Which conlangs have >=500 words and >=100 sentences?

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imperialismus
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Re: Which conlangs have >=500 words and >=100 sentences?

Post by imperialismus »

OTʜᴇB wrote:None. My biggest stats are 94 words and 0 sentences - though to be fair, this is my second conlang and the first to have properly created vocab, and I've only been working on vocab for 2 days. If I can keep working at the same rate (basically impossible), then I should have over 500 in about 10-11 days. Then I need to do more work on grammar and then get into the habit of doing the translation challenges on the forum and I'll be on 100 after a few weeks.
How is that even possible. Do you make a bunch of words before you ever make any grammar? Seems kind of backwards to me.

Anyway, the current grammar I'm working on already has 100 example sentences, and will probably will have twice as many once it's approaching a presentable state. As for number of words, I don't know as I don't really keep a dictionary yet. Less than 500 for sure. What does everyone use here for keeping a dictionary? I'm considering just doing a flat file and then writing a little script that will put it in alphabetical order. Also considering writing some more advanced software, but that would take time way from actual conlanging.
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Re: Which conlangs have >=500 words and >=100 sentences?

Post by mira »

imperialismus wrote:
OTʜᴇB wrote:None. My biggest stats are 94 words and 0 sentences - though to be fair, this is my second conlang and the first to have properly created vocab, and I've only been working on vocab for 2 days. If I can keep working at the same rate (basically impossible), then I should have over 500 in about 10-11 days. Then I need to do more work on grammar and then get into the habit of doing the translation challenges on the forum and I'll be on 100 after a few weeks.
How is that even possible. Do you make a bunch of words before you ever make any grammar? Seems kind of backwards to me.
Yes it is very backwards. Basically this is the second attempt at the same language. With the first, I made a fair amount of grammar, then went on to vocab. Whilst working on vocab, I restarted it as I found my phonology was too small and I had other ideas for grammar - but I was only on systems for making vocab, so I kept at that and now I'm making words, but don't have any grammar.
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Re: Which conlangs have >=500 words and >=100 sentences?

Post by Vlürch »

imperialismus wrote:Do you make a bunch of words before you ever make any grammar?
I pretty much always come up with at least a handful of words first, then some grammar stuff before more words so I can at least have a couple of sentences to decide if it's good enough to keep working on.

Anyway, none of my conlangs have ever had more than a hundred words, let alone sentences...
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Re: Which conlangs have >=500 words and >=100 sentences?

Post by eldin raigmore »

Iyionaku wrote: What do you consider to be a "sentence"? Because I just read all the replies on that post and I'm a little curious why so many conlangers seem to have >1000 words but almost no sentences. Is there some "definition" when something said in that conlang is a "sentence", matching in this context?
Seems to me this might be a good question.
I don't have an exact answer, and nobody else seems to have tried to answer -- or, at least apparently no-one posted such an attempt.
My first guess or first approximation would be what's in http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/Gloss ... ntence.htm.
SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms wrote:A sentence is a grammatical unit that is composed of one or more clauses.
(I'm assuming readers can find out what "clause" means.)

I would probably go on to the internal links SIL puts on that page.
them wrote:What is a complex sentence?
What is a compound sentence?
What is a matrix sentence?
What is a simple sentence?
What is a construction?
And I would look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_(linguistics), and particularly at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_ ... sification, though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_ ... associates might also be a particularly useful part of that article.

I'd also mention that, whatever "sentence" means, any translation into your conlang of any of the 218 English sentences at https://cofl.github.io/mirror/cstc.html, is a sentence in your conlang.
So you could get to 100 sentences by translating some 100-member subset of those.

[hr][/hr]
Lambuzhao wrote: :wat: I didn't notice if this question was asked already , but in your word count metric, are you including all attested conjugated/declined forms of words (that do that sort of thing), or just the bare dictionary forms?
I'd say, count it each way, and any time your conlang reaches 500 in any version of "word-counting-metric", let us know.

