the person next to you. Agglutinative is the easy choice and most of you will take it; that is fine, but choose it deliberately, because adding fusion later is much harder than choosing it now.

The rest of the session is building. Ten words, from your own phonemes, obeying your own rules.

Afterwards#

Write the rules down separately from the words. A list of ten words is a list of ten words. A rule that generates them is a system, and in week six you will need it to produce ninety more.