How many words/concepts do you need to be able to understand and communicate about reality at a deep level?

• tune

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  Discontinued An Intermediate Constructed Language (by teamdrumwork)

  

But if you are working on a conlang, how many words would you need to define that people should memorize to have a rich understanding of the world? If you want to try and break this problem down into smaller pieces that is fine with me. But it seems in my initial attempt at a conlang, you can cover most abstract concepts with about 2,000 words. Then for the common objects on earth (rocks, trees, etc.) or highly specific named entities (star constellations, or atoms/materials for example, or foods or daily objects like kitchen supplies), you can add another 2,000 or so words to the lexicon. I was quite surprised when I listed out every possible tool I could think of, and the list was only about 700 individual words (then you can combine words like "Circular saw" to get more tools). Or for foods, Wikipedia has less than about 1,000 named foods which cover every possible thing you've ever eaten.

• InfluxDB

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