After I answered a question on the amount of vocabulary, apparently, Google thinks that I am an expert for all things vocabulary related. Why else would a search for “how to create words for a conlang” hit my blog?
But okay, unknown googler, I will answer your question. Of course, this is my personal take on it and it is probably inadequate for your needs. Feel free to comment which parts you personally consider good, bad or ugly.
Generally, you are in one of 3 stages:
- just decided to start
- already formed the first sentences in $CONLANG
- some form of basis exists
These 3 stages differ. The first words are very important for the character of the language. Later in the development, they can be relegated to legacy terms or even struck off from the vocabulary*, but the damage will already been done. These words are going to appear in each and every of the first example sentences you are going to use. They will greatly influence how you perceive the language. Which words you will coin for this depends on your personal preferences and the culture of the language. A stone age culture might want a term for ‘hunt’, a future tech language might prefer a word for ‘compile’ for the first example sentences. Use something typical. Build a unique feeling for the culture with the first sentence you are going to write. Make sure that the words fit your phonotactics (or change them while you still can) and fit your phonoaesthetics. Try to speak them, shout them, sing them. No, this is not a joke. Singing words makes sure that you avoid too horrible insults to pronuncability, taste and common sense. At this point, developing a feeling for the language is most important.
After you finished the first few sentences and have a stable-ish grammar**, your priorities can change. You probably still have to work on hitting the exact aesthetic quality, but it will become easier. It will however become very important now, not simply to relex English. You now need to think about what meanings a word has. If you are fluent in a different language, it might help you. But here is a random list of things to keep in mind to prevent relexing:
- Work from sentences. At this point, to look at a list (like Swadesh) probably means to take the English assumptions and meanings and translate them 1:1. Thus, better think about how to use each word in a sentence.
- Think about what the word means. Take ‘spoon’ and ‘fork’: they are both implements to take food and move it into your mouth. The difference is the shape. Maybe you want to have a word for this purpose and specify the exact kind of implement differently. Or think of the difference between ‘to buy’ and ‘to acquire’. OTOH, if you have the feeling that a word mushes two meanings together, think of the meanings separately (right can be the antonym of left and of wrong).
- Think about your culture: If your conculture uses chopsticks for eating (or the right hand), the words for ‘fork’ and ‘spoon’ might be complicated terms or loan words from a language of a culture which uses them.
- Base your vocabulary distinctions at least partially on a foreign language, best of course, is one you are fluent in. If a language which kinda fits the culture already exists, an online dictionary might come in handy: translate a term into a target language (which fits the perceived quality of the language) and take one of the the translated terms and re-translate them into English. Or ask someone who knows the language.
- Consider usage: Maybe a certain word which your L1 uses intransitively is used transitively in $CONLANG, maybe it is the other way around. Maybe there is a choice where English does not allow one, maybe a word which is almost exclusively used in passive voice (frex: to get relegated) is used in active voice in $CONLANG (German uses absteigen), or the other way around (English uses to assign a grade, but rejistanian ‘rala’sidekhir runa which literally means “to get reached a grade”), maybe the meaning is more general, more specific, more polite, more vulgar and maybe it has different connotations.
- Consider existing vocabulary. Given existing Unabsteigbarkeit of your language*** you might be able to derive or compound the word. Remember here that it has to fit the culture. Remember also, that many languages do compound verbs (Rejistanian has many verbal compounds with ‘visko for “to speak”. Some examples are ‘ytinvisko=to.change-to.speak: to translate, or ‘idavisko=to.turn.into-to.speak: to declare). Or express it idiomatically.
- There are always onomatopoetic expressions to fall back to (‘iaia for ‘waking up with a hangover’ for example is supposed to sound as it feels). And even when you are not using a strictly onomatopoetic word, think about whether the sounds represent what the meaning represents. Maybe create own onomatopoetic rules (rejistanian for example often uses the u as only vowel in stems with an unpleasant meaning).