The strictest would be; Only count root morphemes of inflectable lexical-content words in large open word-classes -- "substantives" and verbs, for instance. Or, noun-roots if you have nouns (who doesn't), verb-roots if you have rootsverbs (who doesn't) (but there might not be much difference between noun-roots and verb-roots), adjective-roots if you have adjectives, and adverb-roots if you have adverbs. Maybe you do, and maybe you don't, want to also count adposition-roots (if you even have any adpositions, and your adpositions even have any morphology).
I think one might consider pronouns, conjunctions, articles or determiners, and interjections, (and, depending on the language, maybe also adpositions), to be function-words rather than lexical-content words. Some might not consider pronouns to be function-words rather than lexical-content words, in at least some languages. Interjections are an open word-class, and possibly a large one, but they are still not lexical-content words.
You might include all of the function-words too -- or not. And/or, you might restrict yourself to the open word-classes -- or not. For instance, in most languages with adpositons, adpositions are a closed class, and in most languages with pronouns, pronouns are a closed class. And in some languages with adverbs, adverbs are a small closed class.
Maybe you could count them separately.
First the root morphemes of inflectable lexical-content words in large open word-classes;
then relax each of those restrictions on the word-class {i.e. inflectable vs particle, lexical-content vs grammatical-function, large vs small, open vs closed}, one at a time, then two at a time, then ... etc.;
then go ahead and count major derivations of the roots as different words -- for instance, counting verbal nouns and verbal adjectives separately from the verbs from which they are derived.

I guess that's all a non-answer.
You might look up the definitions of "word" in the SIL Glossary and/or Wikipedia and/or Trask, and maybe those would help.

[hr][/hr]

Actually, I think I personally would be more interested in how many and which morphemes have been completely defined, and whether a complete set of rules for combining morphemes into words has been thought out and written out. If the language has non-concatenative morphology, or has suprasegmental morphemes such as tonemes, chronemes, or stressemes, I would want to know about them, too.
Last edited by eldin raigmore on 14 Mar 2017 02:38, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Which conlangs have >=500 words and >=100 sentences?

Post by Lambuzhao »

Hmmm...

:lat:
Gaudeamus!
Let's rejoice!

Is a sentence all by itself.
And it's one word.

I bet there a gajillion {possible} one-word sentences in folks' conlangs, especially with the highly-inflected & agglutinative camps.

So.... do/would they count twice ?
:wat:
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Re: Which conlangs have >=500 words and >=100 sentences?

Post by eldin raigmore »

Lambuzhao wrote:Hmmm...

:lat:
Gaudeamus!
Let's rejoice!

Is a sentence all by itself.
And it's one word.

I bet there a gajillion {possible} one-word sentences in folks' conlangs, especially with the highly-inflected & agglutinative camps.

So.... do/would they count twice ?
:wat:
They would not count twice in one category, but they would count once in both categories.
And in a (I forget the correct intensifier, but it's intense) polysynthetic language, frequently an entire one-clause sentence* is just the verb; especially if all, or all-but-one, of the participants, are pronominal instead of nominal.
This is one reason I wonder whether I should have asked about >=500 morphemes instead of, or as well as, >=500 words.
(But then questions about nonconcatenative morphology, transfixes, suprasegmental "morphemes", etc., would also have to be settled.)

*(I'm given to understand that such polysynthetic languages usually don't have subordinate-clause constructions.)
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Re: Which conlangs have >=500 words and >=100 sentences?

Post by Threr »

Deyryck (my most advanced conlang) has at least around 15000 words (much more if you count the words that can be created thanks to affixes and even more if you count every thing as words (such as keys) ) and way more than a hundred sentences. I couldn't possibly tell how many though. I didn't count them nor did I store them in a way that would allow me to count them.
I don't think any of my other conlangs does correspond these criteria. :D
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Re: Which conlangs have >=500 words and >=100 sentences?

Post by Iyionaku »

Threr wrote:Deyryck (my most advanced conlang) has at least around 15000 words (much more if you count the words that can be created thanks to affixes and even more if you count every thing as words (such as keys) ) and way more than a hundred sentences. I couldn't possibly tell how many though. I didn't count them nor did I store them in a way that would allow me to count them.
I don't think any of my other conlangs does correspond these criteria. :D
15000? Without counting word derivation!?? Well I don't think it's impossible, but I doubt even English or Kankonian has that many roots. You meant 1500, right? What would still be impressive for roots.
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Re: Which conlangs have >=500 words and >=100 sentences?

Post by Threr »

Huuuh... Unless I'm misreading, English has more than ten times this number of words... I juste checked. I'm not very well organized. But if I take away every word that's from my conworld, and try to under evaluate the number (for possible problem of organization) I'd say I might get down to 12000 words (in fact I'll stick to this number, I'd rather say less than more). But still, that doesn't seem that much to me... There's so much words I don't have yet. :/

I means there's already about 500 words for plants, instruments, animals (and I'm still missing a lot of them), 118 (or 218 in my conworld) words for the different atoms (and I didn't took in consideration the fact that they are three names for each of them in this language.). Only that put you to more than a third of the number you gave (1500). You're scaring me right now... xD Getting confused with numbers is totally me, but I can't see how here...
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Re: Which conlangs have >=500 words and >=100 sentences?

