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Re: lexicon

From:Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
Date:Wednesday, April 4, 2001, 2:16
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