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Re: lexicon

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Wednesday, April 4, 2001, 6:10
David Peterson wrote:
>For instance, my first language (on the computer; my Mac--the
most superior machine out there, no matter what those eunuchs say!) has over 100 pages of words--my dictionary.> Drat, yours is bigger than mine. Kash runs to a mere 48 pages, I think about 1500 head words, though most entries contain several derivatives. The list of potential forms (not all possible forms, which runs to the millions) contains about 4500, so there's still plenty to draw on, and I don't always resort to it anyway. That list was generated with the Langmaker program, which seems to work best with relatively straightforward structure like CVCVC; obviously the phonology and word structure came first. Others here have mentioned their own programs, which is nice if you can do it. I made long lists of words-- adjectives & their opposites, body parts, things around the town/house/farm etc., verbs in various semantic fields etc., then assigned Kash forms pretty much at random, though some biases toward certain sounds crept in unconsciously(?). Plants and animals get short shrift-- this is an alien world, and it's tiresome to have to keep defining things as "similar to...." One thing leads to another, and the culture starts to build itself. So-- David, Yoon Ha and me. That makes 3 who admit to enjoying word-creation. After all, what's a language without words? :-)

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Patrick Dunn <tb0pwd1@...>