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What I am trying to do is build a dictionary that is helpful to people who might want to learn my language, Verbum.
However, Verbum doesn't really have words as much as it has thoughts and concepts. The language is a Minlang with very few actual words. For example; there are only 155 verbs. But from these 155 root verbs, you can create upwards of 5,000 verb concepts. Here is the issue:
If I take the root verb to Give - bil, I can morphologically change it to the concept of to Provide - dūbil. I am saying the concept "Provide" because dūbil is not considered a word in Verbum. It's a conceptual variation of "Give". It can mean most any word in the thesaurus related to "Provide"; Cater, Equip, Furnish, Dispense, Impart, Profer, etc.
So should I just build a dictionary with the actual words in the language and provide examples of how the morphology works to created other concepts or actually list every possible interpretation of a word (probably 30,000 to 50,000 words). One thought I had was to list the actual word, then reference what thesaurus reference the user should look up to see the morphological interpretation, thereby showing what primary concept the derivative means while giving the user the chance to decide what word meaning they want to use.
Suggestions and opinion are appreciated. Also, anyone know an easy way to develop a dictionary using software on a Mac?
EDIT: Thanks to everyone for the discussion and clarifications. Again, not being a linguist by trade or practice, I am prone to mistakes. The issue is two-fold: as someone who works in Big Data and Semantics, I work with data organized as concepts so I imposed that terminology to my language. Second, in trying to put together an English-Verbum dictionary with words that don't directly translate, I was using the concept idea to mean the translation references a series of words in English. I will correct this goign forward.
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