- Maybe there is no term. This does not mean that there is a Sapir-Whorf component involved, there can be many reasons why ‘they have no word for it’. Many English speaking countries do have democratic governments despite the lack of a word for ‘kandidieren’ (they say: to run for office) and they seem to dislike work as well but lack a word for ‘Feierabend’ (the end of the workday as well as the time after work). Maybe $CONLANG has no word for something $NATLANG considers important (rejistanian for example lacks a word for ‘art’, mainly because its definition is so wishy-washy that I cannot get to the associated concepts behind it).
- Write it down. Not only the general idea, but also things like connotations and usage.
From this level on, you can start using The Method, described below, however still remember that the first words shape the character of the language rather much. An example for this is probably ‘sidekhir. Its original meaning is “to reach”. Not only has its meaning expanded into many different areas (to arrive at a place, to get a mark, to get/change into a state), but its at that time dubiously-legal became quite common. (This is not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe you will like the place you reach when something seemingly random influences your language.)
You have made it into the next stage? You don’t know? Well, if you find that you actually can say things without constantly coining vocabulary, you are out of the hard area and probably have established enough feeling for the language to think of the pitfalls of relexing automagically. Depending on how different the culture of $CONLANG is from your own, you might always have issues reaching its state well enough to easily figure out how $CONLANG says it, but you are much less unsure about these things. Now you can think of areas of meaning and fill the gaps in vocabulary. At this point, you can probably start to use lists. I personally still abhor it. Lists however are not the only thing, Languages also have terms which might not have a direct equivalent in other languages. Maybe you think that your culture considers certain things important enough to name them (‘xikila means to qualify via 2 different routes and it became important after it happened in my soccer leagues not only once but twice), maybe you personally want a name for something (rejistanian for example has ‘kamandi (to let others down out of laziness, incompetence or bad motives) and ‘selka (to contribute your share of the work or more) because I thought that group work required these expressions). Maybe you want to include inside jokes, there is nothing wrong with that, Klingon does it, Rejistanian does it, Kamakawi does it to a point. I personally use The Method to help assigning sounds to a meaning.
The Method works like this:
- open your (alphabetically sorted) $CONLANG to $NATLANG dictionary in a text editor, make the window small enough only to show about 25 lines (using a textmode editor would be ideal)
- close your eyes and randomly scroll in the file
- open your eyes and look at the first and the last word in it
- the new word needs to fit in between there somehow. This will mean that certain changes to meaning are required to fit the ‘feel’ of the word. It also means that the distribution of initial sounds is more natural. The areas which have already many words will gain words quicker than the other areas.
And don’t forget: have fun doing it! 🙂
* if you are the kind of person who does that. I am not.
** is it ever really stable? That was a rethorical question.
*** I want to establish the word Unabsteigbarkeit for the ability of a language (including surrounding culture) to build new words via affixes. Toki Pona has the lowest Unabsteigbarkeit out there (it is completely isolating), Esperanto is in a completely different league (the word Unabsteigbarkeit is ne-mal-promoci-ebl-ec-o in Esperanto, just without the dashes which are just inserted to show the affixes), pun intended.
There are also new IRC quotes for you:
I fully agree with malvarma: Why does everyone seems to love Quenya?
( malvarma) I think I will learn a language that sounds pretty to me.
( B-rat) learn sindarin or quenya!
( malvarma) Klingon sounds pretty, but it’s too hard.
( malvarma) I think quenya sounds like dreck.
And here a quote just for the lulz of it:
( malvarma) ithkuil does sound nice. lojban sounds like a nerd mating call.
And the word of the day? It is vylisni’het, which means “lip”. Since I know no good example sentence with it, here a bad one.
Example: Vylisni’het’ny’il min’redy takani. (lip-PL-GEN2S 3PL-be.red mature: Your lips are in an arousing shade of red)
Rejistanian Word of the Day 
All languages build words by combining older elements (including affixes); in no language are all (or even most) of these combinations understandable based on knowing the “meanings” of their parts (for example: emerge > emergence [pretty straightforward]; but emergence > emergency [completely unpredictable, even though noun + -y is somewhat predictable]).
