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

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