Re: Avoiding near-collisions in vocabulary coinage

On Mon, 4 Aug 2008 20:44:23 -0400, Alex Fink <000024@...> wrote:

>>I always keep things in dictionary format in alphabetical order
>>(usually an alphabetical order derived for that language).  So
>>if it strikes me that, "Oh!  Nalo would be a great word for
>>pheasant!" and then I look at the dictionary and see that "nalu"
>>means "game hen", I can reevaluate my decision.
>
>If I had that particular sort of situation happen to me, picking words to
>suit my lamatyave (as opposed to forward-deriving, say), I'd probably do one
>of two things: either lump them together to _nalu_ 'pheasant, game hen' and
>then distinguish them by modifiers ('little _nalu_', '_nalu_ with a wattle',
>...) or else leave them and invoke some mysterious nature of diachronic
>relation.  (In fact pjaukra has a pair of the second sort in really the same
>semantic field: _xaru_ 'raven' and _xarana_ 'eagle'.)
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?

Alex

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