Re: basic vocab

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.

In fact, that approach caused a big surprise some time ago.  I created
categories in Shoebox for numbers of syllables, place of stress, and
derived/root, and organized the root words by syllable-count and place
of stress.  I discovered, to my surprise, that the stress was *not*
usually root-final, as I'd thought (and originally intended to be the
most common place), but on the second syllable.  The fact that 71% of
the roots were 2 syllable caused root-final stress to be most common,
but in the 3-syllable roots I found a majority were stressed on the
second syllable.  Specifically, out of 63 trisyallbic roots, 3 were
stressed on the first syllable, 35 on the second, 25 on the last.  Now
that I look at it, I see that second-position stress does appeal to me
better than the original idea of final-stress.  If I'd used a random
generator, the language wouldn't've sounded as nice to me.

Among the 248 disyllabic roots, there were 204 stressed on second
syllable, and 44 on initial.  Clearly a strong bias against initial
stress (4.8% of trisyllables, 17.7% of the disyllables, 15.11% of
polysllables)

Interestingly, there seems to be a higher-than-normal proportion of
"negative" words like "evil", "ugly", "wicked", "dirt", "enemy", etc.,
in the initially-stressed words.

For me, W is the most esthetically-pleasing of all my conlangs, and I
think the main reason is that I've allowed it to develop forms I like.
Plus, when I first set it up, I gave it a pleasing structure.

Incidentally, I've also set up a filter in Shoebox called "illegal",
which shows only words violating phonotactics, just in case I
accidentally create a word with illegal phonotactics (or if I decide to
forbid certain clusters).

--
Dievas dave dantis; Dievas duos duonos
God gave teeth; God will give bread - Lithuanian proverb
ICQ: 18656696
AIM Screen-Name: NikTailor