Re: Conlang introduction

On Fri, Nov 19, 2004 at 02:29:05PM -0500, Yann Kiraly wrote:
> Thanks for your reply!
> /c/ is pronounced [ts]. The words are generated like this:
OK.


> 1. Take the first consonant of an english word.
> 2. Mutate it according to the following sheme:
[...]
> 3. Do the same thing to the first vowel of the malayian word.
> 4. Do it again with the first consonant of the malayian word.
> 5. Now, add the mutated form of the first vowel in the english word.
>
> Of course this meanins the language is not very close to either english or
> malay, but has a consistant sound. Also, this makes vocabulary creation
> very easy. I'm now using a different malayian dictionary,
I see. Interesting approach to vocabulary creation.


> http://search.cari.com.my/dictionary/dic.php , because it is far more
> complete.
That URL is funny... /cari/ means "search" in Malay, so the URL reads
like "search dot search dot com" :-)


> PS: Do you think it matters that (almost) all words are CVCV?
Well, the only potential problem with that is lexical space. You seem
to have 22 consonants and 5 vowels (did I count that right?) so there
are only 12,100 possible CVCV words in total. That's not a lot,
considering that the Oxford English dictionary has about 600,000
entries and the average English vocabulary of a person is around
70,000.[1] But depending on what you want to do with your conlang,
perhaps 12,000 is "good enough".


[1] Based on:
http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache:DyymJvLAO6IJ:linguistlist.org/~ask-ling/archive-1997.7/msg00321.html+size+of+English+lexicon&hl=en


T

--
Why can't you just be a nonconformist like everyone else? -- YHL