Sunday, January 29, 2023

Etymology statistics

Just a point of interest as I continue to organize my lexicon...

Of the 790 predicate roots assigned so far:

* 163 (21%) are derived from Finnish
* 57 (7%) are derived from Hawai'ian, Sāmoan, Tongan or Māori
* 75 (9%) are derived from other languages (Arabic, Basque, Bislama, Chinese, Doraja, Esperanto, French, Greek, Icelandic, Irish, Japanese, Latin, Lapine, Latvian, Malay, Nahuatl, Polish, Proto-World [ha ha], Quechua, Quenya, Russian, Seadi, Spanish, Swahili, Tagalog, Turkish, Swahili, or broad international usage)
* 34 (4%) are internally-derived

This means 295 (37%) of the current Koa root stock was derived in some way from other languages, compared with 495 (63%) that was either randomly generated, internally derived, or selected/created in some way (unfortunately there's no good way to distinguish randomness from intention reliably at this point). I find these figures a little surprising: it was my impression that the significant majority of Koa words was based in something -- to the point that I was stymied for a long time in creating more vocabulary when I couldn't find enough existing linguistic inspiration. Also, again, let's just pause for a second to acknowledge that Finnish has provided a fifth of Koa vocabulary.

Worthy of special mention are 6 roots (1%) that were created by friends or family members -- I'd love to swell that number moving forward!

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