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

David Bush 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 don't set a goal for vocabulary size.  The best way to work on
vocabulary, and also syntax, morphology, etc., is to *translate*.  Just
abstract "this word means X" will usually get repetitive, i.e., you'll
come often end up with lots of similar-sounding words.  Also, you may
skip over a perfectly reasonable derivation; e.g., you may have "klabit"
for "fight", and then "nador" for "war", when you might be able to
combine an augmentative affix (augmentative = "big", "great") with it,
say "fa-", thus "faklabit" "big fight; war", or you might still want
seperate forms.  But it's my experience that creating words as you need
them tends to make you more receptive to possible derivations.

It's also *wonderful* for working on syntax.  A rule that may seem
perfectly reasonable in the abstract you may find to be impractical in
practice.  Or, as has happened to me several times, you may discover an
ambiguity while translating, which you may decide to keep (after all,
every language has ambiguities), or work around (for example, in
Watya'iya`isa, my conlang, the ending -q(i)ni could be -q(i)n- + -i or
-q(i)ni (2nd person singular + progressive or 2nd person plural), which
I never realized until I began translating.  Context usually makes it
clear, tho, with redundant pronouns if necessary.

You may also think of some cool new feature that you would never have
thought of without translating.

So, my advice in a nutshell: TRANSLATE, TRANSLATE, TRANSLATE.  My
favorite texts are religious, passages from the Bible (my dream is to
translate at least one gospel into Watya'iya`isa).  But, any text will
do.

--
"A silent mouth is sweet to hear" - Irish proverb
ICQ: 18656696
AOL: NikTailor
http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Conlang/W.html