Re: basic vocab

Nik wrote:

> Roger Mills wrote:
> > But one
> > advantage to generating the forms first is that you avoid the
seemingly
> > natural tendency to favor particular sounds, or to accidentally
assign two
> > meanings to one form.
>
> That's a problem?  All languages favor some sounds over another.  I
> prefer to let those "biases" evolve in word-making.  For example, I
> hadn't originally intended to make /v/ and /z/ rare, but it turned
out
> that way, as I used those sounds in few words.  I tends to make the
> conlang very esthetically appealing, IMO.  The sounds you'll prefer
are
> the sounds you like, thus, your conlang will be full of sounds you
> like.  And more than one meaning to a given form mimics natural
> languages, with homophones and polysemy.
For Chleweyish I used a mixed approach.  I used one list (swadesh, I
think) of words and randomly assigned random generated skeletons of
the orthography (being quiet phonetic, it wouldn't matter), but
letting empty places.  This means that not all swadesh words have a
final form today.  I made this after I begun creating words, and later
when translating, and occationally when I think on a concept that
should exist on Chleweyish, I have to coin words for missing concepts.
With the random generated list I can be sure most sounds I originally
reserved for the language are fairly represented, still I let my bias
to flavour the language and I force a few things I left out with the
random generator (like complex clusters and trisyllable words).

Well, it would be nice to extract some statistisc of all coined words.

-- Carlos Th