Cultures & morphemes

A culture in Lexiconlang is the unit that owns a language. It bundles together:

• A phonotactic archetype — which sounds cluster together, syllable shapes, joiners
• Meaning packs — sets of morphemes (semantic units) with class and tag metadata
• Name templates — recipes for how morphemes combine into names
• (Optional) A visual glyph system — see the glyph guide

Phonotactic archetypes

Reusable templates that define a language's aesthetic:

Archetype	Feels like	Used by
flowing	Smooth, vowel-rich	Elvish, aquatic, plantoid
guttural	Hard consonant clusters	Dwarvish, orcish
sibilant	S/Z/Sh-heavy	Draconic, insectoid
clipped	Short, light syllables	Halfling
resonant	Long vowels, soft endings	Mycoid, some aquatic variants

Cultures can override any field — most just spread an archetype and tweak the joiner or syllable budget.

Meaning packs and morphemes

A morpheme is a semantic unit with a class (noun/adjective/verb) and tags. Examples:

{ id: "anvil",    class: "noun",      tags: ["industry", "metal"], label: "anvil" }
{ id: "strong",   class: "adjective", tags: ["strength", "war"],   label: "strong" }
{ id: "iron",     class: "noun",      tags: ["metal", "industry"], label: "iron" }
{ id: "fortify",  class: "verb",      tags: ["war", "industry"],   label: "fortify" }

Cultures combine multiple meaning packs: most fantasy cultures use coreMeanings (general concepts) plus fantasyIndustrial (smithing, mining, crafting) plus genre-specific packs.

Name templates

Templates declare which morpheme kinds to pick and how to join them:

templates: {
  given: [
    [{
      kind: "compose",
      parts: [
        { pick: "adjective", tag: "strength", capitalize: true },
        { pick: "noun",      tag: "industry" },
      ],
      sep: "",          // form joiner — no separator
      transSep: "-",    // translation joiner — keep hyphens
    }, 1]
  ],
  surname: [/* ... */],
  settlement: [/* ... */],
}

The result is a TranslatedName:

{
  form: "Drakaztum",            // ← from culture's lexicon, generated on demand
  translation: "Strong-anvil",  // ← English morpheme labels
  language: "fantasy.dwarvish",
  parts: [
    { form: "Drakaz", meaning: "Strong" },
    { form: "tum",    meaning: "anvil" },
  ],
}

The lexicon is generated, not stored

This is the part that distinguishes Lexiconlang from a wordlist library. A culture doesn't carry a dictionary of conlang words. It carries a phonotactic recipe and a meaning pack, and the conlang form for "anvil" is generated the first time it's needed, from a hash of the culture seed and the morpheme id.

That means:

• A culture has consistent words across all its names.
• Two players with the same seed have the same vocabulary.
• New morphemes can be added without breaking existing names.

Available cultures

Pack	Culture	Archetype	Visual glyph system
fantasy	dwarvish	guttural	SVG runes (phonemic)
fantasy	elvish	flowing	Unicode ideograms (morphemic)
fantasy	orcish	guttural	—
fantasy	halfling	clipped	—
fantasy	draconic	sibilant	—
scifi	humanoid	flowing	Canvas geometric (holistic)
scifi	insectoid	sibilant	SVG chitin (phonemic)
scifi	aquatic	flowing	—
scifi	synth	clipped	—
scifi	birdpeople	flowing	—
scifi	rockpeople	guttural	—
scifi	mycoids	resonant	—
scifi	mammalian	flowing	—
scifi	plantoid	flowing	—

Cultures without visual glyph systems can still have names generated — glyphs are purely additive.