Week 6 Workshop: The first hundred words

A hundred words by the end of the day, at least twenty of them generated by rules rather than invented, and a written record of everything you borrowed

1 April 2027

Before the session#

Watch Dune. Bring everything you have: inventory, morphology, syllable formula, existing words. This is the first session where the earlier weeks all have to work together, so anything left unfinished will become obvious.

In the session#

We work from a core list — the concepts that turn up in essentially every language and that you will need before you need anything else. You build those from your own roots, by hand, checking each against your phonotactics as you go.

Halfway through we stop inventing and start deriving. You write six rules that make new words from existing ones, then apply them, and the last stretch of the session is mostly mechanical: once the rules are working, they generate words much faster than inventing them one at a time.

Keep a borrowing column. Every time you take something from a real language, note which one. Nobody is going to object to your borrowing; you are going to be asked what you borrowed, and “I don’t remember” is not an adequate answer.

Afterwards#

A hundred words is enough to write something short, but not yet enough to write well. That gap closes over the next four weeks.

The Phonology and Grammar Portfolio is due this week. It wants the systems, not the word list — the inventory, the morphology, the syllable formula and the derivational rules, in a form somebody else could build from.