Re: making up words

--- "Sean M. Burke" <sburke@...> wrote:

> A question to all language constructors: once you've settled on the
> phonology and phonotaxis of your language-in-progress, how do you go
> about making up the phonological forms of new words (as opposed to
> their meaning)?
        Slowly, with occasional spasms of quickly.

> Do you use a random number generator?
        I've tried those, but I've never been quite satisfied with the
results.  I often ended up changing the generated words slightly, so I
gave up on that, and just create words as necessary.  Vaior has a web
presence, so the dictionary page keeps me from generating duplicates
by accident, which is always a problem early in a new language since I
usually start on paper.

> Or just play it by ear?
        Yep.  I also lift vocabulary from other languages from time to
time.  There's no real pattern to this.  So, the Vaior word for
"night" is "lail," stolen from Arabic.  As is the word for rose,
"varde."  Occasionally I lift stuff from Greek, "erachne" for spider,
or from Latin, "sipe" for onion.  Obviously the phonology has to be
tweaked to make things fit.  I'd guess between 3 and 5% of Vaior vocab
is generated this way.  The rest are grabbed out of the air as needed.

--
William Annis  -  System Administrator -  Biomedical Computing Group
"When men are inhuman, take care not to feel towards them as they do
towards other humans."                       Marcus Aurelius  VII.65