Make A Lang

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 reassig...

Here's another conundrum I spent many hours figuring out. How can I generate a vocabulary, or lexicon , without it taking YEARS? There are a few different schools of thought on this. Some people feel that each word needs to sound like what it is, within the confines of their phonology. Meaning, you think about and create each word. This is very abstract, but you just might come out of it actually being able to remember a lot of your words, maybe even be able to speak your conlang (Remember, VERY few conlangers are fluent in their language, and the ones that claim to be are suspect, because who can really judge them?). Plus, you're guaranteed to get a conlang that sounds the way you want it to. The opposite extreme is to randomly generate your vocabulary, after keying in your phonology to a word generator program . The advantage is you get a big vocabulary quickly, the down side is that you won't know any of the words off the top of your head until after some st...