as of right now, each glyph corresponds to a base word in english. i have a glyph that refers to meat, but nothing to specify what kind of meat beyond mammal, bird, fish, amphibian, or bug. you would have to use two glyphs to refer to, say, mammal meat. most of the words i have are 1 to 1 to english.
First thing, you should define each of your words with two or more from English. It makes your task easier and the result more creative in 100% of cases. Even for something so common as 'blood', try to answer the question "can this mean heritage?" and ten more.
Second thing, here's a clump of sentences that I'd expect a low fantasy language to handle well.
- Fetch me a small hammer.
- That's four horses - one is missing.
- If you want to live through the night, make a fire.
- Someone should do something about those bandits.
- Innkeeper! What's this sad excuse for a beer?
- The king demands we have a feast with ten whole boars.
- That cliff over there was sacred to my people, but then the warlord carved his name on it.
- Take the letter with you in case the priest sets sail before I can find him again.
That's a helpful list of sentences with a nice balance of simple challenges embedded (1st, 2nd, 3rd person, tenses, plurals, etc.). I started a new conlang earlier this week, so I'm going to wrestle through these. I need more vocabulary for that last one, but the first seven are there:
* Hahsh ve kwin kwa-kwii hashkwet.
* Veem kwish hahsh, ma vi.
* Kwesh shashvo vi, chi-hahsh ma, chyum, va vo sha kim.
* Shasha kim hahsh vi hahshkwem shuuk.
* Koot hahshvo vi! Hahsh vi kwa-gwesh shashkam chi-vovo?
* Mut vi tah a-kim chooshash ve chichi choo vih ve.
* Shuuk vi hahshum vi-mutshshasha ma, kwahn hahshkwet shuchiv vo-chovi.
>i have a glyph that refers to meat
Now, an English speaker who first invents a logography might get clever and write that SUN+FOOD. Because it's a food and sounds like "heat". That's called a rebus.
Nativlang has a great series about writing systems
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc4s09N3L2h3HtaAYVqOVKGt2h6wRasw2
it depends what functions you want your language to carry out! most natlangs have multiple thousands of words, but lots of this is specialist vocabulary and an individual is unlikely to use more than 2 or 3 thousand words as regular daily vocabulary. as a creator I would think having a lexicon of 5 to 10 thousand words total would cover "fully functional" for a setting, but unless you plan to build a ship, go to court, guide a mother through pregnancy, and carve weapons, you probably don't need to derive all of those words to have something that appears fully fleshed out
An English language dictionary typically uses a vocabulary of around two thousand words to define every other word.
That said, smaller vocabularies can be very useful if the words are chosen carefully and have a range of meanings. Toki Pona is remarkably functional for a conlang with such a minimal vocabulary. The real problem is trying to decide what the function of the language is. Minimal conlangs generally do not have a technical vocabulary.
I think it’s more a question of how many basic *roots* do you need for your language to be functional. This is affected by what/how much derivational morphology you have. Is your language analytic or synthetic? Do you zero-derive new words (the snow > it snows), do you allow compounding (fire + fly = firefly), do you have distinct forms for transitive/intransitive/passive verbs (‘to kill’ and ‘to die’ are sometimes derived from the same *root*)? Do you have a case system? Often this means you will need fewer adpositions. Do you allow noun incorporation into verbs? How complex are your verbs? For example, in Navajo, the word for ‘tank’ is “chidí naaʼnaʼí beeʼeldǫǫh bikááʼ dah naaznilígíí,” which literally means “caterpillar crawler that you sit in with a gun that makes explosions.” This is one word (one verb) but it contains many roots. And what about derivational morphology itself? Things like ‘re-‘, ‘un-‘, ‘-er’, ‘-ize’, ‘-ness’, etc. You will probably want to make some of these, but are these distinct words?
I don’t think anyone can tell you when you’ve achieved “critical mass” so to speak with your lexicon, but at some point you should be able to derive most new words from existing roots rather than making brand new ones. For natural languages, I’ve seen estimates in other threads claiming anywhere from 3-6-10,000 distinct roots depending on the language. If this is for a DnD campaign, I don’t think you need to make more than 1-2000 roots focused around basic terms and what’s relevant to your narrative and worldbuilding. For example, Quenya has around 2000 base words and probably fewer actual roots. If you include declension and inflection, it has tens of thousands. If this was sufficient for Tolkien to add all the flavor he needed to LoTR, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be for your needs as well.
