Re: basic vocab

On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, Roger Mills wrote:

> 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
Lucky you!  I did download Langmaker but it kept crashing.  (I'm using
Win98 on my boyfriend's computer.)  After a while, I just gave up; I
don't know enough programming at the moment to try to get the thing to
work even from source.

> 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.
Amen.  I have definite phonetic aesthetic prejudices.  Very bad.  I just
go through the phoneme-list and try to even out the distributions, though
I do allow my prejudices to show in some areas because I figure having a
perfectly even phoneme distribution would just look weird!  :-)

I *like* the Arabic tri-consonantal system because vocabulary happens in
chunks, not one by one.  I almost can't remember how I started without it!

YHL