Re: Size of your dictionary

On Fri, 3 Apr 2009 11:05:42 -0400, Daniel Bowman <danny.c.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."
My Sabasasaj lexicon has 288 inflecting stems under 123 bases, together with
27 closed-class words, 28 preverbs, 21 directionals, and 16 perfect markers
(which I also keep there, segregated thusly).  This isn't a whole lot --
coining new words is still frequent -- but the number is smaller than I
would've guessed it would be.

My Pjaukra lexicon has 1383 entries, and this is enough that it's not
uncommon not to need to coin new words for a short text (not that I've
worked with the language in three years).

In the gripping language, still none yet :-( but that should change Real
Soon Now... we know what several of the words will be, we just have to
assign forms.

Some other langs have non-shabby word counts (AhH 633, khi`ke`ng hundreds, a
random sketch of a daughter language of my first ever conlang 925) but I
haven't really used them.

>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!
For my main langs, just a single text file, sorted by lemma.  Each line
starts with a lemma, then has {morphological data}, glosses, notes,
sometimes [etymologies]: fixed expressions it occurs in.  Sometimes I leave
references to texts that exhibit notable senses or behaviours of the
headword.  In Sabasasaj I've grouped words by the base they're derived from;
then the bases are sorted and the derivations are on indented lines
afterwards.  The find feature of your everyday text editor is quite enough
for lookups.  Would neither be the easiest nor the hardest possible format
to parse by program, but I don't do that often.

When I keep an HTML lexicon for presentation purposes they're often a bit
nicer, e.g. http://000024.org/conlang/AhH/lexicon.html .

Alex