Re: Hello all: I'm new...a quick question about vocabularies

****QUOTED PORTION****
Date:    Mon, 5 Oct 1998 01:06:45 PST
From:    David Bush <dethyvon@...>
Subject: Hello all: I'm new...a quick question about vocabularies

Hello all fellow creative linguists.
        I joined your group yesterday and love it already.  I find it
strange to unite with people in a hobby that I thought had practically
no following.  I love conlangs, but have made only five of any merit.
My last project, a language which I named Kesa, was a language with
Latin-type inflections, except the system was supposedly completely
unambiguous.  I have given up on Kesa because it's so complicated that I
can't write anything in it without much work.
        My question is this: how do you people decide on the
vocabularies
of your conlangs?  I set my sights too high for Kesa with a goal to
translate 15,000 English words.  I got up to 2,500.  I have a hard time
limiting my vocabularies under 2,000 words.  What are your meathods?
                                Thanks!
                                David Bush
                                e-mail: dethyvon@juno.com
Note: "dethyvon" means 'loud thunder' in one of my languages, and is
also
the name of a knight in a book I'm writing.
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Hi there.

I usually start with a word list. There are some on the Web, and one in
the back of a book titled _Loom of Language_. (which I finally found,
after having heard so much about it. Found it on a floor-level shelf at
Borders.) I strip the lists of words that aren't relevant. For example,
_Loom of Language_ is a bit dated, so I took out the words no longer in
common usage, and replaced them with newer ones. Also, there are some
topics that I am not likely to need, particularly in languages that have
fictional cultures attached that might not need words for air travel (or
whatever).

 Then I add words that are relevant, and that I am likely to need. Some
lists are quite deficient when it comes to words that I, as a woman and
a mother of small children, use dozens of times a day. [How can they
leave out "pregnant" or "diaper"?!] And, when dealing with a language
for fiction, there is often some specialized vocabulary that I might add
-- for example, ea-luna has bunches of words that name different parts
of their rather elaborate clan structure and for relationships within
the clan structure.

 All along the way I shift the meanings of the words around. To my mind,
having both "(sand) dune" and "(snow) drift" is redundant, since they
are essentially the same thing made of different substances. On the
other hand, I might take a English common word  and split it into
multiple meanings. "Love" is one word in English, but do you really
"love" your spouse, your cousin, your dog, your country, and your
mother's gravy all in the same way? :)

And sometimes I just make up words as I need them, scribbling them into
notebooks, to be sorted later. (I *always* have a notebook around me
somewhere. You never know when inspiration will strike.)

Mia