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Re: A Conlang, created by the group?

From:Charles <catty@...>
Date:Saturday, October 10, 1998, 15:23
Mathias M. Lassailly wrote:

> This is my ONLY message regarding cases : > > 4.1. Nouns as sole verb roots : what does this imply ?
That section alone was worth the price of admission to this list. You *must* either post further references or elucidate further the 10 nominal-ergative (?) cases.
> 5. Vocabulary : > > Yes. That's a good idea. Who volunteers ? [:-{ > > Why not Charles ? He's stuck his finger in the hinge, now he must pay to get free :-)
I was only asking, not telling!
> I only have my essential vocabulary list of 1150 roots partly drawn from > Japanese kanjis. But there are no verbs (one verb is 'represented' by only > one agent, patient, result or instrument) and no opposites. Maybe it could > help. Maybe not.
What I am using now is the English word frequency data from http://info.ox.ac.uk/bnc/what/index.html ... It is broken down into CLAWS grammatical categories. Example of raw data: 100106029 !!WHOLE_CORPUS !!ANY 4124 6187267 the at0 4120 2941444 of prf 4108 2682863 and cjc 4120 2126369 a at0 4113 1812609 in prp 4109 1620850 to to0 4115 1089186 it pnp 4097 998389 is vbz 4097 923948 was vbd 4005 917579 to prp 4099 884599 i pnp 3746 Columns are: count, word, category, files. This shows that the most frequent words are grammatical particles and pronouns etc. See also "Zipf's Law". Further down are the nouns, adjectives, and verbs: 6222 substantial aj0 1699 6222 funds nn2 1389 6219 northern np0 1120 6209 reasonable aj0 1836 6208 onto prp 1520 6204 learn vvi 1871 6200 aircraft nn0 731 6197 games nn2 1222 6170 background nn1 1956 6164 officials nn2 1111 6158 strategy nn1 1316 6157 works vvz 2078 6154 prepared vvn 2110 What I'd like would be a sort of ontological tree as in WordNet, grouping the near-infinite nouns into a tree of sub-categories, a taxonomy. The higher-level words would be the essentials of a "reasonable" vocabulary. Maybe just 2000 or so well-chosen words is enough? Anyway, it would be a good list to re-lex from.