You are very right here. However languages do differ in how they assemble words for more complex meanings: German (and Kamakawi?) loves compounds, Esperanto has unabsteigbarkeit, Toki Pona uses whatever Toki Pona uses, idiomatic expressions, I guess would be the term.
However, the languages differ in which specific words are derived and which ones are normal stems. Compare police with Ordnungshüter (order-keepers) or down-load with saugen (to suck). Yes, these words differ on the formal vs colloquial axis, but I needed examples.
And even the most regular derivation might puzzle someone else. Or your future self, especially when it [or you] lack caffeine.
I didn’t want to say more.
My point, though, is that what you have with Esperanto is completely unnatural—and doesn’t work, actually, with those that come to speak Esperanto fluently (i.e. words whose derivation should be readily apparent become fossilized, their meanings shift, etc.). With Esperanto, there’s a conscious effort on the part of many speakers to resist semantic drift, but with a natural language, it’s wide open. If one is trying to create a language that looks like a natural language, what you have with Esperanto should probably be avoided.
OTOH, there are languages which have a great deal more Unabsteigbarkeit than our respective natlangs and do not suffer from these issues. Turkish is a good example (and, hey, Umabsteigbarkeit is a German term). Yes, the meanings are sometimes not what you expect, but in general, it seems to work. Sure, attempting to stabelize meanings is not a good idea, but I never advocated that. I talked about vocabulary generation when I do not know the goals of the conlanger. You somehow assume thatI assume that the conlanger wants a naturalistic conlang. I didn’t. Sorry for the confusion.
Thankfully there is a great deal of flexibility with the creation of vocabulary and various methods (including the one posted) can be utilized. I agree that firstly there should be a stated goal and an initial idea of how you want the language to sound. This is where a small sample vocabulary would prove useful to hear the words being spoken, in which case you may keep or remove certain sounds or words all together. Personally, I use a different approach in creating vocabulary. As with any language there is initially a core vocabulary that is expanded upon thereby creating more complex meanings or ideas.
The method I employ relies on using a core sample of vocabulary then I will take a word and put it through a series of mutations (internal letter shifts or swapping a short vowel for a long vowel), or create compound words and compact them together to imply a new, yet related meaning to the core word. This manner in which this is done can be regular or irregular, but it produces a wealth of vocabulary without the reliance of a language dictionary.
The newly created vocabulary will maintain the phonetic qualities of the parent (thus keeping the language sound stable) and will allow a wider range of expression. This is also easily applied when creating new words not based upon your core vocabulary. Other ideas include changing stress or even tone (depending on how complex you want to get and your design goals). Other ideas include using software to generate words based upon the rules you define, then you can assign meanings to them as the need arises.
Define your goals, set the theme (how it sounds), model some samples and play around. The most important thing is to have fun with it and to create something you will enjoy using.
All good advice on creating conlang words. I make words which please me at the time and (to a lesser extent) suit the meaning in my opinion, but have recently discovered the wonder of derivational morphology to create large groups of related words. It’s useful but more importantly for me – a whole lot of fun!
> I want to establish the word Unabsteigbarkeit for the ability of a language (including
> surrounding culture) to build new words via affixes
Being a German native speaker myself, I don’t understand what you mean with ”Unabsteigbarkeit”. The word itself is somewhat clumsy, it doesn’t exist in normal speach, if at all. Despite that, it conveys some meaning, at least to a native speaker. But I can’t bring this meaning in coherence with your definition. To me, it conveys the meaning/notion, that a downwards way/slope/ladder etc. can’t be passed in the indicated direction: downwards. I don’t get what that has in common with the ability of a language to build up compunds or to build up new words by using Affixes etc. Even if you see it the other way round, that the words of a language can be decomposed, i.e. decrease in complexity (the notion of ”abstiegen”) while at least parts of the components still have (related) meanings on their own, I don’t understand why you used ”un-”. Using this prefix, you fix the position (you aren’t able to descend) and nothing can happen any more. Granted, Toki Pona is in that position. So, ”Unabsteigbarkeit” and ”ability” massively contradict each other. Bulding up words form other components (or decomposing them) is a very dymamic process, whilest you proposal is incredibly static.
