Re: Toki Pona survey

kevinurbanczyk@juno.com wrote:
> Yeah, with Proto-Drem, I have (C)CV(V)(V)C(C) for a base CVC which
> is closed
>
> yet I have 3500 words,and I amd now doing "new" sections for
> religion, spirituality, magic, herbs, mining, trees,
>
> as you can see, words add up, so my uestion would be for a conlang,
> how is a closed sylable structure limiting the vocabulary?
>
It _is_ limiting the vocabulary, but possibly not much.  The given
structure could allow anything from 10,000~10,000,000 different words,
depending on other aspects of your morphology.  One problem is that,
once this "space" of possible words starts to get full, every word will
confusable with several others, unless multi-word constructs are used.
A limited vocabulary probably is only bad with a much smaller vocabulary
than that, e.g. 100~10,000 words.  An excellent example (other than the
obvious Basic English) is the efforts of Dalgarno and Wilkins.  I have
found a reasonably helpful summary of a thesis on this subject at:
<http://www.illc.uva.nl/Publications/Dissertations/DS-1999-03.abstract.txt>

Wilkins tried to start with a set of exactly 4,000 radicals, based on a
20*5*20*5 Aristotelian categorisation system.  This worked by having 20
consonants and 5 vowels in the system and making every radical CVCV.

(I actually heard about this originally in the wonderful book _Words and
Rules: The Ingredients of Language_ by Steven Pinker. See:
<http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/wr.html> for all you want to know.)

--
Simon Richard Clarkstone
s.r.cl*rkst*n*@durham.ac.uk / s*m*n_cl*rkst*n*@hotmail.com