Re: antonyms: regretful & tasty

On Fri, 9 May 2003 09:36:30 -0500, Peter Clark <peter-clark@...>
wrote:

>    If you like, you can also create a synonym/antonym dictionary as well,
>just to make it clearer; it's common practice to append a list of words
>divided by category, such as kinship terms, plants and animals, household
>items, etc, so a synonym/antonym section would fit in nicely.
I've found it useful to cross reference synonyms and antonyms in my word
lists -- it can help to narrow down the meaning in some cases ("short"
opposite of "long", vs. "short" opposite of "tall"). In my Lindiga
dictionary in progress, I have entries like this:

|ksoengi| ('kso":Ni) adj hard, difficult. ant. |nzaki|.
|nzaki| (n='zAki) adj easy (not difficult). ant. |ksoengi|.

(see http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/APA.html for my version of ASCII-IPA)

Another benefit of creating words in pairs of opposite meaning is that I
don't end up with words that sound very similar but mean something totally
different (unless I want to do that for realism, since natlangs do have
some confusingly similar pairs of antonyms).