Re: Most developed conlang

On 18.4.2007 Ben Haanstra wrote:
 > What if a language is complete with under 2000 words?

Indeed. I don't think vocabulary size is neither objectively
measurable, unless it means "number of items in online
vocabulary list", nor a valid indicator of conlang
'completeness', except that if the vocabulary is *very*
small you are unlikely to be able to communicate in a lang,
although Toki Pona comes to mind! :)

Mærik <http://wiki.frath.net/Maerik> has a reasonably
complete grammar, and web presence, but only between 1200
and 1300 items in its vocab list, which is unlikely to
suddenly bump in size by 800 items, though it would be
fairly easy to add a lot of regular derivatives (adjectives,
agentives etc.) to achieve that questionable goal. It may be
more informative to say that it has around 400 verbs, and a
productive (though I must admit poorly documented)
morphology for deriving words from other words, including
nouns and adjectives from verbs, verbs and adjectives from
nouns and adverbs from nouns, adjectives and verbs. Not all
words in the 1300 word vocabulary list come in such
quadruplets, but they could easily be created, and if one
counts participles as adjectives derived from verbs you can
in principle derive four different adjectives from most
verbs! I can't easily calculate how many nouns and
adjectives there are which are not related to one of the ca.
400 verbs, but there quite a few, many of which could have
verbs derived from them, so one clearly could create several
hundred 'new' words by derivation from the existing ones,
even without counting things like frequentatives and
causatives, which I considered making regular parts of the
verb paradigm when I last worked on the language.

You can converse in Mærik, which I *know* since I can write
in it. Due to its fictional settings it's however
'deficient' in basic words for modern concepts, although you
can of course discuss anything using circumlocutions,
compounds, transfers etc., as i have actually done in
writing. In relays it is of course OK to doctor content to
fit the conculture of ones lang, and I have done so when
using Mærik, which was primarily created as a "relay
language". The only reason I'm not participating in the
reverse relay is that I had to drop out of the last ordinary
relay due to time pressure, and I don't expect me to have
the ample time needed this time around.

/BP