Vocab building

Christopher Wright wrote:
> And speaking of this, how does everyone else make their
> vocabularies?
I have a machine readable-lexicon, and have carefully constructed
scripts that read it. I have scripts that can generate phonologically
correct words, of any part of speech, minding a arduously thought
out set of probabilities for each phoneme. They can check the lexicon
to ensure that there is no collision with existing words, and
tentatively apply every derivational form to ensure there is still
no collision.  When translating, and finding I have no appropriate
word, I run these scripts, generating eight or ten scrupulously
checked word forms at random.  I then stare at these words until
my eyes begin to bleed. I discard them and try again. Then I try
to find some contorted excuse to re-use an existing word (perhaps
'chewing' is the same as 'pounding'?) Then I hit a dictionary and
discover that the original term in English means something different
than I've been using it for the last thirty-five years. Then I
realize I've spent half an hour on this word and run the randome
generaton again, swearing that I'll just take the first result. I
take the fourth or fifth. Then I decide that word should mean
something related and the word I'm looking for will be derived from
it in a way that I haven't yet put into the language but should
have because of its obvious utility. Then I alter the scripts
(remember them?) to add this derivational rule to their lists, and
re-run them against the whole lexicon to make sure I haven't just
created a stack of new lexical collisions.  Then I go back to the
text I'm translating, and try the sentence in Quenya, Esperanto,
and Ubby-Dubby to see how a _real_ language designer would do it.

        Erich

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