Unabsteigbarkeit is a quality, which was said that certain soccer teams possess (by the fans of said teams): the ability of not to get relegated. I found it mentioned first in the RSSSF.com trivia section. I used this word because normally, when a german-speaker hears this term and the affixes, s/he immediately knows what is meant despite never having seen the word, only the individual affixes. Using a word which expresses a quality for the quality was used by CONLANG-L and Tolkien with the word “cellar door” for a euphonic word.
I’m not interested in soccer at all. So ”Unabsteigbarkeit” is an ad hoc building. It seems to me very clumsy and bad German. Ok, what’d you expect form soccer fans? At least it makes sense as an instance of irreal wishful thinking in the realm of football. But I still don’t understand what it has to do with the ability you have in mind. ”Absteigbarkeit” or better ”Aufsteigbarkeit” would be more logic, but sound also quite clumsy.
I think soccer-slang is not that bad, IMHO. But yeah, the ad-hocness kinda appealed to me.
The meaning does not so much matter as the way it is constructed. It is supposed to illustrate the concept.
I agree with Bardioc on Unabsteigbarkeit, I’m a German native speaker as well, and this word is just plain weird, sorry. I know what you’re going for, but I don’t think the word fits the concept with respect to languages (I get it what it’s supposed to mean regarding soccer, although I find the sport particularly boring, but that’s beside the point 😉 ).
I have two problems with Unabsteigbarkeit. For once, it’s totally unrelated to languages, which makes it hard to make the connection. And for another – and I think this is the worse one – the only association I get is that it doesn’t describe the quality of building new words through affixation for which it may be a fabulous example if nothing else* so much as the contrary; to me it sounds more like a particularly strange term for “this word cannot be declinated any further”. Odd, I know. But that’s what you get when you put words in new contexts.
So… I have no idea right now what word you could use instead. I’ll let you know if I do, though.
Apart from that, great post. Thanks for compiling this awesome list!
*No, I’m not being ironic, sometimes I just sound weird and old-fashioned and over the top like that. 😛
Yeah, I tried explaining that the word is an example of the concept, and thus does not refer to the meaning but illustrates it. The other word like this in conlanging is ‘cellar door’ for euphonic words. (glottal stop can qualify as well in a few English dialects since the pronounce the as [?]). Since I did not find a good worrd for it, I thought using an example might be best.
As such, it is a kind of metynymic term,like Washington for 'the US government, 'the white house' for 'the US president, 'Karlsruhe' for the Bundesverfassungsgericht*, Schalke (a part of Gelsenkirchen) for a certain soccer club**.
* for the non-Germans: federal constitutional court.
** I know, many teams are named after places, but when I was young and first heard Schalke as a place name, I laughed.
Good point there. It’s still confusing the heck out of me, can’t help it. 🙂
Sorry about that. I already decided to use a German term in order not to confuse most conlangers, and then find out that there are quite a number of fellow German-speaking ones 😉
Yeah, I just read the About page and realized you were German, too. Funny how small the internet can be… 😉
It’s a small net after all. 😉
P.S.: Regarding Quenya… Dunno why everyone’s after it, I think it’s pretty boring. I wanted to learn the Black Speech, but there’s not enough corpus around to work with. Those grammar bits were intriguing enough to make me toy around with them a bit.
