Re: Lexicons and Langauge Borrowing

On Tue, 16 Mar 1999 19:50:26 +0100, Irina Rempt <ira@...>
wrote:

>_Orla_ "eagle" is the same as the Church Slavonic word, because I can
>analyze it in Valdyan as "grand master bird" and that's sort of apt
>for it. _Semte_ "person with psychic gifts" actually comes from
>hearing people speak an obscure dialect of English behind me on the
>bus; it was the way one of them pronounced "seventy". It sounded so
>like they were speaking Valdyan that I remembered the sound of it
>until I needed a word for a meaning and it came to mind immediately.
Some of my words have similar origins. I noticed recently that =
"elevators"
spelled backwards is "srotavele", which is probably the source for the
Jarrda word "zrota", meaning "centipede". I often take words that I see
frequently and spell or pronounce them backwards; some of these end up as
words in my languages that mean something totally different. Another =
source
of raw material is reading words as if they are written in Cyrillic =
instead
of the Latin alphabet.

>I'm curious how other people come up with words - I know some people
>who can sit down and *make* them, but if I try that I usually have to
>throw away ninety-five percent of the result. Most of the time, if I
>need a word for something, I dip into my stock of unused stems and
>consider them one by one until I hit one that fits.
I wish I had the secret for instant vocabulary generation, but sometimes
it's really not much better than trial and error. I often get a "feel" =
for
the sound of a language and pre-generate lists of words that have the =
right
sound, as I did with Zharranh, but matching the sounds to meanings is
harder. Sometimes I come up with a word that looks good on paper, but =
then
when I pronounce it I realize that I don't like it; the Jarrda word for
"island", for instance, was "bren" until I pronounced it with a correct =
[e]
vowel, and realized that it sounds a lot like the English word "brain". I
decided that "brin" was preferable.

--
languages of Kolagia---> =
+---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/languages.html>---
      Thryomanes        /"If all Printers were determin'd not to print =
any
   (Herman Miller)     / thing till they were sure it would offend no =
body,
   moc.oi @ rellimh <-/  there would be very little printed." -Ben =
Franklin