Re: Using word generators (was Re: Semitic root word list?)

Jörg wrote:
<<
First, few natlangs have "balanced" phonologies - some phonemes occur
more frequently than others.
 >>

Of course, what I meant, and what should have been inferred by
what I continued to write, was that it was an unrealistically unbalanced
phonology.  On the other hand, if you take a look at that letter-
frequency page, it's not necessarily the case that all languages are
unbalanced like English.  At least one of those languages I looked at,
for the vowels, for example, used four of them 10% of the time, and
the fifth 8% of the time.  That's just about as even a balance as you
can realistically expect.

Hmmm...  The link I have to it displaying the actual html...

http://www.cryptogram.org/cdb/words/frequency.txt

Oh, I get it.  Replace the .txt with .html:

http://www.cryptogram.org/cdb/words/frequency.html

H. S. Teoh:
<<
I agree. English itself shows this: J, Z, and X occur very rarely
compared to, say, E. This does not seem to be a problem in practice. :-)
 >>

Right, but this is a slightly different matter.  Would you contend
that the sounds /dZ/, /z/ and /ks/ rarely occur in English?  /z/,
at the very least, occurs in...what, almost 50% of plural nouns?

The problem is that my alphabet is pretty much phonemic.  Unless
I use the letter for the bilabial click, there is no bilabial click.

Jörg wrote:
<<
Second, you can easily avoid and correct
imbalances by looking at what you have already invented, and use the
underrepresented phonemes more frequently and the overrepresented ones
less frequently as you progress.
 >>

I don't know about the "easily" part...  I wonder: is there a simple
way to calculate letter frequency in one's vocabulary?  I bet
there probably is, but not for folks like me that use a word processing
document for a dictionary...  I'd switch to a spreadsheet, but it's
just so ugly...  And too practical!  ;)

-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

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