Re: Survey (a new one!)

Pablo Flores wrote:

> On Wed, 30 Sep 1998 10:52:48 -0300 Pablo Flores
> <fflores@...> writes:
>
> >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?
This isn't really a good answer to your question, but
the first word of Tokana ever to come into existence
was "talhkoh".  Only after some time did I 'discover'
that this word means "because".  But anyway, the word
just entered my head one day, unbidden, and served as
the germ for the phonological system of Tokana
(essentially what I did was ask myself, "What kind of
language would 'talhkoh' be a probable word of?")

Actually, quite a bit of the vocabulary of Tokana
predates the language itself, since it was 'borrowed'
from an earlier conlang project of mine called Kosan.
Some of the old Kosan words which survived into
Tokana in one form or another include:

    kal       "man"
    iha       "woman"
    koin      "person"
    pyi       "child"  (Kosan "poi")
    ikei      "dog"  (Kosan "igei")
    totsat    "table"  (Kosan "totsad")
    kaut      "chair"  (Kosan "gaud")
    miua      "cat"  (Kosan "miue")
    tiesat    "city"  (Kosan "tiesd")
    kespa     "hold/carry"  (Kosan "gespan")
    im        "when/while"
    eithe     "horse"  (Kosan "eiteq")
    es        "one"  (Kosan "ez")
    tioh      "cow"  (Kosan "dio")
    uhna      "sing"  (Kosan "onha")
    mol       "hand"
    silh      "finger"
    uima      "love"  (Kosan "uena")

and numerous others.

Actually, this is just an extreme case of a more
general habit I have of carrying over vocabulary
from one conlang project to the next - whether it's
recycling actual words, or doing different variations
on a particular sound-meaning correspondence.

In "A Secret Vice", Tolkien remarked that the
correspondence "vru" = "ever" had crept its way
into every one of his languages, and I find the same
thing happening with mine.  For example, in each of
my major conlang projects, the word for "in" or
"inside" has consisted of a fricative followed by
/i/ or a diphthong containing /i/:

    Messyen:     thui
    Tadheka:     zui
    Kosan:       hi
    Tokana:      hi, fi  (earlier versions)
    Tokana:      him     (most recent version)

Do other people find the same sort of thing happening
in their conlangs?


Matt.