Re: A ravening of ravens

DRAT! this went to Yahya privately:

Yahya Abdal-Aziz wrote:
> Does your conlang have any contronyms or (to use
> its synonym) antagonyms?
Kash-- not to my knowledge. Gwr-- almost certainly, since all *CVCV(C) roots
reduce to CV(C), and all derived final vl.stops > /?/, all derived final
nasals > /N/.
>
> And could one design a language to make the
> likelihood of contronyms small?
That, as Jim Henry points out, will depend on usage. It's easy to see how
some (e.g. "left") came about; others are metaphoric extensions ("screen")
of relatively recent origin.
>
> A related question: how to design a conlang to
> minimise - or at least delay - the occurrence of
> homophones - words of similar sound but different
> meanings.
Very carefully :-)))) It turns out, however, that even Kash can have
homonyms in the derivational system, since so many of the prefixes end in a
nasal, and -N+t/l/n and some r- all > -nd-.
In Gwr, homonymy is impossible to avoid, due to the process mentioned above;
however, many such forms do differ by tone--
all *{ptk}V+str{ptk}V# e.g. will end up /{ptk}V?/ with high tone; all
{bdg}V+str{ptk}V# will > /{bdg}V?/ with low tone.

Sometimes if I don't like an outcome, I'll introduce irregularities :-), due
to dialect borrowing of course.