Re: Lexicon counting (was: Weekly Vocab #1.1.1...)

Hi,

From: "Feaelin Moilar" <feaelin@...>
Sent: Monday, September 04, 2006 4:07 AM

>> This has boosted the lexicon to 267 entries.
>
> I've occasionally wondered and only now been motivated to ask, when one
> counts the entries, what do you count? I'm presuming only one form of the
> word (in the situation of conjugation, declensions, and the like) and
> myself I would exclude an whole group of entries in my data that are
> "famous names".
I'm counting my entries like this: I have a database that is
Ayeri -> English at first hand (it's reversible, but then
you haven't got the pronunciation and whatnot for the
English words), so the main entry always an Ayeri word. The
problem is that my database does not accept sub-entries, so
every sub-entry is counted as a new word, e.g.:

  tapiao - to put; to set
  tapiao dayrin - to save ("to put aside")
  tapiao mindoyam - to suggest ("to put forth")
  tapiao taran - to switch off ("to set dead")
  tapiao teno - to switch on ("to set alive")

Where my German-English dictionary would list all those
entries just under "to put", my database makes a new record
out of all of these (unfortunately). As for names, I keep
them in an extra list, so they are not counted. Common
expressions usually have their own entries as well. There
are not many expressions listed in the dictionary, though,
just a handful. Futhermore, since Ayeri is an agglutinative
language, it has lots of suffixes -- these are also counted
as words, even the ones that only have a syntactical
meaning. If you removed those from the list, you'd still
have something around 1300 words, maybe a little more or
less than that.

Carsten

--
"Miranayam kepauarà naranoaris." (Kalvin nay Hobbes)
Siruena, Ravikan 17, 2315 ya 29:39:24 pd