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

David Bush 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?
Why do you limit your vocabularies? You can't have too many words! :)

I have no standard methods for creating vocabulary, but I can tell some
things I've done.

* Semantic fields: I take a certain field of reality and I create words for it.
For example, animals (and I create the words for dog, cat, bird, horse, etc.),
house appliances, body parts, colours, etc.

* Free association: this is what psychologists do. Look around and find an
interesting object, and then create words for everything that it suggests to
you (you should write down a list and then translate them all). For example:
table > food > eat > fork > spoon > tea > cup > hands > hold, etc.

* Translation: this is the favourite of most people so far, and mine too. Take
a general text and translate it. Begin with something simple. Some parts of the
Bible are probably a good start. Myself, I've been working on the book of
Ecclesiastes.

* Unorthodox methods: I sometimes create nice words and *then* assign meaning
to them. One time I did this with rhyming words (this is good for light poetry
too :)

I've quit trying to choose goals. When they're too low, I reach them and found
myself needing more words. When they're too high, it seems to me I'm never going
to reach them and get depressed. My only goal is to have enough *morphemes* so that
given a concept, I can translate it with a word I have already, or readily create
one.


--Pablo Flores

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