Sometimes you just want a big list of words for your language. In my case, I’m creating a language (Maanxmuʃt) to be borrowed from for my main language (Nyji). There are two word generators I use:
- Gen by Mark Rosenfelder at Zompist.com
- Inspiration Pad Pro (IPP)
Both are free, but they have different abilities and results. Before I compare, the obvious caveats:
Don’t just aimlessly use lists of generated words. Consider whether or not the word you’re making should be derived from other words. When randomly generating, I pick out the ones I like and then occasionally check to make sure I don’t have duplicated words or too many extremely similar words.
Think about your native language and how many homophones or extremely similar words there are. (English examples: sing / ring / bring / rung (of a ladder) / sin / sir / sit / set…)
A good rule of thumb is the more words you have, the more words can be similar. If you only have 50 words for your language, you don’t want more than a handful that differ by one sound. If you have 1000, it’d be unrealistic for there not to be any that are similar.
If your language allows multi-syllable words, use them regularly, especially for words with complicated meanings (by whatever definition you want to use.)
With that said…
Gen
Pro/Con: The most basic.
Con: You have to remember what your categories mean. Very limited ability to set frequency. Have to save rules in a different file. Will only accept single letter sounds (but it’s not that hard to get around using the rewrite rules). Can’t specify how many words to generate.
Pro: Because it’s written in Javascript, if you have internet access, you can use it, or you can download the page and use it in any browser. Good help file. Supports Unicode, so you have access to all of the IPA.
Inspiration Pad Pro
This is designed for tabletop rpg games, but it works perfectly good for languages (and has some language generators available for names). You can create or edit generators by right-clicking in the generators panel. Can even make generators to be referred to by other generators (although I haven’t done it, but the example ones do)
Pro/con: Complicated.
Pro: extremely flexible. Good help file. Available for Windows and Android. Can use multiple letters (or words) for anything. Can specify how many words to generate (1, 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, 500, 1000)
Con: limited input with no IPA, but you can use HTML entity codes to get IPA, which you can get off wikipedia on each symbols page or other places. Has to be installed.
The next two posts will talk about generating words in each of them in more detail.
Comparing Results
These are the first twenty results I got with each.
| Gen: | Inspiration Pad Pro: |
| triuʃ xiu ʃnlilxkerx ʃnroxʃ ʀax tleix punʃʀeixʃmluonθdru maan ʃmlurorx wiu θliuxʃ pirx ʃnloxʃ miunk ʃnlip kriu ʃarx triu θarx ʃmind |
jamvim lom ʃriʀ θroovroowuoʃ momvraxt tremʃonθwie ɦep ʃreend venʃ domʃpejdee kiu doox ʃroj xom juukox vrok θrimam lemmiʃtuxʃ wanθ ʃlooxʃriuθint |
As you can see, IPP is more diverse, while Gen is weighted heavily towards certain sounds (the first in the list given it). IPP also has a more realistic range of syllables – I only set it up for one to three syllables, while Gen can’t be customized easily. What you don’t see, is that IPP also has differing vowel frequency in stressed and unstressed syllables (long vowels are rarer in unstressed, which is the 2nd and 3rd syllables).
While Gen is easy, I prefer the results I get and amount of customization I can do with IPP, but if I’m not on my computer it’s not available.
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