Re: Word Construction for a New Conlang

Barry Garcia wrote:
> As for words, i use
> natlangs that have word construction i like, and follow its "pattern". For
> instance, Tagalog, which is where i derived the words for my most recent
> conlang, I noticed tagalog seems partial to K, N, Ng, A. So, most of my
> words have those sounds.
Interesting, I just invent words without any intent to model a natlang.
In fact, I'm sometimes embarrassed to discover that a given
phoneme/cluster is unusually prevalent, or exceptionally rare.  For
instance, a while back I discovered that I have very, very, few /u/'s in
my lexicon - most of the /u/'s in my texts are in grammatical suffixes.
While that's not uncommon for some phonemes to be rarer than others, it
still just feels ... wrong, especially since there are only 3 (6 if you
count length) vowel phonemes - /i/, /a/, /u/.  But, I decided to let it
stay, since I like the overall sound, and I don't want to risk messing
it up.  At other times, I'll compensate by keeping it in mind as I
invent new words - for instance, a while back, I noticed a high
incidence of /kl/ and /gl/, so I decided to avoid those in new words.
And, at other times, I'll change existing vocab, as when I added long
vowels to a few randomly selected words after introducing length.

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