If you've thought of a new word that you would like to donate to MandoCreator, you can submit it for review through this form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdFqNCmsISov2eAJwyhUCMojJnU9EWh4MH5EL1ZnQ2S3AkAkw/viewform
Please only submit words that you have created. Do not submit words that were designed by others, though feel free to encourage other creators to donate their words. All words donated to MandoCreator through the form or shared in the Discord server will get an attribution of "MandoCreator community."
Words are considered in the order they are received, as the schedules of team members permit. To make it to discussion, a word must pass through an initial check by a senior team member against the four core criteria:
Cultural consistency
Necessity
Logical Construction
Phonotactics
Once in discussion, additional team members will be brought in to further exam whether the word truly meets those criteria and whether any additional changes need to be made to its construction or definition.
Here’s a peak at how I approach those criteria when I participate in word-design discussions. Particularly for phonotactics and logical construction, I have a couple of documents devoted to notes on this subject, which sometimes tap as I review or suggest less-obvious constructions.
Among all kinds of little things I try to keep track of, in particular, I check for necessity of the beten and for illegal combinations of letters, especially consonants. I try to remember to check for potential collisions with known roots. For descriptors or verbs, are the last three letters (descriptor/verb ending plus the letter before that) a legal combination? Is the word not too long and not too short compared to the kind of concept it's trying to convey?
Is the word using known roots correctly? For contested roots (such as ba'), does the new word still fit the pattern seen in at least one other word? If it's a verb, does it end in ir, ur, or or, or maybe ar if that does not create a collision with the descriptor form? If it's a descriptor, does it use a descriptor ending? If it's a descriptor without a descriptor ending, is there a logical reason why? If it's a noun that looks like a verb, is there a logical reason for it?
The senior members of the MandoCreator team tend to prefer interesting over banal constructions, though sometimes an obvious construction offers something satisfying to the soul.
How can this concept be expressed using the Mando'a we currently have? Some concepts that are expressed as nouns in English can be expressed using verbs in Mando'a — which helps to emphasize the active nature of the language/culture. Are there any synonyms for it that could cover the concept? If this word is created from roots from other words, does it truly save syllables? (The beten is usually *not* a syllable savings.)
Ideally, this section includes one reasonably crafted sentence in Mando'a that uses existing words — no frankenwords! no new compounds! no English! — to talk about the concept. If the proposed concept has already passed the "cultural consistency" test, then a convoluted sentence demonstrates the necessity of a new, shorter word.
One important aspect to understand about the MandoCreator version of Mando’a is that there is no "cultural and language stronghold" for MandoCreator. That is, there is no server or other social-media group dedicated to using MandoCreator and that has a significant influence on what can get in it.
So, we fall back on the one source that all of us, at least theoretically, can research: the works of Karen Traviss (and, to a lesser extent, other official media). These sources are ones that every person who is part of the expansion project must to agree would have primacy. Because the MandoCreator team uses official media as its source for culture, we do not look to fan fiction for ways in which people have expanded the fictional culture. We also are cautious about including words related Earth-bound concepts.