Re: Keeping Track of Ambiguity in your Conlang?

On Aug/30/2002, Amanda Babcock wrote:

> 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.
        Well, in the natlangs that I know there are usually a few
homonyms. They are differenced by a diacritic accent in written form.
For example, in galician:

        "fóra" -> "outside"
        "fora" -> singular third or first person of the subjuntive of "to be"

        Anyway, there's also words that just differ in pronunciation. My
mother usually teases me because I can't distinguis between "pega" (the
black and white bird relative of the crow, "urraca" in spanish) and
"pega" (singular third person of the present of "to hit" or "to stick").
Their only difference is that the first is pronounced with closed "e",
and the second with open "e". Or was it the other way? I never remember
it :-)

        And there's also the homonyms that you can't tell the difference
out of context: in spanish, "era" (somewhat archaic form to call the
land outside a farm or country house) and "era" (singular third or first
person of the imperfect past tense of "to be") are exactly pronounced
the same, to my knowledge.

--
        Roberto Suarez Soto

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