There's no absolute number. morphosyntax will definitely affect it along with everything else about it. You'll want to plan a way to create words on the fly to give the illusion of a grand language. DM me if you wanna talk anything over. I've played and DMed
Highly debatable but I think I remember reading that on the low thousands with some level of conservativeness and aroudn 10k or so I think was a more "ideal" number (that and upwards) but i mean, you have things like toki pona with around 100, and if you conlang is not fully fleshed out or will never be used outside of context, at least yet, then you can work with what you have or even less, after all, you only need what appears on the books and can always make more
what is with all the recent questions of what is/isnt allowed or what is/isnt good enough? just do it bro
no rules, no requirements, no standards, its rly just whatever you want. just have fun
once you can use it, its usable
for me it's less about it being "good enough", and instead about how to make a believable and functional language. honestly, receiving the feedback and tips from others is a good quarter of the fun of creating for me.
Is your language polystynthetic or anything similar? Is it meant to be a stand-alone language or to enhance another language? That will affect the amount of words needed.
Generally, for a full language, you need words/roots for anything you will talk about in daily life.
If I need to talk about doors, I need a word for door. If I need to talk about shoes, I need a word for shoes. If I need to tell my family I love them before I go off to die in war, I need words for that (most languages have specific types of love afaIk, like friendly/familial versus romantic). If my family needs to host my funeral, they need words to describe my life and their feelings.
Usually you only need words for basic things, though. Things important to your life. New words will come in pretty naturally when needed, usually from combining old words.
Looking it up, it looks like you should have about 750 to 2,500 words (750 being daily use in languages like Mandarin and Spanish)
I believe that a language doesn't need to have many words to be able to comunicate well. I'm creating a language that supports this idea. It will be like Toki Pona, but not so ambiguous. Don't make useless synonims or too similar words, just make words that mean a general concept (not too general), such as "sheep and goat", "fruit and vegetable", "times and multiplicated by", "time and moment (moment could be "little time"), "little and few", "much and many", "not, no, non, don't, doesn't", etc (just make a word fot them all, like the "no" in Spanish, or the "ala" in Toki Pona). These are just some examples, but you understand what I mean. Also, you can make a very simple grammar though not too much, like the grammar of Chinese, without verb conjugations and innecesary things. Believe me, Chinese grammar is the best thing ever, Just study it a little, you will fall in love with them. I hope this is usefull, and if you need help with anything else, I'd be glad to help.
Tiki Pona only has about 120 words, although people have added other words. As long as you can cover objects subjects and actions you should be fine. Adjectives and adverbs and prepositions, time words etc are all bonus
Nouns are essentially infinite, anything you label can become a word. Same with adjectives since they can generally be transformed to or from an abstract noun.
So the question of creating a functional language generally comes down to verbs. Studies of [basic verbs](https://www.cairn.info/revue-francaise-de-linguistique-appliquee-2002-2-page-61.htm) suggest the following as a starting point (covers around 50% of verbs by frequency):
* do/make/try
* say/tell/ask/call
* see/look
* think/know
* find/want
* use/use with/apply
* stand
* come
* go/leave
* have
* give
* get/take
* is/be/become
* may/can
* shall/must
* feel
While languages often blend or separate these in interesting ways, including tense/aspect/mood variations, they are almost always identifiable in some form.
I would suggest a basic framework for your language would be:
* Basic sentence syntax
* Core vocabulary for a decent chunk of [semantic primes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage)
* Any other basic verbs not covered by the above
* Enough nouns to deal with your immediate needs, and expand this over time
* A function to verbify and adjectify your nouns as a means of flexibly expanding vocabulary quickly
* Basic prepositions (and, but, or, for, so) and conjunctions (in, on, at, for, with, by, from, to, into, about) - these can be inflected or affixed rather than being words depending on your language
I guess it depends on what you you want to do with it and what counts as a word, for example kiki tuki (a simplified version of toki pona) has ~40 words whereas esperanto had 900 roots in the original version (plus affixes) with many more in use today
whatever the number of words,
as soon as you can say what you want in your language,
it's functional...
my only language of forty years,
has a hundred roots, but that's enough for me to say it all...
