Re: Phonologically redundant vocabulary

Jim Henry skrev:
> A while ago there was a thread about using phonologically
> redundant vocabulary (no minimal pairs).  I've been working
> (intermittently) on methods and scripts to generate lists
> of such words.  I started writing something which turned
> out to be a bit long for a listgroup post, so here it is as
> an article on my website:
Kijeb tends in that direction, although being a naturalistic
artlang.  Being severely math-challenged (not kidding: <
http://tinyurl.com/nulqo>) I didn't think in terms of n-
dimensional matrices but in terms of phoneme co-occurrences
that didn't suit my lámatyáve as expressed in Kijeb <
http://wiki.frath.net/Kijeb#Root_structure>.

I generated a list of possible roots using John Cowan's
everyword.pl <http://tinyurl.com/m7aba>, then ran this list
through a self-written perl script to eliminate roots with
unwanted phoneme co-occurrences. John's script has provision
for excluding contiguous unwanted letter combinations like
_yi, iy, wu, uw, kwy, gwy_ or two vowels after one another,
and preventing certain clusters from (co)occurring, but I
also wanted to exclude the same consonant, as well as two
stops or fricatives at the same point of articulation or two
nasals, from occurring twice in the same word, so I used
regular expressions like /([$C]).*\1/ and /([pbf]).*([pbf])/
to exclude unwanted roots.  FWIW /s/ got special treatment
so that /st/ and /sd/ [zd] were allowed, but OTOH /s/ can't
occur twice in the same word.  I also excluded some
combinations from occuring root-initially (i.e. they are not
allowed in the same syllable, but allowed across the
syllable boundary), and finally I applied some randomness in
insering _y_ /j/ at the end of consonant clusters and after
consonants.

Clearly I could have gone further, e.g. preventing /u/ and
labial consonants, or /j/ and /i/, from occuring together in
the same root at all, omitting the contrast between dentals
and velars before /i/ and /j/, or preventing two roots from
differing only in their vowel (although the latter would
have decreased the number of possible roots very much, since
Kijeb has only three vowels.

--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    "Maybe" is a strange word.  When mum or dad says it
    it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
    means "no"!

                            (Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)

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