Re: Overly Ambitious Conlang Project (Was Re: Lurkers)

I think your use of leverage will propel you to success. For my 14000 terms
so far, I started with the the Vital English list. It is a list of about
2000 most commonly used terms.
I began by entering manually as many senses of the word as I could imagine
into a database. I was lucky if I could do five words in an hour. Too slow.
But I got in about 2000 terms that way.
Then I wrote a program that fed this through the wordnet database, and
collected every noun, verb, and adverb sense of each word. Each word was put
into a "morpheme candidates" table, to which I added a bunch of check box
fields to represent derivations I wanted to perform, or exclusions from the
final lexicon. It took a few months to go through this list and click all
the boxes I wanted, but hey, I could cover on average about 60 morphemes per
minute.
Finally I wrote the program to hash through the candidates, create words for
them, and create derivations. Now I have just what I wanted. A huge list of
terms that have very specific senses of the most common concepts.
Now I have been able to concentrate on the really fun part, the grammar.

John, what is your fantasy world for? A book? An RPG? Lucid dreaming ;-)


-----Original Message-----
From: John Mietus [mailto:sirchuck@MACOMB.COM]
Sent: Friday, April 28, 2000 5:38 AM
To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
Subject: Overly Ambitious Conlang Project (Was Re: Lurkers)


Howdles,

daniel andreasson spake, saying:

> Re: LurkersJohn Mietus wrote:
>
>> I joined this list about two weeks ago and have been overwhelmed
>> by the volume of input. Mostly I've been lurking simply to get
>> caught up on terminology -- I consider myself a *very* rank amateur
>> at this point and feel I have very little to contribute at this time.
>
> Well, since no one has yet done it (and it's been like 7 hours since this
> mail reached me, come on you guys! ;), let me say: Welcome to the list!
> You seem to enjoy it already, and I know you always will.
Thanks to both you and David Gressett. I'm likin' what I'm seein'.

>> I will, however, be posting about my model language project in the next
>> month or so.
>
> I'm looking forward to see it and I know everyone else here is too.
A quick overview: I wanted to develop a family of naming languages for a
fantasy world I'm creating (who here hasn't?) and got in over my head. I
started by taking the names I'd already worked up (some 2000+), grouped them
by language and language familys, broke them down to components and
retro-arbitrarily determined sound changes so that I could come up with the
equiv. of the proto-Indo-European root words. Then, using American
Heritage's appendix (scanned in, OCR'd, and then cleaned up), I've got a
rough breakdown of the roots that helped shape English (the only language,
I'm ashamed to say, I'm fluent in). With the basic roots and the majority of
their derivations (to give me an idea of how words and concepts have
developed), I've matched sounds I like from my root language to the
proto-Indo-European roots (e.g. *beri = head, *ren = to be). I've got some
3000+ roots for my proto-language (Palkaged, palka = divine, ged = to speak,
the language of the gods) as a result.

What I've then done is used the vocabulary list from the Universal Language
Dictionary from Jeffrey Henning's site to form the basis of a Bronze Age
vocabulary list, creating concepts that need to be expressed in words unique
to the world I'm creating (e.g. demon fused into an object). This, then,
gives me a basic vocabulary foundation, from which I will derive words for
some 5 diff. human cultural groups, 2 satyr cultures, 1 centaur, 1 troll,
and 1 rikeet (nomadic raccon-cat humanoids), with the idea that the
proto-roots are derived from the language of the gods.

Once I have that and name places and peoples, I'm going to start
re-developing the history of my world (certain flash-points I know need to
happen), and allow the languages to grow and shape from the history - from
early Bronze Age to the equivalent of the world's Restoration period. I will
be focusing primarily on three or four specific human, one satyr, and one
rikeet tongue, as those will be the languages used by characters in a story
I'm working on (which prompted this whole thing), but in the end I should
have the rough sketches of some 30-40 languages.

Assuming I have the next 500+ years to pull this off.

Tender Quails,

John