Re: lexicon

On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Tim Judge, Erion Telepalda wrote:

> Hey does anyone know where I can find out the minimum of words I need for a
> "complete" language. English Dictionarys are useless for this (and much to
> big), and I don't know any other language well enough for me to determin
> exactly how usefull the words are.
You can find a claim to a composite 2000-word "minimum" at the Landau
Universal Vocabulary:

http://pages.prodigy.com/kankonia/luv.htm

"Complete"?  Gosh, that must be a hard one to judge.  I suspect I would
consider 2000 words in Chevraqis not quite satisfactory from a
completeness point of view (I'm counting morphemes as words, BTW, so
verb/noun/adj forms are conflated; the morphology makes this make sense
for Chevraqis) though by then I'd probably be able to handle most
translation exercises (I think) unless it involved lots of
out-of-Qenaren/Avren-culture stuff.  It really depends, I suppose, on
what you want the language to be "complete" *for.*

YHL