Robin Lee Powell wrote:
I am feeling hopeful just now that we'll actually get around to publishing a dictionary in my lifetime :) , so I'd like to ask for someone else to do a project I've been thinking about for ages, to help with the dictionary. Research needed: peruse other languages' official test documents (the Japanese JLPT is a good example here) or similar official or semi-official word lists, and come up with a list, in something like importance order, of words that a language "should" have. Perhaps this has already been done; if so, I couldn't find it, but that would be fantastic. The goal is to get a list of 5 or 10 thousand words that we can use to guide dictionary development; a set of words to form a core "if you know this you can have a normal conversation" set for learning.
The project has historically used Helen Eaton's list of the 6000 most used concepts in 4 languages as this standard. The list is biased towards European languages, and of course is 70 years old, but it remains an excellent standard for the goal you refer to, since it was created for artificial language work (Interlingua, I believe).
(It also served as the basis for the cultural gismu design decision. JCB's standard was that the first N - I think 2000 - concepts had to be expressible as either gismu, their basic conversions (using SE and NU), or by simple two-part lujvo. Among the most frequent concepts are "my language/culture/country/religion" (whatever word it is named by), and thus gismu were made for the most common choices as might be used by speakers of the source languages.
It also happens to be an official LLG Project already, though somehow it is documented on the projects page as something I was doing on my own, which was never the intent. I wanted to make sure any attempts were coordinated, to avoid redundancy. (I also have, deep in my archives, the accumulated efforts by JCB's group towards this end. I believe they approached the 3000 level by the mid-80s when the effort fell apart, and some of the words invented could be used in Lojban after updating the source tanru to the current language).
The Eaton book is an out-of-print Dover Book. I have a couple of Xeroxed copies; there are some annotations made by JCB. The archived JCB work is in computer text files.
I would be happy to support others who might want to continue this effort. lojbab -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group. To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.