Re: Basic lexicon

> From: The RipperDoc
>
> Hello!
> Do you have any links to some lexicon that holds all basic, human words,
> like eat, walk, etc? Not just a lexicon of roots, but a lexicon
> of the most
> basic words of humankind. It would be very useful for my conlang,
> so I could
> compare the lexicons.
There certainly are a good number of possible lists to choose from, the
Swadesh Lists come to mind, but I would be wary of doing so.  One has to be
careful not to merely provide one-for-one glosses for a list of English
words in order to avoid a relexification of English semantics.  A very early
attempt to do this for my conlang, amman iar, yielded very poor results.
What I opted for instead was to use a large number of good language
dictionaries that provided not just single word glosses, but real
definitions that exposed the semantic relationships realized in each
language.  When I needed a new word for any particular concept, I would
explore these semantic relationships and select/create new ones for amman
iar.  In this way the semantic net of amman iar became unlike that of any
natlang and in particular, unlike that of English.  This is a far more
time-consuming approach, but in the end yields far more satisfactory
results.

Stay curious,
David

David E. Bell
The Gray Wizard
dbell@graywizard.net
www.graywizard.net
AIM: GraWzrd

Wisdom begins in wonder.