Post by Dormouse559 »

Iyonaku is comparing your number to conlangs, not natlangs. It's impressive for a conlang to have 1,000 words, let alone 15,000.
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Re: Which conlangs have >=500 words and >=100 sentences?

Post by Threr »

Dormouse559 wrote:Iyonaku is comparing your number to conlangs, not natlangs. It's impressive for a conlang to have 1,000 words, let alone 15,000.
Ow... Didn't he say "English" though?
Well anyway, I've been working on this language since high school, so it's like nine years old now. I've had time to create words.^^
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Re: Which conlangs have >=500 words and >=100 sentences?

Post by Dormouse559 »

Threr wrote:Ow... Didn't he say "English" though?
Yeah, he did. [¬.¬] I didn't read his post thoroughly enough.

Threr wrote:Well anyway, I've been working on this language since high school, so it's like nine years old now. I've had time to create words.^^
Well, you know what they say: The early bird gets 15,000 words. Or something like that. Congrats! [:)]
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Re: Which conlangs have >=500 words and >=100 sentences?

Post by Threr »

Dormouse559 wrote:Well, you know what they say: The early bird gets 15,000 words. Or something like that. Congrats! [:)]
Ha ha ha! I guess I didn't. ^^
Thank you very much! :)
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Re: Which conlangs have >=500 words and >=100 sentences?

Post by Iyionaku »

Threr wrote:Huuuh... Unless I'm misreading, English has more than ten times this number of words...
I talked about roots, not words. But I think I underestimated the count of roots, and overestimated how many words can be formed with affixes. It appears that English has not less than 100,000 roots (the OED states around 170,000).

Assuming that you have been working for nine years at this language, I must admit that 12,000-15,000 words does not seem unplausible at all. I apologize for querying your statement!
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Re: Which conlangs have >=500 words and >=100 sentences?

Post by Threr »

Iyionaku wrote:I [...] overestimated how many words can be formed with affixes.
Well I don't really know what I can consider a word out of these constructions.

Let's take an example :

Lakam (love) :

You can have lot's of words such as :

ôlakam : only love

lakasni : with love, using love, through love, via love, out of love, by loving, etc...

lakasfoam : a particuliar love

lakasfaam : love in general

Sfoam and sfaam are both part of the "sµi" derivation :
Spoiler:
sµaa : able to
sµèa : doing
sµoa : way of, using
sµéa : done
sµûa : forcing, imposing

sfaa : generality
sfèa : product, son, result
sfoa : element, part, segment
sféa : origin, constructor, creator
sfûa : idea

scaa : will (want)
scèa : obligation (personal)
scoa : obligation (external)
scéa : obligation (absolute)
scûa : know how to do

spaa : instrument
spèa : achieved, finished, ended
spoa : constant
spéa : unfinished, still on going
spûa : job, occupation

skaa : need
skèa : knowledge
skoa : science
skéa : need (to live)
skûa : technique
skua : possibility
The last "a" can be changed to : "am" (object), "i" (description, including comparisons : it, ot, a-it, a-ot), "is" (person)[/spoiler]

Counting them all would imply a potential in terms of number that'd be beyond huge... But it seems obvious that many of them, although perfectly usable, will almost never be used. That seems weird to me to count them.
Plus they can be apply to anything. And so are most of the word in my conlang. They're like legos.

Example :

"X dès Y" means "X comes from Y".
"X ni" means "at the moment of X".

You can easily fuse them this way :
"X dèsni Y" or "X dis Y" which will mean "X comes from the moment Y".

They're are (literally) countless possible potential combinations.

And also, like forming the "core" in my conlang (subject + action) results in a word.

So : "ro" (he) and "laka" will become : "rolaka" (he loves). If that counts as a word, there's an infinity of words in my conlang. xD

There are sooooo many other cases that should be treated one by one.
I'm an IT student, and I don't believe I would be able to create a program that could simply tell if a word does or doesn't belong to my conlang as almost everything potentially means something...

Do you consider "candy" and "candies" two different words? ^^
Iyionaku wrote:I apologize for querying your statement!

No problem at all! I was just surprised. ^^
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Re: Which conlangs have >=500 words and >=100 sentences?

Post by MrKrov »

I still don't understand why you would count inflectional wordforms as lexical items.
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Re: Which conlangs have >=500 words and >=100 sentences?

Post by Iyionaku »

I count every derivation as world as soon as the exact meaning is not predictable by the inflected form i.e. I would count “take“, not “takes“ or “taking“, but “overtake“ and “takeover“ indeed. Also, I would count “hiking“ as an independent noun and hence as a lexeme, not as a gerund under the entry of “to hike“.
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