Dublex Introduction

Version 1.0.0 - 11/9/99

Dublex is a langmaking game -- think of it as Scrabble for people who like to invent words. Rather than the letter tiles of Scrabble, Dublex has 400 word tiles. You combine the word tiles in as many ways as desired to come up with new words. For instance:

vocsist /vohk-SEEST/ [voc+sist, "word system"]

language -- a systematic means of communicating by the use of sounds or conventional symbols

jamadbin /zhah-mahd-BEEN/ [jamad+bin, "frozen building"]

igloo -- an Eskimo hut built of blocks (usu. sod or snow) in the shape of a dome

cafazmuh /kah-fahz-MOOSH/ [cafaz+muh, "jumping rodent"]

rabbit, bunny, coney, cony -- any of various burrowing animals of the family Leporidae having long ears and short tails; some domesticated and raised for pets and food

pedmestser /pehd-mehst-SEHR/ [ped+mest+ser, "foot place series"]

stairs -- a means of access consisting of a series of steps

cisdesir /kees-deh-SEER/ [cis+desir, "story desire"]

story hunger -- an emotional need for fulfillment through narrative fiction in any form (book, television sitcom, movies, etc.)

You can coin as many words as you like. Most of the words will be compiled into a dictionary and listed on the LangMaker.com web site. Whoever coins the most listed words by January 1, 2000, will win a $100 gift certificate to Amazon.com. The final judge of whether words are entered into the lexicon is myself (though of course I plan on admitting most words).

By submitting words and definitions to dublexgame@onelist.com, you are agreeing to place those words in the public domain. The Dublex dictionary that will be compiled and edited by myself will also be in the public domain and will be a resource for anyone who wants it. I am planning on writing a JavaScript application that will prompt you for a list of 400 words in your own conlang and will then suggest compounds for your language using the dictionary. This will be a quick way for you to get more ideas for words for your own language. Additionally, others in the langmaking community are encouraged to come up with their own uses for the completed Dublex dictionary.

To participate in the contest, you must submit words and definitions to dublexgame@onelist.com. You can subscribe to the list at https://www.onelist.com/subscribe/dublex or by e-mailing dublex-subscribe@onelist.com. Its a good idea to see other people's suggested words -- they may inspire words of your own. However, you can easily set your subscription to "Web Only" if you don't want to read other people's suggestions. If you don't want to participate in the contest, but want to review the Dublex word list and grammar, surf to https://www.onelist.com/files/dublexgame/.

All word definitions must be provided in English, and you are encouraged to adapt definitions from the WordNet database. It's also completely appropriate to invent words without any English equivalents, such as 'cisdesir', "story hunger", above. Since the game mailing list is open to the public, all definitions must avoid obscenity; if you want to define words about copulation and excretion, please use the Latinate vocabulary of English to do so.

The heart and soul of the Dublex game is the Dublex language, the language invented for the 400 word tiles. Once you subscribe to the mailing list, you will be e-mailed the Dublex-English lexicon of root words.

The name Dublex is a combination of 'dub' ("to give a name to facetiously or playfully; to nickname") and 'lex' (from Greek 'lexis', "word", present in English 'lexicon'). It's also a play on 'duplex' ("twofold; double") since many of the Dublex words you can create have two parts: e.g., 'vocsist', "word system = language"; 'sihbin', "health building = hospital"; and 'nassens', "nose sense = smell".

Solitaire Play

For solitaire play, choose any seven Dublex words at random, then begin to combine them to form new words. See the Wordmaking rules below. The object is to coin as many words as possible. You decide what the words mean. It's just for fun, but if you want to compete with yourself, keep track of how many words you can coin from any seven Dublex words and strive to improve your personal best. It's not just 7 times 7 or 49 words, since you can string more roots together ('vocsistlet', "language (diminutive) = dialect"), apply four built-in infixes, create phrases and even create acronyms ('vadap' = 'VAtDArtPart', "watery dirt part = mud part = brick"). Please e-mail any words you define to dublex@langmaker.com, if you are not a contestant in the Dublex game (if you are, please e-mail to dublexgame@onelist.com).

Two-Player Play

Two players each choose seven different Dublex words (at random or by choice) and try to form the most words from them in a given time period -- say, five minutes. The winner is the player with the most words coined.

Three-Or-More Play

When you have three or more players, there's an even better way to play (come on, play Dublex with a few friends and spread the joy of conlanging!). Choose seven Dublex root words at random. For five minutes, everyone tries to coin words from these roots. When the five minutes are up, each player reads his list. Any time two or more players have the same word form with the same basic meaning, they each get one point. Whoever has the most points wins the hand, and you can play up to 50 points a game. The goal is to create as many consensus word compounds as possible with your fellow players. Whoever succeeds in this best wins. In effect, you and your fellow players are creating a common language together.