Oh, and the truth about Lojban finally leaked out then? Well, it was pretty obvious… *hides under bed*
There’s already a term for it: agglutination. (Agglutinierende Sprachen)
Agglutination is a grammatical process, it does not tell how it is used. Turkish uses agglutination and unabsteigbarkeit, German is not an agglutinating language, but has its share of unabsteigbarkeit,, on the hypothetical end of the scale would be a language which uses agglutination for grammatical issues, but is very conservative (ie: has very few constructed neologisms) and prefers to use longer phrases or compounding to affixation to create the few new words it does, ie: klassenerhaltsfähig.
Agglutination tells that affixes exist, but not how powerful and socially accepted they are.
Do you think the German use of affixes is not grammatical?
Agglutinaton is a morphological process, i.e. a subclass of the grammatical processes.
I think German is not considered agglutinating becaues some affixes have more than one meaning in inflectional morphology. But in derivational morphology, I think it is.
From what you write, I may conclude that what you have in mind is maybe ”productivity”, i.e. that there are some morphemes but they are used just in a few fossilised words, but not in general. (I hope I’ve got the notion of ”productivity” correctly.)
Besides that, I wouldn’t recommend to deliberately introduce odd and opaque terms just because they seem fitting to you or come from another field of your personal interest. You may ridicule yourself. Even if soccer is of special interest of you, it might confuse others. Use technical terms, then you can be relatively sure to be understood without massive explanations. That’s what technical terms are for. Otherwise it’s waste of time. We don’t need more confusion than already exists.
And sorry, rejistania, you’re not Tolkin. (If you were, you were already dead.) So, be glad to be alive, and, if one of Tolkins utterances spread out in linguistics for a certain phenomenon, ok, that’s because he’s famous. But I would prefer an additional significant technical term derived form Latin or Greek.
“Do you think the German use of affixes is not grammatical?”
I don’t think that’s what she was trying to say, but rather that the term agglutination describes a process, i.e. the way in which a language works morphologically, while she was looking for a term to describe a quality, i.e. the preference of a language in the formation of neologisms.
Or let me put it that way: A language can be agglutinating and still not form neologisms through affixes, while German loves to do that and still isn’t agglutinating. And yes, productivity sounds exactly like the right term for the process, if you’re refering to word formation. Very good point.
It’s a pretty broad term, though, and agglutination is just one way to do it. We still need a suitable term for that. Hmm, ‘agglutinative word formation’ maybe? It’s a bit unwieldy, but you can always cut it down to AWF. 😉
Hope this helps. And makes sense.
Both ‘Agglutinating Word Formation’ and ‘A Preference to coin new words and not use a longer expression’ (“Wochenende” vs. “fin de semaine”) are needed. Apart from that, you understood my intentions well!
“Wochenende” vs. “fin de semaine”
Ah! But those may be subject to morphological and grammatical restrictions. French hardly ever allows constructions like ‘Wochenende’, so you basically always have use the ‘X de Y’ pattern, if you like it or not (and they have the English loan word ‘weekend’, not kidding). On the other hand, they’re abbreviating everything they can, so it’s not like they have a faible for long words.
Yeah, I am not Tolkien but Rejis, that’s even better 😉 (Sorry, could not resist)
I know, German is fusional, the difference I was going after was more ‘in normal speech’ vs ‘talking about a new thing/idea’. I think that it is useful to look at how languages deal with this and that it is not necessarily related to the different type of language.
Productivity can AFAIK only refer to a specific affix, not to a language. Saying that feels… wrong to me.
I introduced the term ‘unabsteigbarkeit’ because I found myself often referring to this as example when explaining conlangs, especially Eo and because a term for ‘a language which has productive derivation not due to compounding but due to affixes and uses it frequently to coin new words’ was lacking, I tended to refer back to the example of Unabsteigbarkeit. So… if there was no need, I would not have felt the reason to use it… Soccer isn’t even a special interest of me. not that much at least. I just somehow found that term. Find me a better one and I will not use it…
I just mentioned ‘productivity’ concerning the very general term ‘morphem’, but had affixes in mind.
Are you that skilled in linguistics that you are sure that there’s no linguistic technical term for what you have in mind? Does it even make sense? If so, I can’t believe that such a term doesn’t exist, especially because ‘productivity’ is a well established concept, I think.
