Some Inspirational Materials

[wm.annis]

While you contemplate the words and concepts you'd like to see in Na'vi, here are a few things to help you on your way.

First, http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/html/wliste.html will produce a list of the most commonly used words in English, German, Dutch and French.  The corpus from which these draw is a bit unusual, but there will still be a lot of useful stuff there to consider.  We should try to cover as much of the most commonly needed words as possible.  We don't want perfect matches, but the basic senses should be available somewhere.

Second, here's a Hupa Dictionary (grab the PDF file).  This language does things very differently than anything almost everyone reading this forum has had exposure to.  It often gives the literal translation of a definition, which is nice.  This is not to suggest Na'vi should be like Hupa (it really, really isn't), but it might set your thinking in interesting directions.

A collection of Basic English words organized in a funky way.  Basic English is a highly controlled subset of English (800 words in the core).  One can accomplish a lot with that set.  There is also the Voice of America Special English, a 1500-word collection.  I don't doubt there are similar projects for other languages that I don't know of.

Another database, arranged in 24 Semantic Fields.

[Txur’Itan]

AWSOME LINKS

[wm.annis]

AWSOME LINKS

Yep: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~survey/languages/hupa.php.  The entire site, Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, is a feast of interesting linguistic material, while at the same time is pretty depressing.  Wappo, for example, died in 1990.

[Erimeyz]

The World Loanword Database has a list of 1460 words that are common to 41 different languages and could be considered "basic" in some sense.  Na'vi learners working on ideas for the language expansion might be interested in browsing through the 24 categories ("semantic fields") and the complete list of 1460 words ("lexical meanings").

The Swadesh lists are similar, but smaller and even more basic. A list of the 207 words from the Swadesh lists (in eight languages) is here.

Either or both lists might serve as good inspiration for this project.

(Edit - I see Wm. ninja'd me on the WLD link. )

 - Eri