Re: Lexicons and Langauge Borrowing

Irina Rempt wrote: "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've gotten some distance from this problem by mutating living words - like
I mentioned in a previous post (I think!), I've been working on a conlang
that has a Sumerian-based grammar and Ainu-based words. Part of this is to
help me familiarise myself with the grammar-system of Sumerian. I decided
to find a way to approximate Sumerian phonology by systematically changing
the Ainu sounds. It's been pretty fun, actually, and gives me a second
level of archaic language to play with.

BB

*********
I'm a kinky, queer, bisexual genderfucker. And they say, "write what you
know." -Cecilia Tan, 'Writing  Sex,' OutWrite 1999

You need to have a magpie mind. I think you need to like shiny things.
-Samuel R. Delaney on what it takes to be a scifi writer, OutWrite 1999

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