Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: making up words

From:Stephen Mulraney <ataltanie@...>
Date:Wednesday, March 20, 2002, 21:46
On Tue, 19 Mar 2002 15:51:27 -0700
"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? >
Occasionally a nice word pops into my head, but I find that trying to produce one on demand is as easy as getting hair-gel from a rock, so I almost always use a random-word generator to generate a few hundred words and read over them with the meanings I want in my mind. Usually I won't actually use any of them, but I'll see a few that give me ideas, and I modify these as I please. Seems to work fairly well, though it's rather labour intensive. If I forced myself to make up words without any such stimulus, they'd all be the same shape and conform to a terribly boring (and not even very nice) phonology like {a i T f k} ;). I think of it as a linguistic analogy to monte carlo computational techniques - wait until the random number generator produces the word that's just on the tip of your tongue ;) (or epiglottis) stephen

Reply

Danny Wier <dawier@...>