Zompist Bboard Again

Based on the similar topic in Languages…

I’ve not (that I know of) had this happen in any of my langs, but I could easily see it happening. What does the Board do?

I would probably just change the word to something less problematic. There is no point to courting unnecessary controversy just for the sake of one word out of thousands. That said, my conlangs have rather non-European phonology so this and similar issues have rarely come up. So many English words have phonemes or consonent clusters that can't appear in my projects so accidental resemblances are rare.

Well, on one hand, real languages have words in them that sound or look unfortunate in other languages all the time. On the other, conlangs are controlled by the person who makes them and can be changed in various ways to avoid this, at least for languages the creator knows.

I conlang in part for fun but also in part as a tie in to my writing. One language is derived from a real language, so there's only so much I can do to avoid things without changing the entire language in ways I wouldn't like. But I could still substitute a word for a related one that looks or sounds too close to a slur in some language I know. I don't know any languages in say, Africa, so if a word I come up with is a slur in one of those, I'm not likely to know about it while writing or making the language. Googling conwords that are important concepts in the book isn't surefire to stop this but it would catch the most obvious and egregious ones.

Another set of languages which won't be nearly as fleshed out and used in another book aren't based on irl languages at all aside from maybe some inspiration for the sound systems. Even then they aren't 1:1. I can always change the spelling or how things come together.

malloc wrote: ↑Mon Sep 11, 2023 9:58 am I would probably just change the word to something less problematic. There is no point to courting unnecessary controversy just for the sake of one word out of thousands.

I'd also remove such words. Most of my conlangs are a posteriori diachronic ones, so a problematic word may fall out of the sound changes I use, but I can always decide that the item in question was lost in this language.

I do more-or-less the same thing with any word I find phonetically displeasing — have it fall out of use before it takes the offending shape; if I want an older non-offensive form of the word to be present in the language, I simply have the language reborrow it from the earlier stage.