The world is a very big place, and it contains a great many things. Even before you start counting those that are living—from plants and animals down to microbes—you can find a need for hundreds or thousands of words. So that’s what we’ll do in this entry. We’ll look at the natural world, but we’ll avoid talking about its flora and fauna for the moment. Instead, the focus will be on what we might call the natural geography. The lay of the land, if you will.
The world itself
For us, “world” is virtually synonymous with “earth” and “planet”. But that’s an artifact of our high-tech society. In older days, these concepts were pretty separate. The earth was the surface, the ground—the terra firma. Planets were wandering stars in the sky, so named because they seemed to change their positions from night to night, relative to the “fixed” background stars. And the world was everything that could be observed, closer to what we might call the “universe” or “cosmos”.
Within this definition of the world, many cultures (and thus languages) create a three-way distinction between the earth, sea, and sky. Earth is solid, dry land, where people live and work and farm and hunt. Sea is the open water, from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, but not necessarily rivers and lakes; it’s the place where man cannot live. And the sky is the vast dome above, home of the sun, moon, and stars, and often whatever deity or deities the speakers worship. In pre-flight cultures, it tends to have dreamlike connotations, due to its effective inaccessibility. People can visit the sea, even if they can’t stay there, but the sky is always out of our reach.
Here, the details of your speakers’ world come into play. If they’re on Earth, then they’ll probably follow this terrestrial model to some extent. Aliens, however, will tailor their language to their surroundings. A world without a large moon like ours likely won’t have a word for “moon”; ancient Martians, for instance, might consider Phobos and Deimos nothing more than faster planets. Those aliens lucky enough to have multiple moons, on the other hand, will develop a larger vocabulary for them. The same goes for other astronomical phenomena, from the sun to the galaxy.
Land and sea
Descending to that part of the world we can reach, we find a bounty of potential words. There’s flat land, in the form of plains and valleys and fields. More rugged are the hills and mountains, distinguished with separate words in many languages; hills are really not much more than small mountains, but few languages conflate the two. Abundant plant life can create forests or, in some places, jungles, and a culture adapted to either of these areas will likely make far finer distinctions than we do. On the opposite end are the dry deserts, which aren’t necessarily hot (the Gobi is a cold desert, as is Antarctica). These don’t seem truly hospitable for life, but desert cultures exist all across the globe, from the Bedouins of the Middle East to the natives of the American Southwest, but they’ll always seek out sources of water.
Fresh water is most evident in two forms. We have the static lakes and the moving rivers as the most generic descriptors, but they’re far from all there is. Ponds are small lakes, for example, and swamps are a bit like a combination of lake and land. Rivers, owing to their huge importance for travel in past ages, get a sizable list: streams, creeks, brooks, and so on. All of these have slightly different meanings, but those can vary between dialects: what I call a creek, someone in another state may deem a brook. And the shades of meaning don’t cross language barriers, either, but a culture depending on moving bodies of water will tend to come up with quite a few words describing different kinds of them.
In another of the grand cycles of life, fresh water spills into the seas. Now, English has two words for salty bodies of water, “sea” and “ocean”, but that doesn’t mean they’re two separate things. Many languages have only one word covering both, and that’s fine. Besides, a landlocked language won’t really need to spend two valuable words on something that might as well not exist.
In addition to the broad range of terrain, terms also exist for smaller features. Caves, beaches, waterfalls, islands, and cliffs are just some of the things we name. Each one tends to be distinctive, in that speakers of a language have a set image in their minds of the “ideal” cave or bluff or whatever. That ideal will be different for different people, of course, but few would, for instance, think of the fjords of Norway when imagining a beach.
Talking about the weather
The earth and sea are, for the most part, unchanging. Scientifically, we know that’s not the case, but it’s close enough for linguistic purposes. The weather, however, is anything but static. (Don’t like the weather in {insert place name here}? Wait five minutes.) Languages have lots of ways to talk about the weather, and not just so that speakers will have a default topic for conversation.
Clouds are the most visible sign of a change in weather, but the wind can also tell you what’s to come. And for reasons that are probably obvious, there seems to be a trend: the worse the weather, the more ways a language has to talk about it. We can have a rain shower, a drizzle, maybe some sprinkles, or the far more terrible torrent, deluge, or flood. Thunder, lightning, snow (in places that have it), and more also get in on the weather words. In some locales, you can add in the tornado (or whirlwind) and hurricane to that list.
Culture and geography
Hurricane is a good example of geographical borrowing. It refers to a storm that can only form in the tropics, generally moving westward. That’s why the Spanish had to borrow a name from Caribbean natives—it was something they never really knew. True, hurricanes can strike Spain. Hurricane Vince made landfall in 2005, but 2005 was a weird year for weather all around, and there’s no real evidence that medieval and Renaissance Spaniards had ever seen a hurricane.
And that’s an important point for conlangers. Speakers of languages don’t exist in a vacuum, but few languages ever achieve the size of English or Spanish. Most are more limited in area, and their vocabulary will reflect that. We’ll see it more in future parts looking at flora and fauna, but it’s easy to illustrate in geography, too, as the hurricane example shows.
People living in a land that doesn’t have some geographical or meteorological feature likely won’t have a native word for it. The Spanish didn’t have a word for a hurricane. England never experienced a seasonal change in prevailing winds, so English had to borrow the word monsoon. Europe doesn’t have a lot of tectonic activity, but Japan does, so they’re the ones that came up with tsunami. The fjords of Scandinavia are defining features, but ones specific to that region, so we use the local name for them.
Conversely, those things a culture experiences more often will gain the focus of its wordsmiths. It says something about the English speaker’s native climate that there are so many ways to describe rain. Eskimo words for “snow” are a running linguistic joke, but there’s a kernel of truth in there. And English’s history had plenty of snow, otherwise we wouldn’t have flurries, flakes, and blizzards.
Time is also a factor in which lexical elements a language will have. Some finer distinctions require a certain level of scientific advancement. The cloud types—cumulus, nimbus, cirrus, etc.—were only really named two centuries ago, and they used terms borrowed from Latin. That doesn’t mean no one noticed the difference between puffy clouds and the grim deck of a nimbostratus before 1800, just that there was never a concerted effort to adopt fixed names for them. The same can be said for most other classification schemes.
Weather verbs
Finally, the weather deserves a second look, because it’s the reason for a very special set of verbs. In English, we might say, “It’s raining.” Other languages use an impersonal verb in this situation, with no explicit subject. (Our example conlang Ardari uses a concord marker of -y in this case.) For whatever reason, weather verbs are some of the most likely to appear in a form like this.
Perhaps it’s because the weather is beyond anyone’s control. It’s a force of nature. There’s no subject making it rain. It’s just there. But it’s one more little thing to consider. How does your conlang talk about the weather? You need to know, because how else are you going to start a conversation with a stranger?