Yeah, my verbals work more or less like
brivla in Lojban except that, for the place structures, I don't just use numbering or order but cases because it's hard to remember the argument structure of each
brivla in Lojban. Like, from what I remember, the word
klama is something like "go/come". The first place x1 is the "goer", x2 is I think ... the destination, x3 ... the surface upon which x1 moves and x4 is the manner, maybe? Or is it the source of the movement? If you forget, you end up saying something completely different from what you intended.
Using actual cases makes that unlikely. It also makes it slightly more natlangy, and frees up the word order. (I know you can use reordering particles in Lojban, but, bah, hard to learn!). I use the dative case for recipients and destinations (as well as experiencers of sensory verbs), the ablative is obviously going to be the source of the movement, the manner can be expressed with an instrumental argument or with an adverbial clause introduced by the particle
lo (which, in reality is only coincidentally similar to
lejo, the comitative case of the complementiser, but it's used fairly similarly and can plausibly be explained as a shortened form of it). Like, sometimes I forget whether a verbal follows the typical experiential pattern, such as
- xeva :: (v) is <visible> to |D|; |D| <sees> |N|
- mahu :: (v) is <known> to/by |D|; is <knowledge> held by |D|; |D| <knows> |N|
- lai :: (v) is <loved> by |D|; is <dear> to |D|; |D| <loves> |N|
or the nominative-centric pattern such as
- zau :: (v) <doesn't know> |T|; is <ignorant> <unaware> <unknowing> of |T|
T = topical case, i.e. "about"
And I have some funny conversions such as
bo →
bio (|N| is wanted by |D| → |N| wants |A|) and
mula →
mulia (|N| is liked/desirable/pleasant to/by |D| → |N| likes/enjoys/is a fan of |A|), but these little bits of difficulty are similar to how you just have to remember that
begegnen "encounter" and
folgen "follow" take dative objects in German, and that with
fragen, for some reason, the person who is asked is not dative but accusative ... just like the question. Whatever little quirks there are here, it's like any natlang with cases or affixes which might have funny little quirks (why are we interested
in things and not
about them??) I still find it much easier to remember, at least for me, than "this word has the destination in the x2 and this word has it in the x3" because the cases have a base meaning that goes along with them.
I think part of the reason I stick with Excel is that my eyesight isn't that good and I need the colors and zoomable interface to make sure I'm reading the words right. A single mistake like misreading a schwa as an /a/ would destroy any words that depend on that morpheme since that kind of mistake would never appear in nature.
I mostly view the text file in Wordpad rather than Notepad. I got into the habit years ago because Wordpad would load big files quicker than notepad, but now I don't notice much of a difference except that searching is easier in Wordpad (it's precise in Notepad, either forwards or backwards, but to search the whole thing requires more mouse clicks than in Wordpad), and also, you can zoom easily, change the display font easily etc (although of course not save font changes into the txt file). What do you use colours for? Do you see parts of speech quickly and things like that?
But another reason is that I need Excel's sort function ... if you use a text file, how are you ever going to be able to alphabetize it? The part you have right now looks alphabetized, .... do you do that by hand?
Yeah, as I come up with new words, I put them in the right place. Occasionally I find words that are out of place, but I know the alphabet pretty well, so it's not too much of an issue. I've never needed to sort by English translation either ... I can just search with "<" to find the word or beginning of a word I need.
That said, Excel or some other program could easily import that text file, and resort it in the event you want a reverse lookup or to sort the list irrespective of the headwords. Ive had to sort my dictionary by something other than the headword several times so far. But your setup looks like it could be converted to other formats more easily than something like Excel.
Yeah, getting something to parse it and put everything into the right columns or whatever is way beyond me, but I know it is possible, at least in theory. I got the idea from dict.cc, where you can download whole dictionary databases as text files and they use the double colons between the headword and the entry ... but they also have multiple copies of the headword for each translation, and I prefer to just use angle brackets and semicolons to figure out where the translations start and end and which bits can be swapped out. Being able to search easily makes very little a problem so far.