Re: making up words

At 8:48 PM -0600 03/19/02, Peter Clark wrote:
>
>>  Do you use a random number generator?
>
>         I've tried this, and one of these days I'm going to try to
>write an improved
>version, but for every good word that a word generator creates, I have to
>throw out at least five. On the other hand, a word generator is good when you
>think that all the words are starting to sound too much alike.
I have generated all of the possible roots for Tepa/Miapimoquitch
according to the phonotactic patterns I think I want (thanks, John!).
I then check off forms from the list as they are made. This does two
things: 1) it ensures that I'm using phonotactically legal forms for
the lexicon (though the phonotactic patterns themselves are subject
to change), and 2) it ensures that I don't create homophones. I don't
have anything against homophones per se, but I don't think that they
should show up until you have around 8,000-10,000 vocabulary items --
this creates a nice phonotactic spread. Right now, Tepa/Miapimoquitch
has about 700 lexical items. My roots list has almost 16,000 distinct
forms, so I have a ways to go before I need to worry about homophony.
I'm not really planning on using all of the possible roots. It will
be interesting to see which roots don't get used and to feed those
generalizations back into the phonological description of the
language.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                  Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

Man deth swa he byth thonne he mot swa he wile.
'A man does as he is when he can do what he wants.'

- Old English Proverb