Gotan Language Dictionary Work
It has been a busy summer for me, and I have been steady working on Archaios, and specifically, the Bjornlinga Saga, every single day. Part of the reason I am so terrible at this whole modern social media thing is that I would rather just spend what time I have focused on my actual creative work. But I did realize that I have been somewhat negligent in keeping people updated as to my activity, so I figured it was about time to drop you a line.
The Bjornlinga is, in some ways, finished. I have taken it through three intensive drafts. It is very polished. But let me tell you a story about what it means to go down the rabbit hole as a worldbuilder and conlanger.
As I was looking over my text, there were still a few minor tweaks that I wanted to make. In the front of the book is a dedication. I decided that this would be a good place to show off a bit of Gotan (the language that the Bjornlingir speak), as it is a pretty much fully-functioning language. As I was translating this dedication, I noticed some small errors had crept into my Gotan dictionary.
Now...for all of my worldbuilding, for keeping track of the hundreds of characters, endless locations, and a thousand years of history, I used World Anvil. Overall it is an amazing platform for what I do. But...their resources for constructed languages is somewhat limited. I have a PhD in historical medieval linguistics. I know a lot about language and how it changes. I have multiple stages of Gotan: Proto-Gotan, Old Gotan, Middle Gotan, and Gotan--the last being the version that is used in the year 800 After the Reckoning, the date in which the Bjornlinga Saga begins. So, just as when you look up an English word in a dictionary, for many of my words, I know how that word has changed in meaning, pronunciation, and spelling over time. This would all be included in the etymology section of an entry, which World Anvil has.
This would all be great, but as I discovered (to my horror) as I was working on my final drafts of Bjornlinga, the search function in World Anvil does not search the text of the etymology. And because of this, errors and contradictions crept in. Not a catastrophic amount, but enough.
I knew I would need a better tool.
After some research, I figured out that the best way to keep track of a large amount of technical data is...Google Sheets.
I played around with it a bit, never having used it or Excel for anything very large or serious. And frankly, it is amazing. I had trouble sleeping for several days just thinking about how much utility it would give me in my language work. And yes, I do get that excited about my creative work.
Here is a little sneak peek of what this looks like for me:
But of course, there was one downside. I had to move my entire dictionary over to Google Sheets, by hand. As I am moving it over, I am finally including information for things that wasn’t quite feasible before: the proto-root of each word, which time period it occurred in, what semantic category it belongs to, etc.
And so that is what I have been working on for a few weeks now. Currently I have just finished word #274, “same.” And no, it is pronounced “sah-muh,” and it means “nose.”
Anyway, I am going to get back to work on my dictionary now. Thanks for taking an interest in my work.
TRB
