Re: Presenting a language?

Herman Miller wrote:
>
> On Sun, 11 Jun 2000 00:50:55 -0500, Patrick Dunn <tb0pwd1@...>
> wrote:
>
> >I'm surprised he thought it was even possible.  :)  I remember being told
> >as a child that no one could ever invent an entire language.  Of course,
> >having had a problem with authority my whole life, I immediately tried!
> >And failed, but that didn't stop me.
>
> I wonder why anyone would say that? Many people learn second languages,
> which takes incredible amounts of time and patience. Once you've become
> familiar with the building blocks of language by studying others, creating
> a new language to any given level of completeness ought to be easier than
> learning an existing one to that same level. At a rate of eight words a day
> (which is easy enough if you don't have to memorize them) you can build up
> a vocabulary of 30,000 words in a little over 10 years.
>
Eight words a day is very low indeed, but I'd imagine that the rate of
word creation would begin high, but drop off as you expanded the
vocabulary, because all the most common words would already be covered.

> Having said that, I have to admit that I haven't had enough interest in a
> single one of my languages for a long enough period of time to come
> anywhere near a complete vocabulary. But I have the same problem with
> learning natural languages.
>
My goal isn't to create a complete vocabulary, its to create a small
vocabulary for simple phrases. I'll continue to expand the language,
however, unless I start a new project that interests me more.

--
Robert