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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 two at a time 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
pedmest /pehd-MEHST/ [ped+mest, "foot place"]
pedastal -- an architectural support or base for a statue
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 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.
The heart and soul of the Dublex game is the Dublex language, the language invented for the 400 word tiles.
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 the Dublex words you create have two parts: e.g., 'vocsist', "word system = language"; 'sihbin', "health building = hospital"; and 'nassens', "nose sense = smell".
Wordmaking -- How To Combine Roots
You can coin new Dublex words using the following techniques:
 Simple compounding Suffixing
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 temperature", and 'dens', "dense object". 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.
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", cannot be shortened to 'vod', which is a root meaning "body of water", but would have to be shortened to 'vodarg'.
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.
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