Relex

A relex (from relexification) is a type of cipher that replaces the words of an existing language with invented ones. Relexes seldom innovate new grammatical features unique from their source language. For example, A simple English relex may replace the words the, dog, bite, and man with meh, foo, bar, and baz, respectively. To form the sentence The dog bites the man, one simply replaces each word in the English sentence with its corresponding relexified form to make the sentence meh foo bar meh baz.

To the extent that new grammatical features are introduced, they often take the form of regularizing irregular inflected forms or ignoring inflection altogether, as is done in the example above. The semantics of words never deviate from the source language. The wordbaz from the above example would carry the meanings of male human, a human of either gender, and even the verb to man in the sense of to supply with a crew.

If a newbie conlanger discovers conlanging before getting into linguistics, their first conlang is frequently a relex of their native tongue. On the other hand, if they find out about conlangs through an interest in linguistics, a kitchen sink conlang is likely to be their first attempt.

The word relex is often used pejoratively within the conlanging community. However, Lingua Ignota, often regarded as the first conlang ever, was as far as can be discerned a relex of Latin.

As daunting as it may seem, the surest way of avoiding the dreaded relex is to learn a second language. Any language will do, but the more the second language differs from your mother tongue, the better. Once you grasp that different languages express ideas in different ways, and clothe those ideas in sounds your tongue is not accustomed to, you can start exploring linguistics proper.