Re: Size of your dictionary

On Fri, Apr 03, 2009 at 11:05:42AM -0400, Daniel Bowman wrote:

> 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 main conlang, mërèchi, has 1232 entries in the current dictionary, but
some of these are just names (not words), and many are affixes; still others
are derived words.  I'm beginning to include data relationships that will
allow me to generate a dictionary where derived words are listed under their
headwords.  Mërèchi's half-sister, Mirexu, appears to have 78 morphemes
recorded in a beta dictionary-management database I was working on, but
I don't believe that reflects everything I created for the two relays I
used it in; also, it can draw upon the entire mërèchi vocabulary for new
morphemes using a simple set of sound changes.

My secondary conlang, Toma Heylm, has 497 entries.  The third conlang,
Mli Vjacgu, has a token and possibly non-canon wordlist of 232 words
(more than half of them from the gigantic table of correlatives, visible
at http://eaworld.conlang.org/vjatjackwa/index.html, under "Demonstrative
pronouns").  All the rest (and arguable Mli Vjacgu as well) are sketches.

This is what I have after doing this for 24 years!  (With up to a decade
of inactivity, primarily in the 90's.)  I have never been very diligent
about building vocabulary.

> 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!
I skipped spreadsheets entirely (I know many use them).  Initially I used
paper, then a WordStar file (not even WordPerfect yet! :)  After that I
restarted the effort in Unix text files, began managing them with home-grown
solutions in Perl, and now three of the languages are (sort of) in XML (it's
not exactly compliant XML), and one is in a flat-file relational database
(only because my provider at the time did not offer MySQL; I plan to change
this to a real MySQL database now that I have the conlang.org account.)

tylakèhlpë'fö,
Amanda

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