Posted by Gareth Wilson on 8:17 7/3/02
In reply to: Vocabulary Creation?!? posted by Matt on 17:01 7/1/02
I do a lot of random word creation for my languages, and I've found one problem is the words can end up resembling English words or comic-book sound effects, and sounding silly. Considering that Dutch contains /zorg/ , /ik/ and /mui/, and the Japanese word for "restitution" is /fukkyu/, this shouldn't really be a problem, but it still bothers me. One solution is to make the phonological constraints tighter- get rid of all or most of the final consonants and cut down on consonant clusters and you'll reduce the resemblance to English.
Good point... another idea is to make sure the phonology isn't much like English. Introduce a few unusual consonants. The Roman alphabet also, I think, makes it all too easy to have just 5 vowels.