Sometimes —perhaps too often— I don't find enough interesting ideas or meanings to create new words for my conlang's lexicons. While I have protolanguages (and proto-roots) for my most developed conlangs, there are occasions where I just can't derive a word from a proto-root for whatever reason; for example:

    • The proto-root has been exploited too much.
    • The proto-root gives too ugly or bland words.
    • I just don't want to play with proto-roots (often to give a natural touch to a conlang, since not all words in a natlang derive from that language's mother tongue).
    • I don't want the new word to be a loanword from another conlang but a native word with a new meaning for the loaned concept.

I will put here my questions or attempts at creating new words with different etymologies, specially when compared with their natlang counterparts, and others can do the same as well.

And to begin with...

Tomato
Hellesan belongs to a region of my conworld that has a certain amount of non-native plants and animals, and to create words for those concepts different solutions arise. One of them is the typical 'loanword solution', in which Hellesan takes the foreign language's native word for whatever concept and adapts it (hellesanizes it). If there's a foreign colang, there's no problem, and if there's no such language, I can create the word from nothing and it's done.
But this process is often too boring for me, since I like to give all words an original meaning.

Another option is to take the foreign concept, idea or thing but not the word, which forces the creation of a native word (like Greek καμηλοπάρδαλις, literally "camel leopard", to refer to giraffes, instead of adapting a foreign word, perhaps Semitic or Egyptian).

This is what happens with the Hellesan word for "tomato". Since the region where Hellesan exists is far from the land where tomatos are native, the fruit is imported, something exotic, and the name won't be a very ancient one. I could create a supposed native word for the fruit and then the hellesanized form, but as I said that's too boring. So the more funny option is to create a native word for the concept as a reaction of the receiving people/language to such an exotic newcomer, like Italians did creating pomodoro "golden apple" or the French did forging pomme d'amour "love apple", not to mention the funny German wolfpfirsich "wolf peach" (10 points to German for that nice meaning whatever it pretends to relate to).*

I needed, for Hellesan, to create a word for "tomato", and the first attempt has been the very dull gerolasc, which is the despective form for girole "cherry". Not a bad relation, that 'tomato = ugly cherry', but the meaning can be more interesting, like the examples I give above. A second attempt has given tabre guesalís "bloody pepper", for the very obvious ties with peppers (shape, colour) and the blood-like pulp tomatoes have and peppers lack.

*New World fruits and other stuff seems to be a nice pool to find imaginative popular names for the newly imported concepts in European languages, like the examples given above, to which we can add French pomme de terre for "potatos", etc. Not to mention variations of a native loanword within the same language, like the many name for "tomato" in Catalan: tomata, tomaca, tomàquet, tomàtic, tomacó, domàtiga...