How many words does your conlang have?

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Pabappa
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Re: How many words does your conlang have?

Post by Pabappa »

I pride myself on having a word for "arm extender tool" in my conlangs where even English doesnt seem to have one. Even "arm extender tool" isnt specific enough to what type of tool youre talking about. Most people seem to call it "the claw" or something.

I still struggle with color terms because I made a promise some time ago to use an infix, -us-, to derive color terms. That is, if /tan/ means "grape", /taŋūs/ means "purple". The problem is that I dont have words for a lot of the color terms I need. Cold climate cultures cant just use fruit terms for everything, obviously.
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Imralu
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Re: How many words does your conlang have?

Post by Imralu »

SoapBubbles wrote:I pride myself on having a word for "arm extender tool" in my conlangs where even English doesnt seem to have one. Even "arm extender tool" isnt specific enough to what type of tool youre talking about. Most people seem to call it "the claw" or something.

I still struggle with color terms because I made a promise some time ago to use an infix, -us-, to derive color terms. That is, if /tan/ means "grape", /taŋūs/ means "purple". The problem is that I dont have words for a lot of the color terms I need. Cold climate cultures cant just use fruit terms for everything, obviously.
Blood
Sunset/Fire
Fire/Butter
Leaf
Sea
Sky
Berry
Dirt
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Re: How many words does your conlang have?

Post by Jonlang »

Imralu wrote:
SoapBubbles wrote:I pride myself on having a word for "arm extender tool" in my conlangs where even English doesnt seem to have one. Even "arm extender tool" isnt specific enough to what type of tool youre talking about. Most people seem to call it "the claw" or something.

I still struggle with color terms because I made a promise some time ago to use an infix, -us-, to derive color terms. That is, if /tan/ means "grape", /taŋūs/ means "purple". The problem is that I dont have words for a lot of the color terms I need. Cold climate cultures cant just use fruit terms for everything, obviously.
Blood
Sunset/Fire
Fire/Butter
Leaf
Sea
Sky
Berry
Dirt
Cloud?
Rain?
Mud?
Flower?


Do different shades of colour have their own names? I.e. blood and rose (the nearest I could get to rose-red, but you get the idea); leaf and apple etc.
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gach
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Re: How many words does your conlang have?

Post by gach »

dyolf wrote:Do different shades of colour have their own names? I.e. blood and rose (the nearest I could get to rose-red, but you get the idea); leaf and apple etc.
I'd be surprised if that level of accuracy would have much standardisation unless you start to give names for synthetic pigments. In Iatmul, for example, all colour terms are transparently derived from other nouns but there are still only six standard colours in the language. What's also quite interesting is that the nouns behind the colour terms aren't always what you'd consider the most obvious choices. "White" (saunbagi’) comes from "heron" (saun) and "green" (wutnyavibagi’), despite the language being spoken in lush rain forest, from "bile" (wutnyavi).

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Re: How many words does your conlang have?

Post by Boşkoventi »

dyolf wrote:does anyone here go at it and say "right, I'm going to do the colours!" and then make words for as many colours as you're likely to need or can think of, and then say "next - plants!" and do the same?
Both. I tend to cover obvious categories like numbers and colors as sets, but otherwise add individual words as needed, or as I think of them.
Chuma wrote:"without wasted effort or resources"
"efficiently"
Chuma wrote:"new and inexperienced but in a good way".
There isn't exactly one word, but I'd say "new" and/or "fresh" cover this pretty well, in the right context. (Consider, for example, the expression "a fresh pair of eyes".)
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Re: How many words does your conlang have?

Post by Salmoneus »

Chuma wrote: The majority of my words are pretty basic ones, as you'd expect, but I also have a fair few where I thought "this would be fun to have a word for in English - oh well, I'll add one to my conlang instead". Such as "without wasted effort or resources", "be prepared to act as if", and "new and inexperienced but in a good way".
As Bosko says, the first is "efficient(ly)", and the third is usually "fresh". The idiom "bright young" is often used for this as well, though it's more marked. Marco Rubio, for instance, is probably being described as, among other things, "a fresh face", "fresh-faced", "a fresh voice", "too fresh", and also "a bright young senator", "a bright young candidate". As a noun, "new blood" often means this (particularly if the new blood is also fresh). "Promising" doesn't mean quite the same thing, but overlaps a lot.

And if we move away from people to things, "novel" is often used for essentially "untested but in a good way". Fresh-faced bright young new blood with novel ideas.

The second one, meanwhile, is "assume" in its older or stricter sense, although colloquially people often conflate this word with "presume". Where disambiguation is needed, you can use periphrastic constructions like "operate under the assumption that", "make the assumption that", "assume for the moment" and so on. However, "assume" by itself is often used in this way where context is condign. So for instance when there's a hostage crisis you can say "let's assume that they're watching the door", snd be understood to mean not "we're all internally confident in the truth of this even though we lack sufficient evidence to deduct this rigourously", but rather "we're going to be prepared to act as though..."
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