Re: Vocabulary Creation

En réponse à Kua Sai <GreenDragon2988@...>:

> Hey, Chiming in with a question on vocabulary
> design.
Well, welcome to the list! :)

 How would I go about desiging a lexicon for my language? I
> would like this to be language that derives the terms from roots,
> rather then just randomly generate bunchs from a computer.
Why not generate roots by computer? ;)))

 I really
> can't understand the technique behind this process and would be very
> grateful if someone would go through and creat a few words with me,
> just so I can catch on to the details. Sorry to be Bothersome about
> stupid things! Thanks A Bunch!
Well, that's surely no stupid question. Actually, it's a point I often fail
upon (that's why I hate creating vocabulary for my conlangs). So I'm no
specialist, but here are my two Eurocents ( ;)) ):
- your idea of deriving words from roots is excellent. It will help give
consistency to the language. Now, if you want a naturalistic language, don't go
too far and derive all words related to a common concept from a single root.
Only phil*******al languages do that ;))) (well, some languages come extremely
near to it, like Arabic, but they still have often two roots with close
meanings to spice things up ;)) ).
- Depending on the structure of the language (is it a synthetic language, with
affixes that like to eat one or two sounds of the roots before settling, an
agglutinative language with affixes that just stay besides, a Semitic-like
language where only the consonants are meaningful and the vowels tell you what
kind of word you have, or an isolating language that only know about
compounding? ;)) ), you have different ways to go. Just choose the one which
fits you best (or put two or more together. Nothing prevents you from having
both inflection and compounding, or even vowel alternations in the mix - look
at English, it has everything together ;)) -).
- If you choose to have some affixes, make them more or less productive.
English -er to make actor nouns may be quite productive, but that doesn't
change the less productive presence of -ist too ;)) .
- For the rest, try! I found out that the only way to create vocabulary was to
actually create it ;))) . Go ahead and figure out your roots, and then make
compounds, add affixes, whatever you like! Believe me, my Itakian has a
complete set of derivational affixes, but without roots, it cannot get any
lexicon done :((( . So you need to actually begin making the roots. The rest
will come naturally after a while.

Well, probably not much of a help, but I could always try :)) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.