You need not make up a term by force. I even wouldn’t say that a language is that way or the other (what would be implied by such a coinage), but only some of the speakers of that language are. Or some purists at a neologism comitee. If there is a derivational morphology, it at least was used somewhen. A language might borrow new terms for ease if under the influence of an other language, especially it it is international terminology, so why making up unwieldingly native terms by the speakers? To see what I mean, read German Windows Help Files. They invited German terms by force to replace English ones already widely in use. They are hard to understand, even for a native, because of the many made up unusual clumsy German words for international Computer terminology. See the folder ”Dokumente und Einstellungen”. Why not just ”Dokumente”? Path names would be much shorter and life is too short to waste time on often repeated clumsy terms. These repetition of clumsy terms is often used in technical documents. Aren’t they able to use pronouns? Aren’t they able to read the document they’re written once again to shorten it to make it more readable and understandable?
Look down to your keyboard. Do yor see the Strg key? Silly? What does it mean? — Ah Steuerung! Weird. Three syllables. Diphthong followed by vowel. Horrible! Why not using control (only 2 syllables) and the traditional apprivation CTRL? ”Steuerung” is a general term, ”Control” would be a specific loan. Or ”Umschalttaste”. Why not using the short ”Shift”-Taste? Everybody knows this term. The first term is a term concerning a typewriter (very oldfashioned), the second one concening a computer. I really can’t understand the people doing that odd and clumsy ”Eindeutschungen”.
But we’re not finished yet: What is Einfg? Why not ”insert”? If you use computers, you even sooner than later will encounter the Englisch term ”insert”. And why the general term ”Rollen”? Why not the long established well known term ”scrolling”? Why Pos1? Why not sticking to the well known ”Home”? What does S-Abf mean? Or Untbr or Entf? And, why did they keep Esc? And why Enter in the number block? And what does ”Alt” and ”Alt Gr” mean?
To me, it doesn’t make sense to come up by force with new purely German derived words if there are internationally used general terms, especially if almost all German speakers also speak or at least understand some English. Therefore, if a language doesn’t use its derivational possibilities, you can’t conclude an intrinsic ”lazyness” of that language to use it. It maybe just mirror the current situation of the language and its speakers.
So, to my mind your coined term is quite senseless.
I am not that skilled in linguistics, I said what my issues with the term productivity were, and if you either address my issues with it (namely that I only heard it about certain affixes, not about a language in general) or point me to an established term, I’d be glad. I do not insist on it. So do not tell me what I did wrong, tell me what I can do better. *shrugs*
I also did not blame a language for it. I said that the surrounding culture makes certain developments more or less likely. Take French for example and now remove the various academies regulating language use from existance. Would the character of the language change? Probably. Take German and transport into an alternative universe where Vanuatu, not the USA is a world power. Would the way we create new terms change? Probably. This is not lazyness. These are cultural influences. As conlanger, and conworlder, these however are variables to ‘wiggle’ on.
Yes, M$ is an insult to language, good OS design, taste and ethics. And they still are not able to make freecell run maximized. *cuddles a Linux penguin*
Well, I couldn’t find productivity in my linguistics textbook (but then, it doesn’t have a definition of ‘subject’ either) so I looked it up on Wikipedia, and there it’s described with respect to word formation in general, so… I know it’s not exactly the most reliable source, but so far their linguistics articles have been pretty decent as far as I can tell (one semester of linguistics at university didn’t yield any counterindications).
Sorry for hijacking your discussion again.
Ah, k!
Man wird so alt wie eine Kuh
und lernt doch immer noch dazu.
I only knew productive in sentences like ‘$affix is still/no longer productive in $language’.
Well, that’s what makes it so much fun, after all. You can always discover new things. 🙂
So, how exactly would you call what I atm would call ‘$language has Unabsteigbarkeit’?
