Re: making up words

Siyo!
The vocab of Kayasanoda is taken from French and
Cherokee--more abstract notions from the former and
more concrete from the latter.  But fitting them to my
phonology is a bear--my roots are strictly
two-syllable.  So with Cherokee, in which I often have
to deal with 6- to 8-syllable words, I have to scrunch
things.  And French sometimes has one-syllable words I
have to stretch out.  Doubling the vowel and slipping
an "h" in between usually suffices for the latter.
The former gets trickier.  I have saved to an Exel
file a spreadsheet with all possible first syllables
on one axis and all possible seconds on the other.
This prevents me from accidentally using the same
combination twice when I'm scrunching down those
Cherokee words and trying to pick out the right sounds
from them.  I've had to refine it--I've discovered
duplicates where I've taken the same word from both
French and Cherokee--the line between abstract and
concrete can be fuzzy.

I've downloaded and saved a random word generator for
future use, but as I don't have my own computer, I'm
waiting until I need it and hope to borrow the space
on a friend's hard drive.

Hope that gives you some ideas.
Dana!
Clint


--- "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)?
>
> Do you use a random number generator?
>
> Or just play it by ear?
>
> --
> Sean M. Burke    sburke@cpan.org
http://www.spinn.net/~sburke/


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