Re: Avoiding near-collisions in vocabulary coinage

On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 4:34 PM, Michael Poxon <mike@...> wrote:
> Sometimes this is simply going to be unavoidable, especially if one is
> working with a definite phonological area. Indeed, sometimes it will
> probably be intentional (witness Tolkien lifting both the word and the
> meaning from Finnish, with quenya tie "road" and tul- "to come" for
> example). In my case, where there is inherently some causal connection being
I should clarify; I meant, not avoiding new words in one's conlang
that sound too similar to existing natlang words, but avoding words
that are too similar to words already in the same conlang.

> .............. Omina's not
> derived from either a conlang or a natlang (some overt Basque influences
> though) but what I'm after is an impression of inner consistency. I wouldn't
> dream of using any computer resources for generating words. I have to feel
> them.
Indeed, I don't like to use script-generated words for any conlang
where beauty is a high-priority design goal.  Even when I use script-generated
words for an engelang, I tend to generate the list of words in one
step, and then match them up with appropriate meanings in
another step, not entirely automatically.

For gzb all the words were made up by hand, either adapted
to gzb phonology from a natlang source or made up a priori
-- and yet, before definitely adopting a word form I've thought
of that sounds intuitively good, I think it's usually a good idea to
use this findsimilar.pl script to make sure I don't already have
another word that sounds too similar and is likely to occur in
the same contexts.   It seems that this would be a good
design principle for any engelang, or engelangesque artlang,
where unambiguity or ease of learning are design goals
at higher priority than euphony.   (Euphony is a design goal
of gzb, but it's not one of my highest priority goals.)

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html
Conlang fluency survey -- there's still time to participate before
I analyze the results and write the article

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