I have no idea. But I’ll let you know as soon as I do.
My point was that it most likely doesn’t make a sense at all to call a language like that. Maybe it’s impossible to expand the meanig of ”productivity” to the entire language. And that’s why a related word doesn’t exist in linguistics. Do you think that so many linguists failed to recognize a necessity for such a word for decades or even longer?
I had and still have my problems with the notion of productivity in linguistics. To extend that to the entire language makes it even worse. If a language is not under pressure to coin no words, there may no or only a few new words. Borrowing words may also be a good thing. Just using native roots and affixation for all new words may also be quite boring, cause all words will start looking the same somewhen. I once read that in German, only a few hunderd roots are germanic, so just using that and native affixes could lead to a language simillar to Chinese, which also employes only a few hundered syllables. That’s quite restrictive.
Maybe there are productive processes outside the realm off affixation. Think on tones or stress, so your term will be somewhat inappropriate, and only able to describe a subset of languages. Or, how would infixation and circumfixes be coped with in your theory?
It’s not an issue of ”blaming a language”. Also, I’ve put ”lazyness” in quotes. There maybe lots of surrounding cultures, and languages does not evolve homogenious everywhere, especially languages used by many people in a huge area. Of course, languages would evolve differently if set in another context. In conlanging/conworlding, you are the one who decides on the path the development might go. But in real life, things may be more unpredictable.
Although I think that prescribtion is bad when it comes to languages, I think some sort of well-considered use at least in some registers is necessary to be able to communicate without unnecessary difficulties. That’s why I don’t like newly coined native terms if there’s an well known interenational term already. This would be a special case not to be taken into account for judging ”productivity”.
Another problem is how you would measure the phenomenon you have in mind. (Sorry for not restating your clumsy term.) That’s hardly possible for reason I already mentioned. Take German as an exemple: some years ago, it at least seemed that everyone agreed in writing ”Exfrau”, ”Biobrot” etc. Then, these words got a hypen. Today, you will also find these terms as two parts: the prefix and head word separated by a blank, so that the prefix is an adpositon now at least in some cases. This is clearly due to the so-called ”Rechtschreibreform”, where they encouraged the people to tear apart many compound words, even it they will loose meaning if done so. Therefore, pupils today will not get a notion on correct use of compounding because the deformers and the ministers of education and their bureaucrats didn’t require them to learn correct German, i.e. the form of German used by almost everyone for decades as a standard language. So how will you handle that in some definition that a language has a certain degree of that what your term is supposed to mean. (I still did not yet get what you actually want describe with it.)
Besides that, German may not an agglutinating language typologically, but it uses agglutination in word building. It’s not just concatenation, because of a glued on suffix may alter the vowel of the previous syllable like in gut > gütlich.
I think it is very well possible because conlangers and linguists differ. There is a difference between examining how new expressions are formed and having to devise strategies to form them yourself. As such, in conlangs, it is rather easy to measure. Maybe it is important to remember that we are mostly speaking about constructed languages here were coining new words is a daily activity, not about existing languages where important words like “chair” are very seldomly re-created.
EDIT: I do not have a ‘theory’ per se except for: “Languages differ in the way they create new words and these differences can affect the way a conlang feels and should be used effectively to fit the aesthetic vision.” Having much Unabsteigbarkeit is just one specific way to create new vocabulary, a rather common one in conlangs though and IMHO thus deserving its own term. Of course there are other ways, and I mentioned some of them. Heck, Rejistanian does shift the stress to form verbs.
Hm, I said I’m gonna let you know if I find a term that I think works better than Unabsteigbarkeit. My offer now is Unerweiterbarkeit, with “erweitern” translated as “to add to something”. It still kinda conveys the contrary of what’s intended, but at least its meaning is now related to the subject (and I’m not confused by the missing connection between the two anymore ;P ). Maybe someone comes up with a working replacement for the “un-” prefix as well.
that’s indeed a good one… but it is related incorrectly to languages which are extendable via affixes.
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