Contest

To spur initial interest in Dublex, I'm offering a US$100 gift certificate to Amazon.com to the person who submits the most words to the dublexgame@onelist.com list before January 1st, 2000.

Pronounciation Guide

Dublex, as a language for use in a game, has a simplified sound system that should be easy for you to learn.

Vowels

Dublex has just five vowels, each written by a single letter.

a - as in 'father'
e - as in 'pet'
i - as in 'pizza'
o - as in 'Poe' or 'poet'
u - as in 'tutu'

Whenever two vowels occur together, they are pronounced as separate syllables: 'moap' ("male parent, father") is pronounced /moh-AHP/.

Consonants


            Voiceless               Voiced 

Stops       p - as in 'pot'         b - as in 'bought' 
            t - as in 'tot'         d - as in 'dot' 
            c /k/ - as in 'cot'     g - as in 'got' 

Fricatives  f - as in 'fought'      v - as in 'vote' 
            s - as in 'sought'      z - as in 'zit' 
            h /sh/ - as in 'shot'   j /zh/ - as in 'de jure' or 'pleasure' 

Liquids                             l - as in lap 
                                    r - as in rap 
                                    
Nasals                              m - as in map 
                                    n - as in nap

As an experienced English speaker, you will need to get use to the following:

The letter 'c' is always /k/. In English, 'c' has several different sounds associated with it, the most common of which is /k/ as in 'cat' and the next most common is /s/ as in 'city' or cent. In Latin, 'c' was originally always pronounced /k/, but over time (certainly by the time of Medieval Latin) 'c' came to be pronounced /s/ in front of /i/ or /e/; English borrowed this pronounciation when it borrowed Latin vocabulary. The Dublex way is simpler, but requires a bit of unlearning.
The letter 'h' is always /sh/. This is odd, certainly, but Latin lacked the /sh/ sound altogether and the 'sh' way of writing it was cobbled together by Norman monks. Since the /h/ sound itself does not occur in Dublex, this letter was adopted to represent /sh/. So when you see the Dublex word 'hazar', "tree", remember that it is pronounced /shah-ZAHRR/.
The letter 'j' is always /zh/ as in de jure. The /zh/ sound does occur in English, but it written many different ways -- none of them 'zh'! The regular /j/ sound, as in English 'just', is in fact actually a /d/ sound followed by /zh/, a combination rarely permitted in other languages. Since the /dzh/ (English 'j') combination isn't used in Dublex, the letter 'j' has been pressed into service for /zh/ (which, like /sh/, never occured in Latin).
The letter 'r' is actually a trilled /r/ as in Spanish. If you pronounce it as in English, though, your fellow Dublexians are not likely to be bothered.

When consonants occur together in a Dublex word, you may -- if you find pronouncing the consonant cluster difficult -- insert an indeterminate vowel between the consonants. The indeterminate vowel or schwa is a mid-central neutral vowel, typically occuring in unstressed syllables in English, such as the final vowel in 'sofa'. Schwa insertion is something native speakers of Polynesian languages and Chinese dialects will find especially helpful, since consonant clusters do not occur in those languages. As a speaker of English, you will need it less often than they would, but may find it helpful when pronouncing words with doubled consonants: for instance, 'vissens' /vees-SEHNS/ or /vee-s{e}-SEHNS/, where {e} represents the schwa, typically represented as an upside-down lowercase letter e or, in some ASCII notations, as the at sign, @.

Stress & Syllables

If a Dublex word ends in a consonant, its last syllable receives the stress. If a word ends in a vowel, its next-to-last (penultimate) syllable receives the stress. So 'comun' ("communication") is pronounced /koh-MOON/, with the emphasis on the final syllable, and 'comunu' ("to communicate") is pronounced /koh-MOO-noo/, with the emphasis on the penultimate syllable. This keeps the basic sound of the root word the same, regardless of the part-of-speech ending. (Please note that the final consonant always begins the syllable with the part-of-speech ending.)

Part Of Speech Endings

The part of speech of almost all Dublex words (except for a few particles not included in the 400 roots) is indicated by the final vowels, if any.

unmarked - noun
-a       - noun modifier (adjective)
-e       - verb modifier (adverb)
-i       - multiword compound
-o       - preposition
-u       - verb
-ie      - adjective modifier (adverb)
-io      - clause modifier

All Dublex roots are nouns.

