kevinbsmith | Re: Dictionaries updated and new ones are added.

• Autor: kevinbsmith
• Tema: Re: Dictionaries updated and new ones are added.
• Data: 2002-10-15 18:00
• Mesaje: 338 (a supra, presedente, seguente)

--- In LinguaFrancaNova@y..., "P Bjorn Madsen" <europidgin@y...> wrote:
> > About the 100 very common words --
> > what are they, and what can we do about them?
>
> I'll try to run some more comparisons with other word list
> to find all the missing words. I'll also try to ask Kevin.
> He might be kind of an expert in stuff like that.

I'm not an expert, but I think I understand why many common words are
missing from the ULD list. They tried to capture the most common
"substantive" words, and I guess they felt pronouns weren't substantives.

It seems that they didn't try to reconcile grammatical differences
between languages, so they didn't include articles. Perhaps for the
benefit of conlangs, they avoided specific units of measurement like
liters and meters.

Other than that, they just seem to have missed a few fundamental
words, like "a point", and "outer space".

Kevin