Re: lexicon

Tim Judge 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.
There's two MAJOR problems with your question:

i) What do you mean by complete? That you can ask for a cup of tea in it?
That you can keep a normal conversation going in it? Than you can write
complex technical texts in it?

ii) What do you count as words? Is each entry one stem, or are
(some)derivations to be given their own entries? What about compounds? Will
bound morphemes (ie affixes) be included as entries?

That said, I guess a "functional" language in which you can hold a
meaningful conversation going would require at least several hundred roots,
possibly a few thousand. The number is probably greater the smaller room for
derivation and compounding there's in the language.

There's also the question WHAT words are needed. If you're doing a conlang
set in a low-tech society, many words found in a modern lexicon are useless.
Conversely, a conlang from a high-tech society may need alot of words that
we haven't found a need for yet, while others may've become obsoleted (in a
few thousand years only archaeologists will need a word for "CD burner").

                                                       Andreas
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