Re: basic vocab

On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, Roger Mills wrote:

> >On Thu, 14 Sep 2000, Mario Bonassin wrote:
> >> Do any of you have a special list of words that you use to start
> >> creating  root words or basic vocab for your various conlangs, or do you
> >> use a text of something, or do you have another way of deciding what
> >> words to create, aside from just going through a dictionary?
>
> My own rather nuts-and-bolts approach:  After writing up the basic phonology
> and enough of the grammar of Kash to have a firm idea of how things should
> sound/act, I had about 200 basic words.  I then used Jeffrey Henning's
> Langmaker program to generate a lot of possible phonological words, then
> started assigning meanings in fairly haphazard way, mostly going by various
> semantic fields-- i.e things around the house, body parts, the natural world
> etc., number system, adjectives in various fields, plus opposites, verbs in
> various fields.  How well this would work with a language more
> phonologically and derivationally complex than Kash, I don't know.  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.
This is how I did Tepa as well. But I've noticed that in natural
languages there will be certain phonotactic sequences that appear
relatively frequently, while others, though possible, appear
infrequently or not at all (the accidental gap syndrome). I didn't get
that quite right in Tepa when I generated the list of possible Tepa
roots; my list had all phonotactic sequences for mono- and disyllabic
roots equally represented. (I think LangMaker has a way to encode
numerically prominent phonotactic sequences.)

When mapping meanings to roots, I found myself unconsciously selecting
certain types of roots over others (eg; roots ending in -u are not as
common in Tepa as roots ending in other vowels, though there is not
phonotactic prohibition against it). This process has given Tepa a
perhaps more natural feel. In fact, I'm wondering now if it wouldn't
have been better (if more tedious) to create words on the fly rather
than selecting from a automatically generated list. It certainly would
have revealed some interesting things about my phonotactic
predilections ...

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu