A basic dictionary I just looked up gives 'incipient' as one meaning for inchoate. I tend not to use them interchangeably, though.

For me, inchoate gives the impression of something unformed, without pattern, or perhaps capable of being formed into any pattern - like the chaos which Yahweh turned into heaven and earth. So something inchoate, for me, can be as large as you like, so long as it has no real structure.

Incipient, on the other hand, always seems to me like something growing. It may be as perfectly formed as you like, but it will be small - a bud striving to become a rose. Though of course you can talk of incipient order in chaos. Whoops, am I contradicting myself? Perhaps incipient has a slightly wider range of applications than inchoate - you can probably use incipient in most situation where you'de use inchoate, but not necessarily the other way around.

I realise that these are hardly technical ways of looking at these words (and I'm sure other participants here will do a much better job at clarifying your question), but hey, I though I'd have a crack.

And yes, every time you have a new query, it is considered polite to start a new post.

cheer

the sunshine warrior