List of most common verbal roots for making a conlang

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mahagugu
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List of most common verbal roots for making a conlang

Post by mahagugu »

I look for a list of possible or real used verbal roots for making a conlang.
I already found a list of verbal roots for Sanskrit and other resources like the Basic English word list
and the most frequent morphems in Esperanto from which verbal roots could be extracted,
but I know here are experienced people who already have done that and why not share experience
or work.

I also have simplified word list around, but they are not optimized for verbal roots only.
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k1234567890y
mayan
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Re: List of most common verbal roots for making a conlang

Post by k1234567890y »

you can look for the Swadesh list and the Leipzig-Jakarta list for some most common verbs.

I have also made several lists of basic vocabularies for conlangs, you can see it and download it at here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByhOk3 ... VyeEk/view

Also, I have made a list of content words which is a combination of the Swadesh list and the Leipzig-Jakarta list, it contains 199 words and can be a starting list for conlangs: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByhOk3 ... Izb0U/view
I prefer to not be referred to with masculine pronouns and nouns such as “he/him/his”.
mahagugu
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Re: List of most common verbal roots for making a conlang

Post by mahagugu »

Thank you for providing the lists. The second one is much closer to what I intended or wanted to get.

However I wanted a basic noun free list, but since your 2nd list is small that should not be a problem.
It will currently take more then a week to present what I came up with.

It is just an idea of mine that "nouns" are the actual problem in conlanging , because they are too specific
and too abundant and for some reason it is prefered to use well-defined nouns instead of describing or
explaining things, where explaining or describing things should be more focussed on.

Because I feel short of arguments I do not want to say " it is like that" ... it is more like
"i got the feeling starting with verbs and derived words would make conlanging much easier, because
all the years i used classical word list like the basic english list and so on and it did not feel that easy ..."
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k1234567890y
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Re: List of most common verbal roots for making a conlang

Post by k1234567890y »

mahagugu wrote:Thank you for providing the lists. The second one is much closer to what I intended or wanted to get.

However I wanted a basic noun free list, but since your 2nd list is small that should not be a problem.
It will currently take more then a week to present what I came up with.

It is just an idea of mine that "nouns" are the actual problem in conlanging , because they are too specific
and too abundant and for some reason it is prefered to use well-defined nouns instead of describing or
explaining things, where explaining or describing things should be more focussed on.

Because I feel short of arguments I do not want to say " it is like that" ... it is more like
"i got the feeling starting with verbs and derived words would make conlanging much easier, because
all the years i used classical word list like the basic english list and so on and it did not feel that easy ..."
well, you don't need that much nouns.

First, most people, including non-human aliens, are made of materials, they need to eat, drink, sleep, find somewhere to live, take care of hygienic conditions, fight against diseases, interact with others and the outside world, give birth of their offsprings and probably also take care of them. do works to get means that can keep them alive, create tools and food to live and do works, learn new skills to solve everyday problems, solve conflicts(either peacefully or violently), etc. There are a bunch of nouns and verbs that are connected to these needs, they need words to describe social relationships(especially relationships between family members and pronouns), the natural world, the basic tools and artifects(means to survive(food, drinks, etc.). to dwell(houses, buildings, etc.), to do jobs(tools, etc.), to travel(vehicles, etc.), etc.), and these nouns can be basic nouns of a language.

Also, consider who speak your language, medieval people don't have "electricity", "engine", "computer", etc.

You can also look at cultural universals to have an idea what most if not all human society have, although the terms can be very controversial.

Lists of the cultural universals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal http://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm (the "magic" should be changed into "beliefs in magic", and the "spear" I think is actually "any tool or weapon used to pierce objects and people")

Second, you can look at the word lists of Nerriere's Globish and Ogden's Basic English and its extension(as listed in https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip ... d_wordlist but this list is intended for modern and academic usage, you may need to take of academic terms like the element names), and the Swadesh list and the Leipzig-Jakarta list(the Swadesh and the Leipzig-Jakarta lists are better for real basic nouns, but there are not many items, as you have pointed out), my lists are largely made up of them, nouns in the lists might be able to provide a good idea of basic nouns.

You might also think to look at the frequency list of English: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktiona ... ency_lists , the more frequent a word is, the more likey it is a basic word for any given language

You can give the the most similar English equivalent of a noun as its definition first, then write explanations
I prefer to not be referred to with masculine pronouns and nouns such as “he/him/his”.
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