Pablo,

You wrote the following (among other things):

>I'm starting a new conlang and I was curious:
>what are your first words in these cases? Do you have
>a special "test bed" for your conlangs, such as a text
>to be translated? Where do your words come from?

When I first make a language, I make a vocabulary of about five to ten
words; so that I can work out the grammar.  These words, of course,
include translations of _be_ and personal pronouns.  One of the first
nouns I invent is the translation of _dog_.  I'm not sure why this is.
Perhaps when I was inventing one of my earliest conlangs, one of the
first words was the word for _dog_, and that has become stuck in my
subconscious.

In Yibrisitoj, I have moved beyond this phase and now have begun
(barely) translating the Babel text, simply because it has become a
favorite text to translate for comparison purposes, and Act 1 of
_Macbeth_.  After I translate enough texts to get a large enough
vocabulary, I plan on writing short stories of various genres (science
fiction, erotica, etc.) to expand my vocabulary even more.

There was one major exception to my method of developing a vocabulary,
and that was with my first major conlanging effort.  When I look back, I
can't imagine that I could have come up with a method like this if I had
tried--it seems that the best ideas aren't intended.

Three of my friends had founded a club which we originally called "the
cult", which was sort of mock a religion.  I edited a text called
Tonto's maxims, which became our quasi-sacred literature.  (_Tonto_, by
the way, came from the Spanish word _tonto_ and has nothing to do with
the Lone Ranger's companion.)  This text contained such wisdom as, "To
know a little of a lot is far better than to know a lot of a little,"
"If you can't make sense out of what you should do, do something that
makes no sense," and, "To compromise is to never know what would have
occurred if one had not compromised."

A friend of mine made his own version of the text so that when we
disagreed with how something should be worded, we could each have things
our own way.  Now, this text was supposedly transmitted to us by
Tonto--the great Dystopian historian, philosopher, and leech farmer.
(Dystopia was the planet whose inhabitants were the "true" ancestors of
all members of "the cult".  Sadly, it was destroyed by Halley's Vomit.)
So I decided to have Tonto "reveal" the "original" version of the text
to me.  The really brilliant thing was that the original version
contained ambiguities to explain the difference between the two English
versions of the text.  (There was one word that could mean either _chew_
or _translate into Swahili_.)  Also, my friend's text in particular
contained a lot of nonsense words, and the "original" text showed that
these were transliterations of words that were hard to express in
English.

The original language was oddly a lot like Spanish, English, and French
after being spoken for a hundred years by Martians.  Oh, and the
Dystopians used Base 16--that was convenient for me because I had just
bought a scientific calculator and hexadecimal numbers fascinated me.

Pharamond

--

"Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel
interested.

"No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed.
"That's what the name is _called_.  The name really _is_ _'The Aged Aged
Man.'_"

(from _Through the Looking Glass_ by Lewis Carroll)


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