Re: Vocab building

Of course, if there are collisions (i.e., you find yourself producing the
same word with two different meanings), this may be very naturalistic.  One
of the things I regret in Teonaht is the paucity of multiple meanings for a
word; recently I've been setting about trying to correct this fault, so that
T. can have more punfulness.

Your account, though, is hilarious.  I'd like to have a machine-readable
lexicon.  I do everything by hand.  I don't even know how to make my MS
Excel work for me.

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan nuehra celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
"My shadow follows me, putting strange, new roses into the world."
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teoeng.html



----- Original Message -----
From: "Erich Rickheit KSC" <rickheit-cnl@...>
>
> 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
>
>