Really? To be clear, I wasn't calling your advice into question... it's just that I've never heard of such being done. Except maybe this one book with these lizards...
Now that other people have established some other methods, I realize that I'm not quite as lazy as I thought I was. Tolkien's method of creating compound words in realistic ways, and using fully developed grammatic rules to support the vocabulary, just seemed like common sense to me. Just for the gratification of learning, does anyone know how extensive the vocaulary was for Tolkien's languages? And of course it's largely for self-satisfaction. I wouldn't create an entire language for any reason other than developing the world more completely.
I think it's somewhere around 1700 words for Sindarin, though I might mean Quenya... I could take out my lexicons for Elvish and count! Dwarven was significantly less, and so the language of man.