I posted awhile back about word lists you can use to guide you on creating a vocabulary for your conlang. I was recently looking at this again and I decided to look closer at the Universal Language Dictionary (click here for a good description of what this is). I found some great new stuff!
I downloaded the XML file from Rick Harrison's Universal Language Dictionary website and found that they added "levels" to the words! Now, in each category of words, a level is assigned to the words, from 0 to 3, in order of complexity. There are about 30 0 level words, and about 170 1 level words, so the first two levels is only about 200 words.
You could use this as a guide - creating all the level 0 words first, then the level 1 words, and so on. You might disagree with the level assignments, or you might be working on a conlang that emphasizes certain concepts or objects (for example, that old factoid about how eskimos have nine different words for snow) - so you can reassign those word levels.
Click here to access the Google Doc. You can download and modify this spreadsheet for your own purposes, but if you use this on the web, please give credit to Rick Harrison. He and his team have spent many, many hours on this project.
If you look, you can see that the first tab is the original spreadsheet as I downloaded it from the ULD website.
The second tab is all the categories with the words sorted by level.
The third tab is all the 0 level words, by category, and then all the 1 level words by category.
The fourth tab is just a pivot table showing how many words are at each level.
Enjoy!
I downloaded the XML file from Rick Harrison's Universal Language Dictionary website and found that they added "levels" to the words! Now, in each category of words, a level is assigned to the words, from 0 to 3, in order of complexity. There are about 30 0 level words, and about 170 1 level words, so the first two levels is only about 200 words.
You could use this as a guide - creating all the level 0 words first, then the level 1 words, and so on. You might disagree with the level assignments, or you might be working on a conlang that emphasizes certain concepts or objects (for example, that old factoid about how eskimos have nine different words for snow) - so you can reassign those word levels.
Click here to access the Google Doc. You can download and modify this spreadsheet for your own purposes, but if you use this on the web, please give credit to Rick Harrison. He and his team have spent many, many hours on this project.
If you look, you can see that the first tab is the original spreadsheet as I downloaded it from the ULD website.
The second tab is all the categories with the words sorted by level.
The third tab is all the 0 level words, by category, and then all the 1 level words by category.
The fourth tab is just a pivot table showing how many words are at each level.
Enjoy!
Comments
But now I'm stuck. Can you tell me (both in your blog and in mine) what can I do next?
We, the conlangers, are not always understood. There are many people on Lingvoforum who tell conlangers to shut up because it's waste of time. It's good to know that you are supported.
Here (http://zbb.spinnwebe.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=37442) you can download regularly updated dictionaries.