Think of this part of the series as a chance to catch up on some of that linguistic spring cleaning you’ve been meaning to do. We’ve all been in houses, and we know how many things can be inside them, so taking a look inside the home is a great way to flesh out a conlang with a vast array of terms for all those miscellaneous items we have lying around.
Room to move
Houses, as we know them, are generally divided into a number of rooms. Which ones a house has depends heavily upon the culture, the level of technological advancement, and a few socioeconomic factors. Many apartments, for instance, don’t have kitchens. And while it’s very common in America to have bathing and toilet activities in the same room—the bathroom—not every country does that. On the “technology” side of things, you’re not going to find an entertainment center in a medieval home, but that’s not to say there won’t be a room for entertaining guests. Finally, the houses of the wealthy will, obviously, have more (and more varied) rooms than those of the common folk.
For a conlang, this matters because it’s those rooms that are common to most speakers’ houses that will be most likely to occur as native roots. In English, we’ve got dens and kitchens, for instance, but most of the others are compounds: bedroom, bathroom, living room, etc. And then there are a number of rooms whose names we’ve borrowed, such as the foyer. You can draw quite a few conclusions about a culture’s history in this manner, such as the fact that most Anglo-Saxons didn’t have a foyer, but some wealthy Frenchmen later on must have.
Another question is what to call the “ideal” room itself. Because English has a couple of different terms for that. We’ve got room, obviously, as in dining room, but fantasy or historical literature might instead speak of the more archaic dining hall. And that’s okay. Halls are rooms, too. There’s a different connotation, and connotations are always nice to see. They’re where conlangs can distinguish themselves.
What’s inside
What’s inside those rooms is usually much more interesting than the rooms themselves. Looking around my own bedroom (where I write), I see quite a bit of furniture. There’s the bed, of course, because what’s a bedroom without a bed? And I’ve got my desk, a bookshelf, my chair, and a few odds and ends. Other rooms in the house will have their own larger fixtures—furniture and appliances—almost always tied to the room’s function. American bathrooms will have toilets and sinks, while kitchens will have counters and cabinets.
Beyond the major functions of a room, the space will contain many other things. Some of these are tools, like all those screwdrivers we can never find when we need them. Others are strictly for entertainment, such as TVs or toys. We could also throw in toiletries and clothes and other such things, but we’ll save all that for other posts. For this one, we should focus on those things that make our house a home.
Changing things up
Home items can display a remarkable amount of irregularity. That’s almost all cultural baggage, as the things we find in our homes change as we interact with other peoples. Everything in the room around you has a history, and so does every word you would use to describe those things. Household items are a great place to toss in loanwords, odd and idiosyncratic compounds, sketchy neologisms, and whatever else you can think of. It’s not uncommon today to have a television (pseudo-classical Greek) sitting a few feet from your coffee table (compound derived from Turkish and Old French), which is right in front of your couch (Old French again), where you’ll curl up under your blanket (more Old French, but they borrowed this one from Germanic). Even the most xenophobic American can travel linguistically around the world from the comfort of his home.
Coming up
So we’re in 2017, and the series continues. Part 23 will come next month, after the usual Isian and Ardari posts. It will cover food and drink, topics that are subtly different from the “flora and fauna” subjects we saw not too long ago. Until then, keep on creating!