Re: Size of your dictionary

Daniel Bowman wrote:
> Hello all-
>
> How many words does your conlang(s) have?  I realize that this might be a
> tricky question to answer depending on how you define "word."
>
> Angosey currently has about 770.  Maybe a quarter of these are "dead" words
> that I don't really use from day to day.  I've committed maybe half to
> memory, although now that I'm keeping a diary, my memorization is lagging
> behind.
>
> Also, how do you keep your dictionary organized?  I wrote an excel macro
> that allows me to enter words and also search by word, grammatical type, and
> English keyword.  I can make it available if other people want to use it,
> but it may be a while-it's not working correctly yet!
>
> Danny
It's also a tricky question to answer for some of my languages due to
the haphazard state of the documentation (e.g. Tirelat) or the tentative
nature of many of the words. When I did the CALS pages for a few of my
languages a while back, I settled on 1500 as an approximate vocabulary
size for Tirelat and Minza. Jarda had slightly more, at around 1800
words. Not many of my languages have even reached 1000 words -- Yasaro,
at the time I did the CALS page for it, had only 100 words.

I just have a big Word document with my vocabulary organized by category
(e.g., animals, plants, containers, musical instruments, colors). All
the roots are delimited by square brackets, so I can take the whole
vocabulary section and sort it alphabetically for a Minza-English
dictionary. I use bold face to keep track of which words have entries in
the English-Minza dictionary. I've been working on converting the
Tirelat documentation to this format, but for the most part I just use
the search functions to find Tirelat words.