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> There are homophones, though. I haven't decided exactly what to do, if > I should accept them or not at all. In either case, I accept them to a > certain degree (lower than in natural languages): they have to be few, > and I have to think they will be disambiguated in context, and they > can't occur in the core of the vocabulary. I haven't accepted any > homophones yet, though. My solution is to manually look for > alternative interpretations of all words I create and see if there is > some ambiguity. If there is, I remove it. Hmm. If it were me, I wouldn't accept any, but it's your baby. How many part-of-speech consonants do you have? A simple jigger of the final consonant of your triliterals might remove the whole problem. > I think I won't accept them. But I do accept that the listener has to > know the language, though, to be able to parse it. That is, a word of > the form CVCCum might be either a verb or a noun, but only one of them > will exist. Fair enough. > > > voice structure in the middle of the word as possible. (What vowel > > are you representing with 'y'?) > > /@/. I have the phonology of Lirakdom here: > > http://veoler.googlepages.com/phonology.html Nice. > > > Have you thought of using some biliterals for really common words? > > They can even use the exact same vowel matrix, just shifted over: > > CVCV for verbs, say, and VCCV for others. > > No. I used to play around with both CC and CCC sometimes in earlier > sketches, but not for Lirakdom. Since any consonant could occupy any > position in roots, I will get CCh, CC', CCw, CCj and similar, and > introducing biliterals would only increase the ambiguity of my > morpho-phonology without giving me much in return. Out of curiosity, what does 'h' sound like as a final consonant? > > > I'd love to see what else you've developed, if you don't mind. (I > > don't really have enough concretely decided to share as yet, alas.) > > I haven't got much. Right now I'm working on expanding the lexicon, > since that is what I usually do last, and the grammar is more or less > finish, but I want some clay in my hands to work with. I know the feeling. I've been trying to nail down the morphology and grammar, but it all feels very abstract without some actual words to play with. > A thing which I'm proud of is my transfix stacking system I invented > 2007, which I haven't seen in any other language, nat or con. It > allows you to have an agglutinating language, where you can have > infinitely many affixes in any order, and at the same time have a > completely nonconcatenative morphology. It also solves a main problem > with taxonomic languages. That is *really* fascinating. Since my own language is partly taxonomic, it's tempting to swipe, too. My only concern is whether it's really learnable, given that it *is* completely new? I mean, 'bakem' isn't bad at all, and 'lafbekim' is doable, but eventually those vowels are going to wander really far from their homes. The brain-processing time is going to take a hit with the third modifier, my gut tells me. But perhaps two is all you really need? I assume that for Lirakdom, you don't actually start with 'kam', but with 'bakem'? BKM for the triliteral, and a-e for the verb type? How does the word 'Lirakdom' break down in this system? By the way, I'm guessing that RKD means the same thing in Lirakdom and Raikudu? Something like 'speak' or 'language', perhaps?