A summary of the recurring morphemes and naming principles in the cycle. The parentheses beside the titles of character, concept, and place pages give the originals point by point; what is gathered here is what shows through between them.
The language the cycle is written in is never named in canon; Nareon spoke evasively of "an addition to English". Criticism in the 1990s produced phrases like the Nareonic vocabulary and the House lexicon, but only the descriptive the language of the cycle stuck. The everyday side of naming is treated separately under house names, and the divergences between translations under translations and terminology.
Naming principles
Names in the cycle rarely look invented. More often they are words a reader is ready to take for existing ones simply not met before: they sound like an old regional vocalization, like a term from a surviving craft glossary, sometimes like a phonetic calque from a language whose existence the reader grants without going to check. Nareon himself, in rare comments, said he does not make words up but "finds how they would have looked had they come down to us", and that account, evasive as it is, conveys the workings of the corpus more precisely than any attempt to derive regular rules.
Recurring roots
A few morphemes travel between the books and hold the frame of the vocabulary: they turn up in characters' names, in place names, in the working terms of menders and vaulters. They travel unevenly: in one place a root is recognizable at once, in another it has to be reconstructed from two or three diverging forms, and it is exactly this unevenness that lets a reader believe the corpus was gathered from living speech rather than from a table.
Double names and the switch of root
Some names, of people and of houses alike, exist in two forms, outer and inner. The outer sounds like an ordinary regional name, the inner almost always carries a different root, and this pair is a regular source of confusion for anyone sitting down with the cycle for the first time. How the system works for people is treated separately under house names; what is of interest here is how the phonetics shift at the crossing.
Words with a Slavic contour
Within the English original there is a group of words that the ear reads confidently as Slavic, and it is these that needed almost no adaptation in the Russian editions: translators left them as they were, sometimes not even setting them in italics. Nareon never confirmed that he built them deliberately from Slavic phonetics, but neither did he deny it, and that silence keeps the words at exactly the reputation they hold now.
What Nareon never produced
Nareon spoke more than once about a glossary of his own for the cycle, what he was collecting, what he was preparing, what he wanted to "release with the sixth book and not before". The sixth book remained unfinished, the glossary unreleased, and everything that survived of it entered circulation by roundabout paths: quotations in letters, notes in margins, asides in rare interviews. The present wiki is built on exactly that principle: the original in parentheses beside each page title returns one small fragment of what was to have been a dictionary entry to the shared corpus.