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Re: making up words

From:Dirk Elzinga <dirk_elzinga@...>
Date:Wednesday, March 20, 2002, 17:27
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