Conlang Resources

Here are some odds and ends that I'm making available to fellow conlangers:

Word lists

List 1 I can take no credit for - I downloaded it from the web some years ago, but the project it came from has moved on and the raw list is not available online any more (AFAIK). It contains words for contemporary technologies and also fuller definitions of words that might be ambiguous in English.

Lists 2 and 3 are heavily-edited versions of 1 and aim to be culture-neutral, so for example there are no words for anything invented after about 1700, and plants and animals are divided into those found almost everywhere and those with more limited geographical ranges. Naturally the lists are human-centric, so conlangers creating languages for unusual or non-human cultures will therefore need to edit them to reflect the needs of the language being created.

1. The Universal Language Dictionary (HTML, 1600 vocab words) - from the project of the same name*.
2. Conlanger's Universal Wordlist (1303 vocab words) - my cut-down version of 1, somewhat rearranged to make it more useful to conlangers and also more easily parsable by scripts.
   • Text version
   • Excel spreadsheet
3. Conlanger's Root List (plain text, 482 vocab words) - a subset of 2, focusing on the kinds of words found in, e.g., Indo-European etymologies.

* If you are interested in this project, just Google for the phrase. In its current incarnation, it has words from several different languages compiled into it, which is probably more useful for its intended main audience of language students, but less so for a conlanger looking for a quick way to cover the bases in a growing vocabulary.

Describing Morphosyntax

This excellent book can be tracked down through secondhand dealers, but in case you want to write your own conlang description using the book's structure as a guideline, here is a document listing just the topic headers and questions. [Links to these files were originally posted on the ZBB Conlangery & Conworlds forum - if you know who did all the hard work of typing them up, I'll happily credit them!]

• Word document
• PDF

NB. I only downloaded the Word version - the PDF I created from that using OpenOffice.

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