Re: Conlang optimized for a specific text

For me, it's what I always do. I used to fear translating works of
literature or religious texts, because to me the former was
desecration if I did it badly, while the latter would be desecration
in any case. So I ended up translating articles from the Economist,
which meant that an earlier version of Arithide, one of my conlangs,
had very simple words for things like "current-account surplus" and
"illiberal democracy" whereas there weren't enough word shapes left
over to fit to all the simple stuff like "axe" and all. I've kind of
abandoned the technique -- that is, I still expand my vocabulary not
by sitting around thinking of words that randomly pop into my mind but
words from an actual text being translated, but I make sure I use the
appropriate degree of complexity for the words. It isn't a very
naturalistic method of conlanging after all, and its purpose would be
hard to expand beyond fun.

Eugene

2007/3/7, Joseph Fatula <joefatula@...>:
> Jim Henry wrote:
> > Have any of y'all ever designed a conlang around a target
> > text like this?
> >
>
> I've done something kind of like that.  Sometimes I'll take a language
> that isn't very far developed yet and choose a text to translate like
> this, knowing I'll have to extend the language quite a bit to make it
> work.  I'll usually choose a text that would require some useful
> constructions, so that I'll end up with grammatical rules that are
> useful in the long term.
>
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