[tlhIngan Hol] Klingon Word of the Day: rech

[James Landau]

The 12,000+ entries are a result of the "splitlang" nature of the LCV. There are 32 entries for "cousin", for instance. If you're creating a naturalistic conlang, you won't get 12,000 separate words out of this list. I once ran the list through WordSmith (corpus software) and discovered that if you created a conlang that covered every concept in the LCV (bot no other concepts) with the same degree of polysemy and synonymy as English, you'd have about 5,800 lemmata in your conlang.


A number of other claims to "core vocabulary" have lexica of comparable sizes. Jayme Adelson-Goldstein and Norma Shapiro's _Oxford Picture Dictionary_, for instance, advertises itself as covering the core vocabulary of English, and has about 4,000 entries. Some of the terms it includes, such as "TDD" and "bobbin", are not words that all adult native speakers of American English know. The Oxford 5000 list, another core vocabulary list (see https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/wordlists/oxford3000-5000 ), contains 5,000 words, although unlike OPD, it does not have low-frequency specialized nouns.


And as Will Martin says, the core vocabularies of individual languages differ. The LCV has some fruits like "durian" and "rambutan" that many English-speakers get along fine without, but those are part of the core vocabulary of many Southeast Asian languages. Although the LCV's bias in general is modern, there are also words like "driftwood", "adze", "sword", "dynasty", "warlord", and "mead" that will be of use to creators of Polynesian-style, Imperial-China-style, etc. conlangs. And I've consulted lists of the most common lemmata in English, Spanish, Japanese, and other natlangs with their most common meanings to make sure I have the high-frequency, can't-do-without-'em concepts covered. All in all, though, I've found the LCV useful for creating conlangs for the Lehola Galaxy --  just so long as I remember to add in lots of words for Lehola-specific animals, plants, sapient species, foods, clothing items, music genres, musical instruments, sports, religious concepts, technology, >4-dimension terms, calendar terms, place names, etc. to my conlangs! Those are the kinds of terms you CAN'T find on lists like the Landau Core Vocabulary!



>Message: 2>Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2023 00:52:26 -0400
>From: Alan Anderson <qunchuy at alcaco.net>
>To: tlhingan-hol at kli.org
>Subject: Re: [tlhIngan Hol] Klingon Word of the Day: rech
>Message-ID: <2CE4B041-DFB2-4981-A6A9-14D3393FCC9B at alcaco.net>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
>On Oct 21, 2023, at 8:09 PM, James Landau via tlhIngan-Hol <tlhingan-hol at lists.kli.org> wrote:
>> The LCV now stands at 12,419 entries + 1,000 names.
>> And that, my friends, is the story of the Landau Core Vocabulary.
>
>I?m unable to reconcile the myriad words with the ?core vocabulary? concept.
>
->- ghunchu'wI'  
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