Re: Keeping Track of Ambiguity in your Conlang?

On Fri, Aug 30, 2002 at 10:03:46AM -0400, Amanda Babcock wrote:
> Has anybody come up with a way of tracking accidental homonymy (due to
> inflections or compounding) in their conlang, short of devising an
> unambiguous scheme for its morphology?
I've tried, but haven't really succeeded. It does help somewhat that I
generally know most Ebisedian words by heart, and can double-check when
coining a new word whether ambiguities would result. I've *tried* devising
an unambiguous scheme for Ebisedian's morphology, but found it too
restrictive. Besides, it would've precluded some of the irregular words
that I just felt *compelled* to include in Ebisedian.

> Making it guaranteed-unambiguous only works for really regular agglutinating
> or isolating things, and I've always wanted to do something with lots of
> fusion and internal inflection.  I could accept a certain amount of ambiguity
> as naturalistic, but I'd want to keep it limited to a reasonable amount, as
> well as come up with likely paraphrases that the speakers would use in place
> of overly-ambiguous words.
Hey, that's a good idea. Some parts of Ebisedian tend to be a little too
ambiguous for my tastes; I guess I should start coining paraphrases for
them. :-) Thanks for the tip! :-)

> So I'd like to write something that would take the lexicon and apply
> every valid transformation to every word, recursive to several levels,
> and then find duplicates.  Has anyone tried this before?
[snip]

I *thought* about this many times, esp. since I've already written quite a
number of automated tools for working with Ebisedian. However, there are
too many irregularities in inflectional rules, etc., that would make this
impractical. I'd *like* to do something like this, but unfortunately I
suspect it's not feasible.


T

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