Or dictionary writing.
Science-fiction writers carry this farther than most: there are very few who have not at least once constructed an extensive glossary of an 'alien' language, (If a story contains five words of Arcturan, you may be assured that a lexicography of 50 or 500 more was on a wall chart or in a notebook at the author's left hand as he worked. I myself have a cardfile indexing a complete genealogy of more than a hundred names cross-bred on board a star-ship originally crewed by twenty women and four men — the residue of two short stories totalling less than 10,000 words.) Few of these ventures remain parenthetical in nature although they are sometimes more inventive and engaging than the formal stories. One reason I embrace the word fabulation so eagerly is that it provides an extension of critical vocabulary for the discussion of the increasingly acceptable and necessary body of work which is neither 'fiction' by traditional standards, nor 'essay' nor 'exposition' nor 'reportage': something that might have been called fiction-science. (The classic example would be Asimov's famous 'Thiotimoline' article; the best-known recent one, The Report from Iron Mountain.) 'Confluence' is one of the rare pieces of this sort to see prints although its publication in Punch was in a slightly altered version.
Confluence
Brian W. Aldiss
The inhabitants of the planet Myrin have much to endure from Earthmen, inevitably, perhaps, since they represent the only intelligent life we have so far found in the galaxy. The Tenth Research Fleet has already left for Myrin. Meanwhile, some of the fruits of earlier expeditions are ripening.
As has already been established, the superior Myrinian culture, the so-called Confluence of Headwaters, is somewhere in the region of eleven million (Earth) years old, and its language, Confluence, has been established even longer. The etymological team of the Seventh Research Fleet was privileged to sit at the feet of two gentlemen of the Oeldrid Stance Academy. They found that Confluence is a language-cum-posture, and that meanings of words can be radically modified or altered entirely by the stance assumed by the speaker. There is, therefore, no possibility of ever compiling a one-to-one dictionary of English-Confluence, Confluence-English words.
Nevertheless, the list of Confluent words that follows disregards the stances involved, which number almost nine thousand and are all named, and merely offers a few definitions, some of which must be regarded as tentative. The definitions are, at this early stage of our knowledge of Myrinian culture, valuable in themselves, not only because they reveal something of the inadequacy of our own language, but because they throw some light on to the mysteries of an alien culture. The romanised phonetic system employed is that suggested by Dr. Rohan Prendernath, one of the members of the etymological team of the Seventh Research Fleet, without whose generous assistance this short list could never have been complied.
AB WE TEL MIN - The sensation that one neither agrees nor disagrees with what is being said to one, but that one simply wishes to depart from the presence of the speaker
ARN TUTKHAN - Having to rise early before anyone else is about; addressing a machine
BAGI RACK - Apologising as a form of attack; a stick resembling a gun
BAG RACK - Needless and offensive apologies
BAMAN - The span of a man's consciousness
BI - The name of the mythical northern cockerel; a reverie that lasts for more than twenty (Earth) years
BI SAN - A reverie lasting more than twenty years and of a religious nature
BIT SAN - A reverie lasting more than twenty years and of a blasphemous nature
BI TOSI - A reverie lasting more than twenty years on cosmological themes
BI TVAS - A reverie lasting more than twenty years on geological themes
BIUI TOSI - A reverie lasting more than a hundred and forty-two years on cosmological themes; the sound of air in a cavern; long dark hair
BIUT TASH - A reverie lasting more than twenty years on Har Dar Ka - themes
CANO LEE MIN - Things sensed out-of-sight that will return
CA PATA VATUZ - The taste of a maternal grandfather
CHAM ON TH ZAM - Being witty when nobody else appreciates it
DAR AYRHOH - The garments of an ancient crone; the age-old supposition that Myrin is a hypothetical place
EN IO PLAY - The deliberate dissolving of the senses into sleep
GEE KUTCH - Solar empathy
GE NU - The sorrow that overtakes a mother knowing her child will be born dead
GE NUP DIMU - The sorrow that overtakes the child in the womb when it knows it will be born dead
GOR A - Ability to live for eight hundred years
HA ATUZ SHAK EAN - Disgrace attending natural death of maternal grandfather
HAR DAR KA - The complete understanding that all the soil of Myrin passes through the bodies of its earthworms every ten years
HAR DIDI KAL - A small worm; the hypothetical creator of a hypothetical sister planet of Myrin
HE YUP - The first words the computers spoke, meaning, 'The light will not be necessary'
HOLT CHA - The feeling of delight that precedes and precipitates wakening
HOLT CHE - The autonomous marshalling of the senses which produces the feeling of delight that precedes and precipitates wakening
HOZ STAP GURT - A writer's attitude to fellow writers
INK TH O - Morality used as an offensive weapon
JELY JIP TUP - A thinking machine that develops a stammer; the action of pulling up the trousers while running uphill
JIL JIPY TUP - Any machine with something incurable about it; pleasant laughter that is nevertheless unwelcome; the action of pulling up the trousers while running downhill
KARNAD EES - The enjoyment of a day or a year by doing nothing; fasting
KARNDAL CHESS - The waste of a day or a year by doing nothing; fasting
KARNDOLI YON TOR - Mystical state attained through inaction; feasting; a learned paper on the poetry of metal
KARNDOL KI REE - The waste of a life by doing nothing; a type of fasting
KUNDULUM - To be well and in bed with two pretty sisters
LAHAH SIP - Tasting fresh air after one has worked several hours at one's desk
LA YUN UN - A struggle in which not a word is spoken; the underside of an inaccessible boulder; the part of one's life unavailable to other people
LEE KE MIN - Anything or anyone out-of-sight that one senses will never return; an apology offered for illness.
LIKI INK TH KUTI - The small engine that attends to one after the act of excretion