Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: basic vocab

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Friday, September 15, 2000, 19:30
>On Thu, 14 Sep 2000, Mario Bonassin wrote: >> Do any of you have a special list of words that you use to start >> creating root words or basic vocab for your various conlangs, or do you >> use a text of something, or do you have another way of deciding what >> words to create, aside from just going through a dictionary?
My own rather nuts-and-bolts approach: After writing up the basic phonology and enough of the grammar of Kash to have a firm idea of how things should sound/act, I had about 200 basic words. I then used Jeffrey Henning's Langmaker program to generate a lot of possible phonological words, then started assigning meanings in fairly haphazard way, mostly going by various semantic fields-- i.e things around the house, body parts, the natural world etc., number system, adjectives in various fields, plus opposites, verbs in various fields. How well this would work with a language more phonologically and derivationally complex than Kash, I don't know. But one advantage to generating the forms first is that you avoid the seemingly natural tendency to favor particular sounds, or to accidentally assign two meanings to one form.