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How to create a language
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Well, now you have everything set up, so you have to begin creating words. Probably you already have some particles, case endings, affixes, etc., but that's only the skeleton.
How many words do you need? If you're creating a full language (which I assume you are, because you wouldn't have come this far if you weren't), then you'll need about 2000 (two thousand) words to communicate with a certain comfort. You can do quite a lot with about 1000 words, if that scares you; but you'll probably be creating new words now and then.
Mark Rosenfelder mentions (and I'm not going to repeat it here) the thesis of Ogden and Richards. These guys showed that the most part of any English text contains a very reduced lexicon. A group of common words cover 80% or 90% of any text. Then they said, "Well then, let's isolate those words and use them and only them, combining them to form complicate concepts instead of using not-so-common words". For example, forget the word "success" and use "make good". All in all, you could do with only 850 common words and perhaps a hundred more for specific fields.
The argument is right, but it has a failure. The most common words which cover so much of the text are also the ones that carry the least information: articles, prepositions, pronouns, etc. In newspaper headlines, those are usually deleted, because they are not so important and the rest can be understood. The not-so-common words cannot be deleted, because they are the ones which convey all the meaning, all the information. In fact, the theoretical basis of modern informatics says that the most unusual signs are the ones that possess the most information. If you understand the 90% of the words in a text, but the 10% remaining is composed of the most critical information, then you're actually getting nothing except a lot of particles connecting inintelligible concepts.
So don't spare your words. You can never have too many.
How do you start? There's no method, but I'll tell some ways I have used:
There's a very interesting list of words (the Universal Language Dictionary) which comprises 1600 words divided into topics, and used in some way by the most common languages of the world. You can find it at the Model Languages site: it comes with the Langmaker language generator. Very good, at least to check for words (it's not very fun to sit and generate them one after another). For a simpler but still useful way to generate random words, try Wordgen. It lets you specify beginning, medial and final consonants, clusters, vowels and diphthongs, and the number of syllables you want.