Re: basic morphemes of a loglang

On Mon, 24 Nov 2003 20:33:56 -0500, Robert Jung <RobertMJung@...>
wrote:

>Hi folks,
>
>I'm stuck.
>
>I'm making a logical language (not online yet), and I would like to know how
>many basic morphemes you need for a conlang that's actually useable. What are
>those words? Any suggestions or (preferably online) resources?
Rick Harrison's ULD (Universal Language Dictionary), with a total of 1600
definitions of words, is a good start. There is some duplication in words
like 0BF "alive" and 0E9 "live, be alive" (which in a logical language
would probably share the same root), some cases of fine distinctions that
could potentially be combined into a more general concept (4AD "dust", 51E
"powder"), and some that could be split into finer divisions (2A3 "angel,
fairy"). Many grammatical words like conjunctions and personal pronouns are
not included in the list. Probably a few hundred more words would be needed
to fill gaps in the basic vocabulary. So it seems that 2,000 words would be
a good number of words for a basic vocabulary, and 3,000 would be adequate
for anything that doesn't get too technical or specialized.

Some of these might be able to be expressed with compounds. But eventually
you get to the point where the compounds are so arbitrary that they might
as well be separate roots. Jeffrey Henning's Dublex had 400 roots, from
which thousands of words can be derived, but many of these compounds would
be too arbitrary for a logical language. My guess is that a minimum of
around 1,000 roots would be necessary to build a vocabulary.

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