Re: Thoughts on Word building

Taka Tunu wrote:
> One question underlying this thread is where to stop breaking down the
> vocabulary into "roots" or "stems" or "affixes" and reversely, where to stop
> multiplying them? Criteria may vary: realism, idealism, "conciseness", poetry,
> etc.
>
> That is personal taste, granted, but shouldn't conlangers be happy to find that
> some natlangs have already "rounded up" their own vocabulary, not into a
> 30,000-entry dictionary, but a merely 2,000-entry one?
>
> As a matter of taste, I find this "kit" invaluable because it's well-tested and
> still in use and I don't understand why this is not taken as much into
> consideration than the other useful ones like the "Basic English" lexicon or
> what else.
Who says it isn't? :-)

Next to the ULD and the Lojban gismu list, Japanese kanji compounds have
been another one of the places I turn to for inspiration for new words.
Tirelat borrowed the Japanese word for "peninsula" (半島 hantou, related
to the Chinese bàndǎo) as "tanigira" (literally "half-island"). More
recently, I started creating a set of word components called "luaki"
which are used to build Minza words (each of which corresponds with a
Japanese character). A few of these were initially derived from
back-formation from existing Minza words, like na (森) and ko (林) from
the existing word "nako" (forest, with the characters 森林 from Japanese
"sinrin" or Chinese "sēnlín"). I only have a tiny selection of the
Japanese characters in the luaki list so far, but I've already created
new words such as "kamu" (material) from these components.

kamu from 材料 "zairyou" (Chinese cáiliào)
ka from "paka" (wood), J. 木材 mokuzai or Chinese mùcái
mu from "kumu" (food, a Vuki Lialia word), J. 食料 syokuryou

This is also useful for translating names from Japanese, e.g.,

dažebišan "Ivysaur" from the Japanese フシギソウ husigisou (which I
interpreted as 不思議 + 草)

But it's also worth remembering that lots of Japanese words and
derivational affixes are written with kana. This includes recent
borrowings from English and other languages as well as older Japanese
words and the colorful onomatopoeic expressions that Japanese has. So
the 2000 or so Joyo Kanji are only a starting point.