The Conlanger's Lexipedia: Resources

Web Resources

The Fantasy Frequency Wordlist

Here is a text file containing just the words in the wordlist, in alphabetical order.

Here it is again in frequency order (what's in the book).

More from Zompist.com

You can meet other conlang enthusiasts— and get help when you're stuck— at the zompist bboard.

If you're getting started with conlanging, check out the online Language Construction Kit here. If you want more depth, try out my other books:

The Language Construction Kit
Advanced Language Construction
The Planet Construction Kit

There's more of interest on zompist.com-- take a look around! If you've got the etymology bug, look at my lists of English words from Amerindian languages, India, Arabic, and Chinese.

There's far more on Almea over at Virtual Verduria. You can get more ideas for etymologies by browsing my lexicons.

In more depth...

More on kinship terms from Brian Schwimmer.

Jim Clark's guide to chemistry is intended for British students, but it's a fantastic in-depth explanation of electron shells, the periodic table, organic chemistry, and plenty of stuff I'm glad I don't have to understand.

Errata

p. 230: The diagram of Latin kinship terms switches avuncular and patruus and their children. Here's the correct diagram:
p. 352: The formula for potassium carbonate (salt of tartar) should be K₂CO₃. It could be obtained by baking potash, which is an unrefined form.

Stuff I wish I'd included

There's a fascinating cluster of meanings deriving from Greek μύσος 'something abominable or repulsive'. This gives Latin miser 'unhappy, wretched'. The emotion evoked by such states was expressed by miseror 'pity, deplore'. English misery and miserable (i.e. 'pitiable') are straightforward. In French the primary meaning is now one type of wretchedness-- poverty. Spanish miserable can also mean 'despicable'; this might have been the semantic bridge to the meaning 'avaricious', which we have as miser(ly). Finally note misericord, from 'a pitying heart', which has various meanings, including a bracket attached to a folding seat which allows a standing person to lean on it.

Spanish mísero 'wretched, miserly' must not, by the way, be confused with misero 'fond of going to mass'. Which in turn is an interesting nonce specialization of the Romance -er person suffix.

Another Englishism to watch out for: where Latinized adjectives have a neutral 'relating to X' meaning (solar, manual, nasal, feline, ecclesiastical, aqueous), the native adjective has a quirkier idiomatic meaning (sunny 'full of sun', handy 'good with the hands', nosy 'inquisitive', catty 'spiteful', churchy 'fond of church', watery 'with (too) much water').