Vocabulary Creation?!?


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.


Mark responds:

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.


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