We all have a job to do, whether it’s an actual career or simply the odd jobs we do around the house. Work is as old as humanity, so it’s not surprising that it is a very important part of a language’s vocabulary. For a conlang, it should be no different.
Working on work
Work is, at its core, about action, about doing things. Thus, many of the words regarding work will be verbs, and many others will likely be derived from those verbs in some way. To be sure, there will be nouns and adjectives that aren’t, but derivation gives us a powerful tool to create new words, and work is a great example of a field where derivation really shines.
Think about “working” verbs. We can cook and clean and teach, among hundreds of others. And when we do those things, in English, we become cooks, cleaners, and teachers. Two out of the three of these use the agent derivation -er, and that pattern is repeated throughout the language: agents are nouns that perform an action, so agents of working verbs naturally represent the “workers”. (Cook is an exception, but not much of one. Ever heard of a cooker? That’s not what you call the occupation in English, but another language could do things differently.) If your conlang has an agent marker, then creating occupational nouns is probably going to be easy and regular. Of course, there can be exceptions, especially once loanwords come into play, e.g., chef.
Another easy derivation takes us to abstract nouns representing the occupation itself. In English, this comes in the gerund form: “working”, “teaching”, etc. Other languages might have their own special cases, though. Note that this is not the same as the adjective form seen in phrases like “a working man”. That one is a different, yet equally simple, derivation; a language can use the same pattern for both, or it can separate them.
If your language has a gender distinction in nouns, then things might become a little more complicated. English has a few cases like these (actor/actress), but political correctness is starting to erase some of these distinctions. Romance languages, by contrast, have a larger, more stable, set of gendered agents. Now, a conlang with gender doesn’t have to have separate occupational terms for masculine and feminine, but it’s an obvious step that many natural languages have taken.
Which work is which?
The breadth of work words is another one of those cultural things that you have to take into account. A primitive society set in Bronze Age Europe isn’t going to have words for “computer” (originally, this was “one who computers”, a word for a person) or “investor”, because such concepts won’t exist. Similarly, a lost Amazon tribe might not have native words for “ironworking” and “blacksmith”, as those would be foreign concepts.
As with plants and animals, “foreign” work will often be spoken of in foreign terms, i.e., loanwords. This isn’t always the case, however. It’s entirely plausible that a language’s speakers will invent new terms for these new jobs. If they’re smart enough, they may even try to translate the meaning of the foreign root. Even if they do borrow the root, they may not import the agent marker with it. Instead, the borrowing can create a whole new paradigm: work verb, occupational agent, abstract occupational noun, and so on.
Irregularity
For naturalistic conlangs, regularity is anathema. With the field of work, there’s ample opportunity to introduce irregularities. The agent derivation doesn’t always have to work, for example—we’ve already seen English cook. Old verbs might be lost, leaving nouns (like carpenter) that don’t seem to fit anymore. Different derivations can be used on different roots, too; we speak of carpentry but also woodworking. And then there’s the oddity of English employee, one of the few instances where the language has a patient derivation to go along with the agent. (The full paradigm of “employ” shows exactly what we’re talking about, in fact. You’ve got the basic agent “employer”, the not-quite-irregular patient noun “employee”, and the abstract “employment”, which doesn’t use the usual participle form. Irregularity all around.)
Next up
In the next two posts, we’ll get a look at some Isian and Ardari working words. Over 50 of them, if you can believe that. Then, the future becomes murkier. We’re nearing the end of another year, so stay tuned for a special announcement regarding upcoming parts of the series.