Idiom Neutral - English dictionary now finished

Thursday, May 20, 2010

I spent most of today in a flurry of typing and managed to finish the Idiom Neutral - English part of the dictionary, for a grand total of 7325 words. My estimate at the beginning was that there would be about 5000 words, so having a larger total than that is a nice surprise. In spite of this, the dictionary is still lacking in a lot of words which will need to be supplemented over the next few months.

The easiest words to supplement are those that are obvious, like:

* provokar = v., to challenge; to provoke.

There's no term for provocation in the dictionary but it's obviously provokasion. So the first order of the day will be to make a quick search through the dictionary per suffix and prefix in order to find any obvious words that need to be added and don't require consent (i.e. the approval of new words) to do so.

But the most important task for now will be to create some lessons, in order to make the language easier to learn. The plan for the moment is to create lessons that are entirely in spoken Idiom Neutral (my voice), uploaded to YouTube and then with English subtitles which will let it be translated into the 56 other languages Google Translate offers so as to maximize the audience. More on that later though.

On the language itself: it resembles other IALs quite a bit, but Idiom Neutral sometimes surprises you with an unexpectedly quirky or interesting word. I wrote a few of the ones down that I particularly liked, and there are many more besides this. Here are a few:

rapiator - thief

bas-bot - shoe, literally "under-boot"

florotemp, termotemp, fruktotemp, frigotemp - Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. I think I particularly like these because I've always wished English stuck with the traditional names for months instead of importing boring Roman numbers and emperors. They're also pretty easy to learn.

hort --> garden. Cognate with horticulture, and taken directly from Latin.

sagit --> arrow, as in Sagittarius. Same as Latin.

sepult --> grave.

sub-ridar --> to smile, lit. to sub-laugh.

trembl --> aspen. To tremble is tremblar, so an aspen is literally a 'tremble'.

ur --> auroch. Aurochs are one of my favourite ancient animals and ur sounds like a really old word given that it's the same as the Babylonian city.

veras, verase --> true, truly.

verdikt (ver + dikt) --> verdict. Spelled almost the same as in English but in IN it literally means true-dict(ate).

vigilesk(ar) --> (to) wake.



To get the dictionary, go to the new group for Idiom Neutral I just created here. It also includes the pdfs for each language except German, as it's over 10 MB (the maximum file size) and I'll have to find a way to shrink it down.



I've also almost gotten to E on the Idiom Neutral - German dictionary, which is going quite a bit faster as I'm not using any formatting for that one. Since German isn't my mother tongue I don't know which words look strange and which don't (besides some obvious ancient spellings) and speed is of the essence so I'll just type it up as a .txt file that German speakers can then do with as they see fit.

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