Re: Avoiding near-collisions in vocabulary coinage

Alex Fink wrote:
>
>And in this connection, I can't help but mention the couple times I've
>thought "Oh! X would be a great word for Y!" and then looked at the lexicon
>and found that, indeed, X *is* recorded as the word for Y and I'd forgotten
>completely about it.  (_sere_ 'dew' and _memle_ 'coal' are the two cases I
>remember.)
>
>Anyone else had that happen?
>
Oh Never, well, hardly ever :-))))

You also wrote:
>It would be really great if someone wrote a tool that could do this for a
general phonotactics: you tell it your word / stem / whatever structure, it
spins through your lexicon and notices, hm, you've used quite a lot of coda
/n/ compared to onsets, but a comparative paucity of /un/, etc.  This'd be
handy not only for gap-filling but for looking for patterns which could be
traces of former sound-changes if you were trying to erect a diachrony on an
extant lexicon. >

That _would_ be useful. (Way back in the 60s, a statistician did something
similar for the reconstructed vocab. of Proto Austronesian, and found some
interesting correlations or lack thereof--but no one has done it in recent
years, and many reconstructions have been modified since they were first
published in the 1930s.)

Years ago, with the old Langmaker word-generating program, I made several
thousand forms for Kash, to which I assign meanings by whim. Having a simple
phonology (mostly CVCV(C)) helped....I also create forms on the fly, and if
by chance I happen to create a homophone without checking the list, I think
twice...  But Kash morphophonemics does mean e.g. that "nama, rama, lama,
tama" will all (potentially) have the same Causative and nominal forms
"rundama", "andama" resp., so I'm careful about making the meanings too
similar.  But so far no problems AFAICT.

(People pooh-pooh that old Langmaker program, but it was a godsend at the
time to non-computer-literate me......)

Gwr also derives from *CVCV(C) forms, and since everthing reduces to 1
syllable (depending on stress and with lots of V-changes, plus tone), there
is a fair number of exact homophones or near-homophones differing only by
tone (but Chinese handles that without problems I think). Still, by paying
attention to assigning meanings, too much outright conflict has been
avoided. Would it matter much if e.g. "green" and "basement" had the same
form? I don't think so.........