Re: CHAT: False friends - echos from the mother tounge

Quoting Harald Stoiber <stoiberh@...>:

> A precious day may be yours!
>
> What would you do in the following case? Let us say, you have a root
> "sat" and an inflectional ending "an"... would you avoid the remaining
> "satan"? Just a question. Are you trying to avoid inclusion of negative
> or unpleasant terms of your mother tounge into your conlang?
>
> I am in such a situation right now. My constructed language inflects the
> semitic way, putting vowels between three consonants. Should I reject
> s-t-n just because it will give me "satan" when inflected as an intransitive
> verb? It gives a strange ring in the ear, yes - but on the other hand it is
> (most certainly) my own cultural bias which makes it ring that way and
> not another. Hm, I am not sure how far it would take me if I would begin
> to avoid such intuitively unwanted "false friends". Probably it is ok to
> make the own conlang as different as possible from one's mother tounge
> but I guess it would cost  too much vocabulary if put to the extreme.
>
> Briefly considering what I would have to sacrifice leaves me unwilling
> to do so. Such a lovely root like h-r-n would need to vanish because of
> its gerund inflection "huren" which unfortunately means "whores" or
> "to go whoring" in my mother tounge German. More and more I come to
> the conclusion that I should not even try to rid my lexicion of these and
> other sort-of offensive roots. I guess it would be far too costly. And
> probably I should rather take the chance and accept the opportunity to
> lose my cultural bias in this cases. ;-)
>
> So, my question is: What do you think? How do you handle such cases?
Inconsistently!

I'd probably not include a root looking like some real-world word I feel bad
about, but I don't care if a regular derivative of an otherwise innocent root
have a nasty real-world homophone.

                                                      Andreas