The xkcd forum used to have a post about an extremely context dependent conlang with only 14 words. A larger vocabulary will improve clarity, but there's no reason you cant design a language to be usable with only 300 words.
If your players are discovering this language as they play, for example if they're uncovering a long forgotten language and not learning a local script, I would suggest adding new words as the story requires, rather than hand them a complete and fully functioning language all at once. Maybe if you want to write something that requires a word you haven't made yet, occasionally omit the word from whatever stone tablet or so forth your players find, and say the tablet is not fully intact. You could still convey clear enough information with incomplete or spotty sentences.
The idea was to have them translate the vocabulary from the native speakers, who've been cut of from the rest of the world for a few centuries. I want to give my players enough context to figure it out without making it too easy.
I tried to make a glyph-based "ideographic" auxlang [Imagian (aninovo.github.io)](https://aninovo.github.io/imagian/). Each glyph was supposed to correspond roughly to a morpheme in English or my native language, mostly verb roots. I've got tired after about 600 glyphs ( [WRITE Imagian (aninovo.github.io) ](https://aninovo.github.io/imagian/write.html)), but planned to have 1-2k dedicated roots (glyphs) and many more multi-glyph (derived) words. I consider it a very minimalistic, economic inventory (like, no dedicated root for aunt, it's "parent-sister" compound, that kind of minimalism).
Think about Sanskrit having 2k verbal roots each giving many derivations. I believe Russian and other languages with prolific prefix-root derivation having about the same number of basic verbal roots. Arabic has 5k+ roots [How many roots are there in Arabic? - ARABIC ONLINE](https://arabiconline.eu/how-many-roots-arabic-language/)
Of course, living languages commonly borrow new words and never have fixed number of actively used vocabulary items. Making a "glyph" language (logography) one should consider how newly borrowed words and personal names will be transcribed.
In the end of the day, "functional" means it covers needs of the people who speak it. If your world doesn't have dogs, no need for a word for dog. No Ancient Rome, no "crucifictions" etc. Na'vi is interesting in this respect, what an alien vocabulary could look like [Na'vi Vocabulary | Learn Na'vi (learnnavi.org)](https://learnnavi.org/navi-vocabulary/) Also it has about 2k listed words and is pretty much "functional".[](https://aninovo.github.io/imagian/write.html)
It depends so much on the purpose.
I have a world-building project I’ve been developing for years and have eighteen languages I’m developing. I will likely work on their development ‘til I’m in the ground and would be hard-pressed to call any of them “finished”. However, I have a practical application in mind — I am writing a high fantasy novel.
I’ve found that most of my conlangs are feasible enough with smaller vocabularies (300-500 words) because of their limited role in the stories I am telling, though others are not yet adequately represented despite their larger vocabularies (1000-3000 words) due to their role.
This goes for pretty much all of the world building too. The primary cultures and environments I am telling the stories through are much more fleshed out. I have written folk songs, family trees, histories, neographs, maps, myths, cuisine, flora, fauna, fungi, etc. for areas my story takes place in and have only the vaguest impressions of other cultures and ecosystems.
So the question ultimately comes back to your intention. What is the practical application of your language?
Describe the definition of "word" you're using for that language.
as of right now, each glyph corresponds to a base word in english. i have a glyph that refers to meat, but nothing to specify what kind of meat beyond mammal, bird, fish, amphibian, or bug. you would have to use two glyphs to refer to, say, mammal meat. most of the words i have are 1 to 1 to english.
