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

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>
> At 01:06 05/10/98 PST, you wrote:
> >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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> >
> >
>         Creating the lexicon is for me the most difficult thing to do. With
> Moten, I managed to create 700 roots, but that's all I could do up to now. I
> think that with 2500 words, it's really enough. An average speaker of any
> natlang generally has enough with 2000 words or so.
>
>         The best method to create a lexicon is to translate texts (I should
> use this method but I never do it -do what I say, not what I do!-). You can
> then think of derivations and others things that enhance your vocabulary
> without adding new words (I use this method very widely).
>
>         Welcome to the conlang list (you're the second new one in less than
> three days, wow!).
>
>                                                 Christophe Grandsire
>                                                 |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.
>
> homepage: http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html

And I'm The other newbie! This is the first time I get to say welcome to
the list! So, Welcome!

With Oc, The language I've been working on for at least ten years, I
came up with all the Oc radicals first. Its simple in Oc, one consonant
with one vowel. Start with 'B' and work your way through the vowels till
you get to 'C'. Start over again . Keep going like this till you get to
'ZH'

So I had a nice aphabetized collection waiting for me to give them an
English translation. Basically I just started translating into Oc. When
An English word needed a radical I just looked into my list to see where
there was an opening and there I was.

What I really wanted, was a list of the most commonly used words,
starting with the most  used word at the top and working down the list
to the least used word. i have limited openings for words and I don't
want to miss any important ones. then I found the webpage about Dutton
Speedwords. Dutton had the same Idea I did and *he* did the research. So
I used His collection of English words and plugged them right in to my
list!