generate etymological roots automatically (was: Re: poll 30? (long...Sal at her most voluble))

At 14:18 26.5.2003 +0100, And Rosta wrote:

>Very nice! Perhaps you have hit on one possible solution to the downside
>of automatically generated vocab, viz the flavour of excessive arbitrariness.
>That is, generate the etymological roots automatically, & then run them
>through regular sound changes and other processes such as analogy,
>folk-etymology, metanalysis, etc. etc., and add them into compounds and
>other derivatives that in turn are run through the same processes.
>There'd still be a lot of work involved, but it would overcome the agony
>of inventing the word in the first place, while at the same time resulting
>in the sort of lexical patterning that gives words their sense of fitness.
>
>--And.
Now that's exactly what I do, and in general the results
are satisfying. This kind of thing -- namely apparent
"relatedness" between computer-generated has happened to
me once or twice earlier, though I don't remember anymore
the exact instances, since at those times the roots/lexemes
involved were not so central to the conculture.  After a
while they would be indistinguishable from those cases where
I had swapped meanings of doctored with the roots to achieve
relatedness.

/BP 8^)
--
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melrochX@melroch.net (delete X)
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