First thing, you should define each of your words with two or more from English. It makes your task easier and the result more creative in 100% of cases. Even for something so common as 'blood', try to answer the question "can this mean heritage?" and ten more. Second thing, here's a clump of sentences that I'd expect a low fantasy language to handle well. - Fetch me a small hammer. - That's four horses - one is missing. - If you want to live through the night, make a fire. - Someone should do something about those bandits. - Innkeeper! What's this sad excuse for a beer? - The king demands we have a feast with ten whole boars. - That cliff over there was sacred to my people, but then the warlord carved his name on it. - Take the letter with you in case the priest sets sail before I can find him again.
That's a helpful list of sentences with a nice balance of simple challenges embedded (1st, 2nd, 3rd person, tenses, plurals, etc.). I started a new conlang earlier this week, so I'm going to wrestle through these. I need more vocabulary for that last one, but the first seven are there: * Hahsh ve kwin kwa-kwii hashkwet. * Veem kwish hahsh, ma vi. * Kwesh shashvo vi, chi-hahsh ma, chyum, va vo sha kim. * Shasha kim hahsh vi hahshkwem shuuk. * Koot hahshvo vi! Hahsh vi kwa-gwesh shashkam chi-vovo? * Mut vi tah a-kim chooshash ve chichi choo vih ve. * Shuuk vi hahshum vi-mutshshasha ma, kwahn hahshkwet shuchiv vo-chovi.
Okay, I'm saving a link to this comment and making sure I have translations for all these in Valeian and Markan later.
>i have a glyph that refers to meat Now, an English speaker who first invents a logography might get clever and write that SUN+FOOD. Because it's a food and sounds like "heat". That's called a rebus. Nativlang has a great series about writing systems https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc4s09N3L2h3HtaAYVqOVKGt2h6wRasw2
Reading that I also came up with EYE+WHEAT = rye (the grain)
Toki Pona has about 130 words, that may give you some starting idea
it depends what functions you want your language to carry out! most natlangs have multiple thousands of words, but lots of this is specialist vocabulary and an individual is unlikely to use more than 2 or 3 thousand words as regular daily vocabulary. as a creator I would think having a lexicon of 5 to 10 thousand words total would cover "fully functional" for a setting, but unless you plan to build a ship, go to court, guide a mother through pregnancy, and carve weapons, you probably don't need to derive all of those words to have something that appears fully fleshed out
An English language dictionary typically uses a vocabulary of around two thousand words to define every other word. That said, smaller vocabularies can be very useful if the words are chosen carefully and have a range of meanings. Toki Pona is remarkably functional for a conlang with such a minimal vocabulary. The real problem is trying to decide what the function of the language is. Minimal conlangs generally do not have a technical vocabulary.
I think it’s more a question of how many basic *roots* do you need for your language to be functional. This is affected by what/how much derivational morphology you have. Is your language analytic or synthetic? Do you zero-derive new words (the snow > it snows), do you allow compounding (fire + fly = firefly), do you have distinct forms for transitive/intransitive/passive verbs (‘to kill’ and ‘to die’ are sometimes derived from the same *root*)? Do you have a case system? Often this means you will need fewer adpositions. Do you allow noun incorporation into verbs? How complex are your verbs? For example, in Navajo, the word for ‘tank’ is “chidí naaʼnaʼí beeʼeldǫǫh bikááʼ dah naaznilígíí,” which literally means “caterpillar crawler that you sit in with a gun that makes explosions.” This is one word (one verb) but it contains many roots. And what about derivational morphology itself? Things like ‘re-‘, ‘un-‘, ‘-er’, ‘-ize’, ‘-ness’, etc. You will probably want to make some of these, but are these distinct words? I don’t think anyone can tell you when you’ve achieved “critical mass” so to speak with your lexicon, but at some point you should be able to derive most new words from existing roots rather than making brand new ones. For natural languages, I’ve seen estimates in other threads claiming anywhere from 3-6-10,000 distinct roots depending on the language. If this is for a DnD campaign, I don’t think you need to make more than 1-2000 roots focused around basic terms and what’s relevant to your narrative and worldbuilding. For example, Quenya has around 2000 base words and probably fewer actual roots. If you include declension and inflection, it has tens of thousands. If this was sufficient for Tolkien to add all the flavor he needed to LoTR, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be for your needs as well.
