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

On Mon, 5 Oct 1998 01:06:45 PST, David Bush <dethyvon@...> wrote:

>        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?
I used to just generate words as I needed them, for the most part. When I
started to design Eklektu, I found that I couldn't work that way, because
it took too long to look up words in a number of different dictionaries =
and
select one for each new word that I needed. So I borrowed a bunch of =
words
from the same language all at once, and kept a list of alternate
translations for many words to avoid future conflicts with other words =
that
I might borrow. Zharranh was a somewhat successful attempt to generate a
large-scale vocabulary in a semi-random fashion, by manually generating a
list of words that fit the Zharranh phonology and matching them up at
random to a list of meanings including some from Rick Harrison's =
"Universal
Language Dictionary" =
(http://www.webquarry.com/~hrick/langlab/uld2in.html)
and others from the Eklektu vocabulary list. I also used semi-random
methods to generate the Jaghri vocabulary. But I generally prefer
generating words a few at a time, and although I tried semi-random =
methods
for Jarrda, I ended up rejecting most of the randomly generated words in
favor of ones that I created as I needed them. So I've given up on
large-scale randomized vocabulary for the projects currently in the =
initial
design stages (Iwa and Hlererhoi).