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When you create a new conlang, what are the first words you create? Mine are usually numbers and pronouns.

Pronouns, numbers, colors, and kinship terms, usually in that order.

I often get tied up in the morphology, and don't start hard with the vocabulary until later. I tend to go more with more basic nouns and verbs such as 'person', 'house', 'hit' or 'sleep'. My conlangs are almost always polysynthetic in some way so I don't even use independet pronouns all that much, and the many different options you have with numerals, colours and kinship terms often sees me leaving them off till later (I might use verbs for kinship terms, for instance).

I created actual xerossu from keeping some rare words from precedent attempts I made long ago : kenore (Hi!) , xeross (communication protocol) that was already the language name of the previous versions and became Xeroßu / Xerossu (conveniant writing, but incorrect romanization) , kerer (smt that kills / killer / to kill), vixou (a hug / to hug), ragknar (became ragnaet ; mechanical/electrical/hydrolic/... power )... I discarded nearly everything else. And nearly every words of a lexicon I found on my computer, that I wrote one day and absolutly don't remember when and exactly why... but words sounded just like "xerossu" to me, so I took them as part of my initial work base : i.e. uhwa (truth / science), wohf (future / hopes), tep (servant), ereiß (supervisor, god, dog-like), wawa (to query for data), aruhf (communication)...

Then as I started working again on a new attempt to bring this language to life because of dreams in which I was speaking it and other peoples and creatures too, I tried to remember words and sentences morphology as well as I could... then built things pieces by pieces..

Sometime I have a new bucket of words coming in mind related to some subject, or not. But since I have now enought roots to construct words by weaving and agglutination, I mainly create new words from ones I already know.

Going back to the post exact question, I could answer that I really started with alphabet design, something that came suddenly and monolithic. I wrote it down to paper, I found it to be really good, easy to write as hand, easy to remember really fast, easy to discriminate each letters and yet more than an alphabet : it's at the same time an hexadecimal mathematical notation.

And regarding lexicon building, I can tell that first words were mainly animals and lifeforms related.

tziaruk, dog ; shulxi, hyena ; tziaktaruk, wolf ; lerowukta, leucrocuta ; kelfbaruk, reptile ; naǩtaliki, spider ; banuma, waterlilly ; nutßi, nose ; tziayixi , fox ; bwabaruk, rat ; kataruk, cat ; ketztakluomaruk, bird ; nuak - nuk - nuataklu, types of fur ; ketzti , feathers ; kererþoŕnikotl , predator ; italikta , wine ; kotl , fangs ...


If I wanted to create another language from scratch, not inspired by something heard in dreams and eveything... I don't really know what I will construct first, but probably everything needed to express data enquiries about vital needs and asking basic orders. Then express logical relationships between facts and/or numbers. Then express confidence levels of ideas. Then feelings. And so on

Pronouns, numbers and the Swadesh list.

Like Frislander, I normally start with the morphology, so I create some nouns and verbs to hash out declinations. As my conlangs tend to be a posteriori, my first words are often random words from the real life base language which I have put through the sound changes that lead to my conlang.

In my latest random mess, the first word two words were oeg'g [ɞɣə̆ˠɣ] and xam'y [t̪͡ɬ̪ɑ̃m̚ə̃j], respectively meaning "a person who dedicates their whole life to guarding a field of potatoes" and "a nice, cooling breeze on a summer night". Make of that what you will.

Whatever pops into my mind. I've recently adopted a new approach: fill the Liepzig-Jakarta list.

Vlürch wrote:In my latest random mess, the first word two words were oeg'g [ɞɣə̆ˠɣ] and xam'y [t̪͡ɬ̪ɑ̃m̚ə̃j]

Uh-oh, I have bad news for you. You can't have velarized velars because they're already velar. And an unreleased nasal? Is that possible?

Or is this some non-human language where these things would make sense?

Now, first the salt *plunks down a bucket*: I'm very new to actually organizing my conlang making, so extant languages are a jumbled, mumbled mess I'm trying to make sense of. I'm also working out formal phonologies (and the Unicode symbols there of so I can post aforementioned phonologies.) so these are as-is transliterations that may change.

The Marachi language: I started with titles, several of which broke down to words. I worked backwards and rather illogically. I've several passages in the language that I now have to figure out what they mean. (I mentioned that I'm new at doing this sensibly yes?)

For the others I'm slowly working on, I'm starting out with nouns and verbs that are important to the culture or the story the culture appears in, including how they deal with magic (Fantasy worlds to date.)

I expect most of this will change as I get deeper into the process and screw things up and figure out more efficient ways of doing things.

I havent really been able to do this lately, as all of my conlangs are related, and I tend to assume very low rates of loanword borrowing and semantic shift, perhaps unrealistically low. Thus when I start a new language the first thing I do after getting the phonology is to start sound-changing words from its closest relative.

Right now, my newest and least developed conlang, proto-paleo-Repilian, has a lexicon consisting of only one word: kheketi "pineapple", the cognate of which in the Gold language is merely â, which means that this word will almost certainly have died out except perhaps as a morpheme within a larger word.