Lexember is done, but I don’t want the momentum to end too. I appreciate how Lexember drives me to create both basic and advanced vocabulary and really think about the cultural context of my languages.
But the Lexember format is very hard on me. Coming up with a culturally relevant word that meets whatever constraint I’ve set is quite a time-consuming thing to do every day. This year I made it even harder on myself by adding the entry to the public lexicon and posting to this website as well as to Twitter. This isn’t a very efficient way of creating vocabulary; I spend a lot of time repeating the same word creation and posting steps over and over, without being able to batch them together. If I’m going to keep up the Lexember momentum, I need a format that I can actually sustain, even through busy times, and where I can spend the bulk of my time actually making my languages rather than posting about them.
That’s why I’m starting a new post format called Weekly Words. Every Monday starting January 4, I’ll post at least one new word from each of the public languages of Meamoria. Right now that means Muipidan and Kharulian; a third language, Nitherian, should join their company soon. I’ll try to have a theme each week, whether it’s a semantic theme showing off cultural differences, or a linguistic theme like “roots with repeated consonants” or “words containing body part metaphors”.
I’ll run this format for a two-month trial period, and if it strikes the right balance I’ll keep at it!
(I’ll link to each post on Twitter as well. If you want to follow the posts directly, there’s an RSS feed too!)