Re: Lexicon Making

Veritosproject 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.  These were assigned more or less at random
to a list of ca. 5000 forms generated by the old Langmaker program. Later
relays and the old translation exercises  did a lot to fill in gaps, along
with occasional forms that came to me while driving around (e.g. Hmm, what
_is_ the word for "fuel"? :-)), and more organized thought about specific
areas of Kash culture, e.g. the class system, telepathy, recipes, etc.

Gwr has been another matter; at the beginning I devised about 100 words,
with only vague ideas of what the developments from *CVCVC > CVC+tone would
be; this worked for a while, until I (a) generated the complete list of
possible proto-forms (40,000+), then over the last few months wrote up in
detail the sound changes (lots of them, since almost every combination was
different...aargh-- actually there's more systematicity than I first
thought, but haven't gotten around to that yet), then began creating (in
some cases re-creating*) the lexicon based on my old Indonesian wordlist
(online if anyone wants it); but after 600 words or so I'm feeling quite
burnt out, and haven't gone near it for several weeks.
-----------------------
* For ex., "fawh" 'run' turns out to be an impossible form, but I like it,
so it's become a "dialect borrowing".  :-)) For some words in the most
recent relay I neglected to note the proto-form, and it is proving difficult
to back-track.

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