Evolving Nat-langs for a conlang/world

[Mâq Lar]

You said you want "simple english magicked into the speakers;" it's your decision on how simple then. If you think the -ment suffix is not simple enough, don't include it. That would give you space to do something more interesting with how you express the concept.

But as Sal pointed out, if your cultures are nomadic, they'll need plenty of words to describe their way of life. They might not be horse herding nomads, but they'll need words for whatever they do. Have you decided what it will be? Tolkien famously wrote the Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion because languages need a culture and a people to be complete. You don't need to do the whole three million year history like he did, but you'll need to know the daily life of the people who speak your languages.

[Durakken]

But you haven't defined what a 'solid' list would be.

If a modern speaker of english went to this world they woudn't have a problem speaking with them due to a lack of vocabulary on either side, about their world, other than specific names for creatures, plants, etc, because they we don't have words for those things since they don't exist here... but at the same time, a pretty small list in comparison to the average speaker's vocabulary.

You said you want "simple english magicked into the speakers;" it's your decision on how simple then. If you think the -ment suffix is not simple enough, don't include it. That would give you space to do something more interesting with how you express the concept.

But as Sal pointed out, if your cultures are nomadic, they'll need plenty of words to describe their way of life. They might not be horse herding nomads, but they'll need words for whatever they do. Have you decided what it will be? Tolkien famously wrote the Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion because languages need a culture and a people to be complete. You don't need to do the whole three million year history like he did, but you'll need to know the daily life of the people who speak your languages.

I meant that they didn't evolve from some other form to this English or "learn it" initially. I said it like that to not cause confusion.
The world is a virtual world created in the near future. Part of that creation phase in the virtual world is the in world creation of that world where in the developers play the roles of the gods.
The people of the world are divided into 4 regions which each have a different environment and each region has a different language. The developer in the incarnation of the god "magicked" the languages into them, but the language was built around the idea of commands (like programming languages), testing out their AI, and being only enough to have a functional society and communicate with the devs when needed. After this testing phase is over, the developers simulate the progression of history on 2 levels, first over millions of year in terms of continental movement, and over thousands to to let the world develop.

So, a quick step back to the previous conversation, even if I'm wrong and a program to simulate sound change can't be done, the results would be likely closer to what I want since the actual language change that happens here is more or less done in that way.

[Salmoneus]

But you haven't defined what a 'solid' list would be.

If a modern speaker of english went to this world they woudn't have a problem speaking with them due to a lack of vocabulary on either side, about their world, other than specific names for creatures, plants, etc, because they we don't have words for those things since they don't exist here... but at the same time, a pretty small list in comparison to the average speaker's vocabulary.

Well, a 4-year-old has a vocabulary of about 5,000 words, and an 8-year-old has a vocabulary of about 10,000 words.
The average person regularly uses 5,000 words in speech, and 10,000 in writing. [These aren't necessarily the same 5 or 10 thousand they learn first. I do not use the words 'pirate', 'galleon' and 'velociraptor' on a daily basis, but I learnt them pretty early on...]

The average adult understands a vocabulary of between 20,000-35,000. A highly educated person may have a vocabulary of over 80,000. There are something like a million words in the language in total, but most are specialist terms that most people don't know. Apparently second-language learners need about 5-10 thousand.

So if people have 5,000 words of English, then they'll probably come across as small children or early language learners - most simple conversations will be possible, but it'll get frustrating if you want anything more complicated, and there will be some random gaps in there.

With only 1,400 words, it'll be an extremely frustrating attempt at conversation.

[KathTheDragon]

With only 1,400 words, it'll be an extremely frustrating attempt at conversation.

This is actually a very good point: try writing an English conversation with only the words in your list.

[Mâq Lar]

...After this testing phase is over, the developers simulate the progression of history on 2 levels, first over millions of year in terms of continental movement, and over thousands to to let the world develop.

So, a quick step back to the previous conversation, even if I'm wrong and a program to simulate sound change can't be done, the results would be likely closer to what I want since the actual language change that happens here is more or less done in that way.

At the risk of repeating myself, only if the in-world god-devs don't do their simulations realistically. The problem wasn't that a program couldn't be written, it was that the program you wanted to write wasn't a good one. Additionally, since you're not actually doing this god-Deb thing, just writing about it, it wouldn't be a very practical method either. Paper and pen and some chosen, well-thought out sound changes will give you results closer to what your god-devs' program would produce than a program you could write.


If you want a practical language list, find a list ranked in order of frequency, and remove any technical or otherwise unnecessary words from that.

Although this actually might not be necessary: how much of this language do you need to produce? Do you need to have the entire vocabulary listed out, or just a representative sample for use in a book or other consetting? Do you need to produce an extensive dictionary, or just the equivalent of a sketch grammar with some example sentences? If you just describe the general process with some examples, that will usually be sufficient for most conlang purposes.