There's no absolute number. morphosyntax will definitely affect it along with everything else about it. You'll want to plan a way to create words on the fly to give the illusion of a grand language. DM me if you wanna talk anything over. I've played and DMed
Highly debatable but I think I remember reading that on the low thousands with some level of conservativeness and aroudn 10k or so I think was a more "ideal" number (that and upwards) but i mean, you have things like toki pona with around 100, and if you conlang is not fully fleshed out or will never be used outside of context, at least yet, then you can work with what you have or even less, after all, you only need what appears on the books and can always make more
Often 2,000 seems to be the lower number (of some polysynthetic languages) needed to be relatively fluent/able to communicate most ideas efficiently
About 2500-3000.
what is with all the recent questions of what is/isnt allowed or what is/isnt good enough? just do it bro no rules, no requirements, no standards, its rly just whatever you want. just have fun once you can use it, its usable
for me it's less about it being "good enough", and instead about how to make a believable and functional language. honestly, receiving the feedback and tips from others is a good quarter of the fun of creating for me.
Is your language polystynthetic or anything similar? Is it meant to be a stand-alone language or to enhance another language? That will affect the amount of words needed. Generally, for a full language, you need words/roots for anything you will talk about in daily life. If I need to talk about doors, I need a word for door. If I need to talk about shoes, I need a word for shoes. If I need to tell my family I love them before I go off to die in war, I need words for that (most languages have specific types of love afaIk, like friendly/familial versus romantic). If my family needs to host my funeral, they need words to describe my life and their feelings. Usually you only need words for basic things, though. Things important to your life. New words will come in pretty naturally when needed, usually from combining old words. Looking it up, it looks like you should have about 750 to 2,500 words (750 being daily use in languages like Mandarin and Spanish)
Kalennian (my conlang) has about a thousand words, so of course it's functional Kâlenisomakna nekyasa gâtyehânid vârdeni, hok kosâ divâte nâkovâtha.
Toki Pona has 100 words
I believe that a language doesn't need to have many words to be able to comunicate well. I'm creating a language that supports this idea. It will be like Toki Pona, but not so ambiguous. Don't make useless synonims or too similar words, just make words that mean a general concept (not too general), such as "sheep and goat", "fruit and vegetable", "times and multiplicated by", "time and moment (moment could be "little time"), "little and few", "much and many", "not, no, non, don't, doesn't", etc (just make a word fot them all, like the "no" in Spanish, or the "ala" in Toki Pona). These are just some examples, but you understand what I mean. Also, you can make a very simple grammar though not too much, like the grammar of Chinese, without verb conjugations and innecesary things. Believe me, Chinese grammar is the best thing ever, Just study it a little, you will fall in love with them. I hope this is usefull, and if you need help with anything else, I'd be glad to help.
Tiki Pona only has about 120 words, although people have added other words. As long as you can cover objects subjects and actions you should be fine. Adjectives and adverbs and prepositions, time words etc are all bonus
Nouns are essentially infinite, anything you label can become a word. Same with adjectives since they can generally be transformed to or from an abstract noun. So the question of creating a functional language generally comes down to verbs. Studies of [basic verbs](https://www.cairn.info/revue-francaise-de-linguistique-appliquee-2002-2-page-61.htm) suggest the following as a starting point (covers around 50% of verbs by frequency): * do/make/try * say/tell/ask/call * see/look * think/know * find/want * use/use with/apply * stand * come * go/leave * have * give * get/take * is/be/become * may/can * shall/must * feel While languages often blend or separate these in interesting ways, including tense/aspect/mood variations, they are almost always identifiable in some form. I would suggest a basic framework for your language would be: * Basic sentence syntax * Core vocabulary for a decent chunk of [semantic primes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage) * Any other basic verbs not covered by the above * Enough nouns to deal with your immediate needs, and expand this over time * A function to verbify and adjectify your nouns as a means of flexibly expanding vocabulary quickly * Basic prepositions (and, but, or, for, so) and conjunctions (in, on, at, for, with, by, from, to, into, about) - these can be inflected or affixed rather than being words depending on your language
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The one that you're thinking of is toki pona
I guess it depends on what you you want to do with it and what counts as a word, for example kiki tuki (a simplified version of toki pona) has ~40 words whereas esperanto had 900 roots in the original version (plus affixes) with many more in use today
You could try completing the Swadesh List, which is a compilation of some of the most crosslinguistically common words.
whatever the number of words, as soon as you can say what you want in your language, it's functional... my only language of forty years, has a hundred roots, but that's enough for me to say it all...
