Kategorier
WordBuilder

Esolanean

Esolan is a large country, or empire, rather, covering most of the continent east of Dunderhill. Esolanean is the Dunderer name for the language spoken there. I know very few words of Esolanean, but I thought it could make an interesting test language for WordBuilder.

I’m no expert conlanger, so I’m probably going about this all backwards, but here goes.

One word that I know is the word for magic: /sint/. From that word come words for magic-user, /sintor/, and for a master of magic, /sintaro/. I made those up back in the day without giving much thought to why they’d be named so, but I’ve made up an explanation:

The stem of the word is /sin/, actually meaning “river”. Magic in the world of Dunderhill and Esolan is of the channeling kind, so it would make sense for magic users to describe it as a river. The /-t/ suffix works to mark the determinant form, so /sint/ means “the river”.

The /-or/ suffix changes a noun into “a slave of <noun>” – so a magic user to the Esolaneans is basically “a slave of the river”.

The /-aro/ suffix works like /-or/, but turns the noun into “a master of <noun>” – that is to say, “the owner of a <noun> slave.”

Let’s say Esolaneans are pretty keen on this slave/master relationship. I’m thinking I can use the slave suffix for genitive forms in general, but also to indicate reliance on, or addiction to, something, and the master suffix could be used for people who master a trade or skill. A regular mercenary could be a slave of the sword, while a highly regarded warrior hero might be a master of swords.

As for WordBuilder, this already gives me a bunch of tokens (phonemes, I think they’re called) that Esolanean must allow: the vowels [a] [e] [i] [o] and the consonants [l] [n] [r] [s] and [t].

Kategorier
Role playing WordBuilder

Tired, so tired

Bleh. I’m tired, and I want to go to bed. It’s only barely 8 pm, though.

I’ve been planning to start a conlang and try to fill it in using WordBuilder, and then blog about my progress here. Not entirely sure where that’ll take me.

Kategorier
WordBuilder

Upcoming

Hm.. I had some fun with InkScape, generating names with the extension, but I’ve found that it’s a bit of a bother to have to make text-on-path objects for it to generate into. So for the next version, I’ve added functionality to put text on selected paths that have no text attached, so if there’s text on a path, that text will be filled, if there’s no text on it, a new text-on-path will be created.

Also, I’m working on a word-editor for the dictionary, where you can manually add tokens, apply rules, branches and marks.

Kategorier
WordBuilder

WordBuilder 1.3 released

Download here: http://whee.dk/wordbuilder/WordBuilder.msi

New features:

  • Substring command: substring <start> <end>

Where start is the first letter you want to keep, and end is the last letter you want to keep. Negative numbers count from the end of the token.

So, with the token ‘abcdefg’:

substring 2 -1 // bcdefg
substring 1 2 // ab
substring 1 -2 // abcdef
substring -3 -1 // efg
  • About box
  • Inkscape extension to populate selected text objects with generated words – in the install dir, there’s a folder called InkScapeExtension. Copy the content of that folder to your InkScape/share/extensions, and look under Effects/Text.