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Lore based suffixes
I’m in the process of helping someone come up with lore and I was wondering if there was a website to help with suffixes related to lore and mythology. Things like adding ist, kin, age, folk, etc to try and make new words for beings or creatures.
I found someone's bachelor's thesis on suffixes in fairy tales but it was not what you were looking for.
I think you'd be most successful in looking at already existing terms and highlighting suffixes, using folklorist or world building resources? Maybe the affixes section here
This is actually pretty interesting. Jumping around these wikis the closest thing I am finding in the collective nouns is the productive ending. They listed “raisinlike” for example and words ending in “like” is another one I had forgotten about. While that word is no longer in use, words such as catlike still exist. For me it may just be continuing to hunt down and see if there is a large list.
Plural suffixes in other languages may also help you. It really depends if you're leaning more conlang or not I think. (Even if you don't go full conlang)
Latin, Greek and Arabic are what I’ve used in the past, but it may be time to branch out.
You might like to look into Anglish, a conlang where they stripped all the French-derived words out of english. I find it has a real game of thronesy feel to it. Could be a good source of vocab.
This is wild, thank you for sharing it. It unsurprisingly reminds me of German the way words are derived by compounding. Since English is a Germanic language, I guess that makes the most sense. For instance dictionary becomes wordbook.
Linguistically this is rather interesting. I do have to mention that the phrase "linguistics pluralism" makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, and I do feel some concern that it speaks to something less savory. I honestly don't want to spend enough time with it to begin drawing any conclusions.
From what I can gather, Anglish doesn't have roots in racism/nazis/that kind of linguistic purism, though I certainly can't say it's remained clear of it and I get why there's some underlying anxiety there. Conlang creators is a subculture I'm not super familiar with but most seem just very language nerdy (complimentary)
As someone who's more familiar with the conlanging world, Anglish doesn't have roots in Nazism afaik but there is definitely a non-insignificant element of at least weird right-wing thought in its fan community. It's still a cool idea and can be fun to read or write in, but there are fans who spout weird rhetoric about making a "pure" English that isn't "tainted" by Latin that definitely echoes some uncomfortable shit. That said, you can usually tell if someone is coming at it from that perspective by seeing what other conlanging stuff they're into and how they talk about language elsewhere, and the Anglish community isn't big enough to really be a problem for anyone. I just wouldn't hang out on their subreddit.
Appreciate it! Yeah I've been in enough pagan/heathen communities to catch the signs of those who are into it for those reasons.
A book series I'm enjoying has an alternate history (and dragons) and in that world the "Anglish" colonization of North America is very Norse, because having essentially planes capable of vaporizing enemies resets the balance of power. Similarly colonization looks different, as does language and governmental structure and only the current lack of indigenous dragons among the peoples of the East Coast of "America" makes them vulnerable to it (smallpox or equivalent unfortunately is still a thing and the Great Dying still happened).
I'm curious if the author was aware of "Anglish" the conlang now.
I'm reading that series too!
Cannot wait for the next book! The Nampeshiweisit series for folks unaware. By Moniquill Blackgoose
Not familiar with the book you describe, but imo it doesn't make a ton of sense to call it "Anglish" if it's so heavily Norse imo, since the "Angl-" comes from the Germanic tribe, which the Norse weren't part of. But then Old English was already subject to heavy Norse influence (heavier than the influence of Latin on Old English that people more often bring up, imo) so I suppose it's not too wild a departure, even without whatever other alternative history stuff may be involved.
To be fair, I'm not a historian or linguist, maybe Nordic is more accurate or it's plenty "German" and I'm just not that aware of the lines. It's this series which focused on an indigenous girl who becomes a "dragoneer" (her people don't use the term )
But their political system involves jarls, history is "lore", al-jabar not algebra, the city is Vastergot, skiltas are used to describe atoms.
It strikes me as the "New World" being "discovered" by the Norse and them not leaving (because dragons) but I don't know that we've gone that far back into the alternate history - plus the MC is indigenous and doesn't care about the Anglish much by preference and wasn't taught their history.
ooh okay sounds interesting! I may check the series out at some point, the premise sounds intriguing.
It's really well done IMO, technically YA because she's a teen in school but it's not that kind of YA.
Oh this is really cool! I’ve never heard of this before!
It sounds like you might be trying to build what conlangers call a "naming language"? I'll confess I don't entirely understand your description of what you're looking for here, but you may have luck asking further in spaces where conlangers hang out, like r/conlangs
I’m basically trying to help someone come up with a name for a new game. Creating a new word would be an easier thing to own.
Pokemon for example is a nice compound word of two ideas.
I would generally like to create a word that sounds real. Kin for example means family or group, a real word in munchkin, the concept of kin has been used to create new words like the now popular shopkins for example.
A more recent one I saw was on the show foundation where they created a group called “Luminists” by taking the word lumen and adding the “ist” at the end. I’m trying to see if there is a common list of suffixes that can aide in creating general creative lore.
The suffix "-kin" that is probably used in "munchkin" is a Middle English diminutive suffix borrowed probably from Middle Dutch and cognate with German "-chen", and afaik it's completely unrelated to the English word "kin", which descends from Old English "cynn" and is cognates with German "Kind". Note that there is another English suffix "-kin" that does trace its etymology to the word "kin", but this one is less productive and describes similarity to whatever the suffix is attached to, which fits "munchkin" less well than a diminutive for obvious reasons. It is also generally this diminutive suffix used to form brand names like "Shopkins" or "Webkins", since these are toys and a diminutive fits the desired associations.
"Munchkin", fwiw, was coined by L. Frank Baum for the Oz books, and he never explained how he came up with it. There are various theories of its origin, many of which rely on borrowing from other languages. The "munch" part is the bigger mystery than the "-kin" suffix, though, as using a diminutive when inventing a name for a race of little people makes sense.
Anyway, Wiktionary has a pretty comprehensive appendix listing English suffixes
I was not aware of the munchkin history, thank you! And the wiki page was one of the ones I was looking at before, so I will keep using that for now.
So you're basically just looking for an English language cheat sheet so you don't have to rely on your own memory?
That’s an odd way to describe wanting a resource. Is every book a cheat sheet? Quasi-Platonic in a sense, like everything is already in our memory and we should just remember it.
What's weird about calling a cheat sheet a cheat sheet? The term is almost always used for legitimate aids these days, not actual cheating methods.
Yes, some basic lists for general use in mythology. I don’t always have a lot of time (the last project I had about two days), my only other options would likely be to use some ai assistant to sort through words.