Re: A Conlang, created by the group?

On Fri, 9 Oct 1998, Mathias M. Lassailly wrote:

> Actually I realize it sounds very stupid, and maybe difficult to understand. But
> anyway, I'm not Zamenhof :-)
I have been re-reading a very interesting
critique of Esperanto; and in this section ...
http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto.html#f
... there occurs the following challenge:

> F3: Simplicity
>
> This is the inverse problem, overlooked by Zamenhof.
> Language learners want to be able to communicate
> with as little rote learning of vocabulary as possible.
> English is rather good at this,
> as it is rich in "metonyms" - coverterms like "house" or "clothes",
> usable as stand-ins for more specialised terms
> like "palace" or "sou'wester" as well as in
> self-explanatory compound words like "treehouse" or "nightclothes".
> If the 850 words of "Basic English" are sufficient for encyclopaedias,
> any language designed from the ground up
> could in principle get by with a one-page dictionary.*
I think a sub-goal of the project envisioned here
would be, basically, F3 above; and it would be
at least a very useful word-list for conlang designers.
Basic English has many known flaws, and is certainly
not "the last word" in basic word lists ...
The best I know of presently is EuroWordNet,
http://www.let.uva.nl/~ewn/corebcs/topont.htm