Re: basic vocab

On Thu, 14 Sep 2000, Mario Bonassin wrote:

> Do any of you have a special list of words that you use to start
> creating  root words or basic vocab for your various conlangs, or do you
> use a text of something, or do you have another way of deciding what
> words to create, aside from just going through a dictionary?
Someone already wrote in with lots of URLs.  :-)

However, what I've been doing is creating poetry-source texts and then
"translating" them into Chevraqis just to generate morphemes (once you
have a morpheme you can derive various verbs, nouns, adj etc., though I
haven't figured out how compounding works).  This actually works out
pretty well since the poetry is based on the conculture, though someday
I'm going to have to sit down and figure out real basic things, like
greetings.

I remember trying the dictionary approach with my first quasi-conlang (in
middle school, basically an English/French clone), Eivaredd.  Didn't
work.  I'm sure it could for others, but with a dictionary I'd have to
sort through all the modern terminology that wouldn't appear in a society
with Renaissance-ish technology, Western culture terms, technical jargon,
etc.

YHL