Re: Thoughts on Word building

Why not consider that any root word is a potential, valid "derivational affix"?
See Chinese,Japanese, Khmer lexicons. Indonesian uses both a very small set of
affixes and loads of compounds. The so-called "power" of affixes is their
fuzziness. For instance "invention" is either an process or a result. Affixing
and compounding are different in the sense that affixing requires making a whole
kind of lame second lexicon. With compounds, "Esthetics" may be more evocative
"beauty feeling", "beauty yearning", "beauty concept", etc.

Other posts give lists of material. I have a list of 1450 Tunu concepts that I
made by criss-crossing the kanjis and the words I encountered most often when
translating languages. The good thing (and the real conlanging pleasure) with
the 1860 or so jouyou kanjis is that they have been used for centuries so you
are pretty sure that with compounding the few of them you can translate most
imaginable words (although you'd rather use the concepts they express rather
than the kanjis themselves) without needing a single affix. Modern SinoJapanese
vocabulary was built with them by a handful of "academicians" at the turn of the
19th century to match the Western vocabulary. And it's so precise and handy!
With kanjis, no need correct "pafiluto" into "kanono", but rather a ready-to-use
"gun" with any twin you want to associate with.

From time to time I try to downsize that list, but always come to realize that
less is less efficient.

µ.

Gary wrote:

>>>>
So anyway, the point of all this rambling is; it seem
like a very good starting point for a conlang
(assuming it is structed to be able to use prefixes
and suffixes) is to collect a comprehensive set of
conlang affixes and compounding rules. After that, one
single primative root can yeild dozens, or maybe
hundreds of additional words by affixing and
compounding.
But is there in existence on the web such a list of
affix functions?
--gary
>>>>

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