Word Patterns

The most important goal in creating a lexicon for Dublex was to have it always be obvious when a word is a compound form or a root form. To this end, almost all Dublex words begin and end with consonants and exclude consonant clusters from the beginning of syllables. So words are of forms like CVC (Consonant-Vowel-Consonant) 'muh' /moosh/, "rodent"; CVVC 'poer' /poh-EHR/, "man, male person"; CVCC 'sist' /seest/, "system"; CVCVC 'catoh' /kah-TOSH/, "cat"; CVCVCC 'malact' /mah-LAHKT/, "milk" . A root like *plant is not permitted, since initial consonant clusters are not allowed, and the word 'campus' /kahm-POOS/ could not be a root but would be a compound of the roots 'cam'+'pus' ("shirt" + "usage"). The word patterns make it easy to tell where one root begins and one ends (for instance, 'duvsir' is clearly 'duv'+'sir' and 'mentvoc' is clearly 'ment'+'voc'). Of course, all final vowels make up their own morpheme, marking the part of speech (for instance, 'vissensu' is 'vis'+'sens'+'u').

While the word patterns ("morphotactics") of Dublex may seem artificial, many languages have much greater restrictions on possible word forms than English. For instance, Polynesian languages typically allow only V and CV syllables; Chinese syllables are typically CV or CVC. This means that when roots are borrowed into these languages, they undergo a lot of change, such as when English 'pocket monster' becomes Japanese 'pokemon'. In Dublex, English 'plant' (from Latin) is present as 'palt', since both *plant and *palnt are invalid roots.

Which brings us to the primary design tension of Dublex. On the one hand, root words must fit strict syllable patterns, but on the other hand root words should be as recognizable as possible to speakers of any language. Since it was not feasible to analyze thousands of languages for common forms, Dublex focused in on words from six of the most spoken languages in the world: Arabic, Chinese, English, Hindi, Russian and Spanish (called the six cardinal languages). The primary source of these natural-language words was the Lojban etymological dictionary, which presented phonetic information about over 1200 words. Where possible, forms in other languages were also considered, especially forms in German, Dutch, Italian, Esperanto and Novial, as derived from the Universal Language Dictionary.

How recognizable are Dublex words? It is rare that you will have a Dublex word like 'motor' /moh-TOHRR/, "motor", which -- as a technical term derived from Latin -- has found its way into all the cardinal languages (though, in Mandarin Chinese, it takes the form /mada/). More typical is something like 'cafaz', "jump", from the Arabic /kafaz/, a form which won out because it fit the word structure of Dublex best and because its initial /k-/ was reinforced by Hindi /kud/. Matching the initial sound was considered quite important, as it has been demonstrated to be a strong mnemonic, and a high correspondence of word-initial sounds from Dublex to the speaker's native tongue makes Dublex sound "more natural".

While early attempts were made to systemize word formation, these methods were rejected and it was done on ad hoc basis. The priority was to take any form more or less as is, if it were present in two of the cardinal languages. If it were a particular high-frequency form, it might be truncated to one syllable, such as 'per' from Latin 'persona', extant in Romance (Spanish, Italian, et al), Germanic (English, German, et al) and Russian, and reinforced by Hindi /puruc/. If no forms matched, but some matched on an initial letter, one of those forms was chosen.

In some cases, conflicts with other words changed the available form: 'cat' in Dublex means "cut" as this form is supported in more cardinal languages than the form 'cat' for "cat"; therefore something longer than /kat/ was needed for "feline" and the selection was 'catoh', taking the /-osh/ from Russian /koshk/, with the -ato- reinforced by the Romance form 'gat(t)o'.

While word forms could have been generated randomly by computer, looking to natural languages for inspiration provided some needed realism to the language -- and makes remembering the vocabulary a little easier, especially for English speakers.

Wordmaking -- How To Combine Roots

You can coin new Dublex words using the following techniques:

Simple compounding
Suffixing
Applying infixes
Coining phrases
Forming acronyms

Simple Compounding: The simplest method of word creation is simply to place a modifier before the word being modified. Thus 'darg'+'vic' = 'dargvic', "road vehicle, car", and 'fon'+'sens' = 'fonsens', "sound sense, hearing". You can string together as many compounds as is reasonable, as in 'lun'+'col'+'vic' = 'luncolvic', "lunar wheeled vehicle, lunar rover". As a result, you can incorporate other people's coined words into your own words.
Suffixing: A small set of Dublex words follow the word they modify. Most of these are scalars, which are words that describe an end point on a scale, such as 'term', "hot", and 'dens', "dense". So 'vattermmest', 'vat'+'term'+'mest', is "hot water place, hot springs", and 'furtcisid' is 'furt'+'cisid', "acidic fruit", which might refer to the lemon, lime or kumquat. All the scalars are marked in the Dublex root-word dictionary. Five suffixes that aren't scalars are 'ses', "female"; 'mas', "male"; 'ton', {augmentative}; 'let', {diminutive}; and 'con', "opposite". Sample words are 'tigerses', "tigress"; 'bacarmas', "bull"; 'lunton', "full moon"; 'lunlet', "crescent moon"; and 'succon', "unhappiness". The advantages of having a few of the most common roots be suffixes including having alphabetical lists with related terms close to one another (e.g., 'bacar', "bovine"; 'bacarmas', "bull"; 'bacarses', "cow") and having clearer structure in words with three or more roots.
Applying Infixes: Six of the most common suffixes can be inserted as infixes into the last syllable of a root. For instance, the augmentative 'ton' has the corresponding infix -u-, and the diminutive 'let' has the infix -a-. So 'perton', "augmented person, giant", can be written 'puer', and 'perlet', "diminutive person, dwarf", can be written 'paer'. The infixes -i- and -o- have different meanings depending on whether or not the root modified refers to a person or animal; if it does, then -i- indicates female, 'baciar', "female bovine, cow", and -o- indicates male, 'bacoar', "male bovine, bull". If the word does not have animality, then -i- indicates opposite, 'lium', "light opposite, darkness", and -o- indicates abstraction, 'loum', "light abstraction, luminosity". The infix -e- is used when the infix matches the final vowel of the root, so *luun is invalid, with the correct form being 'leun', "full moon".
Coining Phrases: English and many languages have set phrases, called idioms, whose meaning is not obvious from the words used. For example, the White House is not just a house that is white. Dublex phrases are formed using the part-of-speech marker -i, which means, in effect, that this word idiomatically modifies the word after it, so "White House" might be 'nieri fambin', "white(black+opposite)+{idiom} house(family+building)". You can also simply write this 'nierfambin', of course, but marking words as idiomatic modifiers is useful for indicating the scope of a modifier: 'nieri', "white", clearly modifies 'fambin', "house", where 'nierfambin' could be read as "white family's building" or "white family-building".
Forming Acronyms: Really long phrases or words can be truncated into acronyms. For instance, 'vatdartpart', "watery dirt part = mud part = brick", could be shorted to 'vadapart' or 'vadap' ('VAtDArtPart'). The rule for forming acronyms is that you use only the CV from each word except the last word, which you can either append in full (as in 'vadapart') or truncate to the initial consonant (as in 'vadap'). However, acronyms can't conflict with one of the 400 roots or 3 pronouns ('von', 'nin' and 'tan', the first-, second- and third-person pronouns, respectively); therefore, 'voltdarg', "electric road, monorail", can be shortened to 'vod', which is a root meaning "body of water", but would have to be shortened to 'vodarg'.

Although it is not needed for game playing, a syntax specification for Dublex is available.

Happy Langmaking!

Jeffrey

Acknowledgements

Leo Moser: Thanks to Leo for sharing generously of his research for his Acadon system and for his detailed feedback on the internationality of proposed root words. It was at Leo's passionate suggestion and insistence that 'c' was adopted in all places for the /k/ sound.
Lojbanistas: Thanks to all the Lojbanistas who contributed to the six-language etymological lexicon.
Rick Harrison: Thanks to Rick for designing the Universal Language Dictionary, and for overseeing the compilation of it, which proved an invaluable reference for coining Dublex words and for deciding which core concepts needed to be included in the Dublex dictionary.
Ivan Derzhanski: Thanks to Ivan for his comments and corrections on natural language sources of Dublex vocabulary.
Ray Brown: Thanks to Ray for his suggestions for simplying the sound system of Dublex, specifically his critism of separate /w/ and /v/ sounds, of the presence of the /h/ sound, and of using the digraph 'ch' to represent /sh/. Inspired by this, /w/ and /h/ and /y/ were eliminated and 'h' was instead used for /sh/.
Rick Morneau: Thanks to Rick for his article on morphotactics, which prompted me to design the morphotactics of Dublex, and especial thanks for his magnum opus, "Lexical Semantics", which influenced the grammar of Dublex significantly.
Mark McGrath: Thanks to Mark for insisting on schwa insertion.
John Cowan, Mark Shoulson, BPJ, et al: Thanks to everyone who helped me refine the Dublex vocabulary and provided valuable feedback.
Others: If I left you out, please forgive me -- and gently remind me.

This work is placed in the public domain by Jeffrey Henning. However, Dublex is a trademark of LangMaker.com, used to describe the Dublex game and Dublex software.

Jeffrey.Henning.com

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