Re: basic vocab

>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.