Re: making up words

Dirk Elzinga wrote:


>>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.

This is similar to my approach to Kash-- used Langmaker to generate a lot
but not all (around 5000, as it turns out) of the possible forms, V, VC,
VCV, VCVC, CVC, CVCV, CVCVC according to the phonotactics; longer forms are
possible, but those I usually devise separately.  The generated forms are
checked off as they're used; sometimes I have to devise a form that wasn't
pre-generated, or modify one that was (in particular, I was overly generous
with the /S/ phoneme).
I wouldn't deliberately be homophone-phobic, but so far there aren't many.
There are certain constraints (e.g. final /p/ is largely restricted to
"funny" words, and I think the language doesn't like too many final
syllables -CVC with idential C) but these are more in my mind than in the
language.......