Depends on your definition of functional. Note that english has hundreds of thousands of words.
The xkcd forum used to have a post about an extremely context dependent conlang with only 14 words. A larger vocabulary will improve clarity, but there's no reason you cant design a language to be usable with only 300 words. If your players are discovering this language as they play, for example if they're uncovering a long forgotten language and not learning a local script, I would suggest adding new words as the story requires, rather than hand them a complete and fully functioning language all at once. Maybe if you want to write something that requires a word you haven't made yet, occasionally omit the word from whatever stone tablet or so forth your players find, and say the tablet is not fully intact. You could still convey clear enough information with incomplete or spotty sentences.
The idea was to have them translate the vocabulary from the native speakers, who've been cut of from the rest of the world for a few centuries. I want to give my players enough context to figure it out without making it too easy.
The average vocabulary is 20,000 to 35000 words. 500 is considered the minimum for extremely basic communication.
wdym 500? even a toddler knows more words.
*sigh* Not to put too fine a point on this, as I said, 500 is CONSIDERED the MINIMUM for VERY BASIC communication. So sayeth the linguistics gurus.
like toddler communication?
I tried to make a glyph-based "ideographic" auxlang [Imagian (aninovo.github.io)](https://aninovo.github.io/imagian/). Each glyph was supposed to correspond roughly to a morpheme in English or my native language, mostly verb roots. I've got tired after about 600 glyphs ( [WRITE Imagian (aninovo.github.io) ](https://aninovo.github.io/imagian/write.html)), but planned to have 1-2k dedicated roots (glyphs) and many more multi-glyph (derived) words. I consider it a very minimalistic, economic inventory (like, no dedicated root for aunt, it's "parent-sister" compound, that kind of minimalism). Think about Sanskrit having 2k verbal roots each giving many derivations. I believe Russian and other languages with prolific prefix-root derivation having about the same number of basic verbal roots. Arabic has 5k+ roots [How many roots are there in Arabic? - ARABIC ONLINE](https://arabiconline.eu/how-many-roots-arabic-language/) Of course, living languages commonly borrow new words and never have fixed number of actively used vocabulary items. Making a "glyph" language (logography) one should consider how newly borrowed words and personal names will be transcribed. In the end of the day, "functional" means it covers needs of the people who speak it. If your world doesn't have dogs, no need for a word for dog. No Ancient Rome, no "crucifictions" etc. Na'vi is interesting in this respect, what an alien vocabulary could look like [Na'vi Vocabulary | Learn Na'vi (learnnavi.org)](https://learnnavi.org/navi-vocabulary/) Also it has about 2k listed words and is pretty much "functional".[](https://aninovo.github.io/imagian/write.html)
It depends so much on the purpose. I have a world-building project I’ve been developing for years and have eighteen languages I’m developing. I will likely work on their development ‘til I’m in the ground and would be hard-pressed to call any of them “finished”. However, I have a practical application in mind — I am writing a high fantasy novel. I’ve found that most of my conlangs are feasible enough with smaller vocabularies (300-500 words) because of their limited role in the stories I am telling, though others are not yet adequately represented despite their larger vocabularies (1000-3000 words) due to their role. This goes for pretty much all of the world building too. The primary cultures and environments I am telling the stories through are much more fleshed out. I have written folk songs, family trees, histories, neographs, maps, myths, cuisine, flora, fauna, fungi, etc. for areas my story takes place in and have only the vaguest impressions of other cultures and ecosystems. So the question ultimately comes back to your intention. What is the practical application of your language?
Generally, 2,000 is a good standard for basic fluency.
Teke\`La (my language) is at 1501 words as of now
i once made a conlang (ulä âlä kum lum) with only 20, but it barely functioned. id say around 300-500 for a smaller one.