Re: conlan/natlang coincidences

On Wed, 18 Jun 2003, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 11:21:21AM -0400, John Leland wrote:
> > John Leland here: this is almost exactly how I created Rihana-ye: I set up
> > a series of monosyllabic basic words, and *all* subsequent vocabulary has
> > been created by combining those words.
>
> Sounds time-consuming
>
> -Mark
>
Actually, since I internalized (most of) the basic words long ago, I can
generate most new words very rapidly.  There are a few examples (as with
"wivaro" in the Week 12 material) where I was dissatisfied with a word
and have kept tinkering with it, but that could happen with any word-generation
 system. If you mean setting up the original basic words was time-consuming,
I did it some years ago, and do not recall the exact time involved, but I do
not believe it was very long. There were only 90 words in the original
basic chart (it did not include the "number" column you see in my example) as
I had 18 consonants and 5 vowels. (This was based on the Hepburn system
for Japanese). Later changes made it less Japanese-looking by adding  the
vowel y (representing the English "long i") to create the number column and
adding the "five new sounds" (hl,tl,th, sl,ch)  Overall, this still gives
only 138 basic words, and some of these are rarely used.
John Leland