Re: Lexicon Making

On 4/24/06, Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:

> > When you make vocabulary, do you get a text and make what words you
> > need or make the words first and then translate?
> >
> I've enjoyed reading the various responses..... My own take(s):
>
> The Kash lexicon developed in isolation back in Spring 2000, when I was new
> to Conlang-L and had done no translations or relays. It was simply a matter
> of brainstorming and free-associating; as many
> verbs/adj/nouns/adv.expressions etc. as I could think up at any one time--
> usually in batches of around 50.
Would this typically be batches of words covering a specific semantic field?
I took this approach when working on some of my early naturalistic conlangs,
e.g. Thauliralau, and to some extent during the early gzb development:
develop a bunch of weather terms at once, and then
a bunch of words for family and sex, and so forth.  Treating a whole
semantic field at a time is another good way to avoid relexing other
languages -- you can think systematically about what, in this conculture,
are the most salient distinctions to be made, and what are the most basic terms
from which words for less fundamental concepts derive, and so forth.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry