Re: Lexeme Request: Water and Fire

Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Hi!
>
> "David J. Peterson" <dedalvs@...> writes:
>
>>...
>>Henrik wrote:
>><<
>>May I ask what do would need a list of these words for?
>> >>
>>
>>Two reasons, actually.  There's a general idea that words in a
>>given conlang will be assigned based on "feel", and that this will
>>often cause words for, for example, "water", to all have liquids,
>>glides, open syllables, etc., so that a really strange word for
>>"water" would be [blOrkp@sk].
>>....
>
>
> Interesting.  I often actively avoid this, because I don't like this
> assignment by 'feel'.  At least for Tyl Sjok and Qthyn|gai, I used a
> random word generator, so any reasoning about 'feel' will not be valid
> anyway.
I haven't had much luck with random word assignment. I wanted to avoid
any unconscious bias with the vocabulary of Tilya, so I made a big list
of all possible roots and reordered it in a random order. I ended up
with "jarsa" for fire and "fokma" for water. I was never satisfied with
many of the random word assignments, which is one of the reasons I
eventually gave up on Tilya. "Jarsa" [Zarsa] isn't bad for "fire", but
it's hard for me to imagine "fokma" as being a good word for "water".

With Jaghri vocabulary, I chose the initial and second consonant
randomly and allowed for some choice in the selection of the first vowel
and final consonant. So "water" ended up as "yalra" and "fire" as
"xampa". I wasn't sure whether I should have included these in my
initial reply because of their random origin, but it does make an
interesting contrast.

There were also elements of random word assignment in the vocabularies
of other languages, but in the end I've ended up replacing a lot of the
random words (in Tirelat especially). Still, I think it can be useful to
include some random elements to avoid unconscious biases, in particular
the tendency to avoid words beginning with the same letter as a
corresponding English word. In a real language, *some* words would
happen to begin with the same initial sound by chance, and even more
detailed resemblances will pop up from time to time in randomly
generated lists ("kiv" for "cave", "ret" for "reptile") as the lists get
longer.