Re: Messy orthography (Re: Sound change rules for erosion)

At 12:30 PM 11/21/03 -0800, you wrote:
>Quoting Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>:
>
> > And I should add that, since I have thought it through over the last 24
> > hours, I think that things get kind of messy when you want to pluralize
> > a noun ending in a consonant.  It might form its plural by labialization,
> > or
> > it might form it in -Vn.  Unfortunately, you simply have to know - and
> > if
> > it forms its plural in -Vn, then you simply have to know which vowel.
> > It
> > is entirely conceivable that there could be another word <tatw> in the
> > singular with the plural of <tatwon>.  It could be any one of the five
> > vowels.
>
>While this idea in itself is plausible and naturalistic (and I like it),
>you might want to think about which one of the five vowels is generalized
>for use on new words,
I think it would be the -in ending, for no other reason than that that was
the original plural suffix that I've had in my mind for years before I ever
thought of the language having more than one way of making a plural.

>  and if this ending perhaps starts to replace the
>others. For example, surely the five vowels didn't occur with exactly the
>same frequency in the proto-lang, and the one(s) that were more common
>would have survived on more plurals and come to be viewed as regular and
>then spread to other words.
I'll have to play around with vowel frequency when I form the proto-language.

And you're right that there would be a natural tendency to simplify plural
formation when there are five or six possible for each noun ending in a
consonant.  As far as I know, those original final short vowels are
completely lost - except before the -n in the plural of the noun.  This
would produce the tendency to move all of those plurals to -in, which
everyone can remember, except in cases where there is a similar word with a
different meaning which takes its plural in a different -Vn.  In those
cases, it might make sense to keep the original plural in order to prevent
the words from becoming entirely homophonous.

How long would it take for the -en, -an, -on, and -un to all merge into -in
after the word-final short vowels were lost?  Would the separate plural
endings persist for a long time or a short time?  (I guess my question is
whether we're talking about a couple of generations or a couple of
centuries.)  There is written language at this point, but I don't know how
high the literacy rate is, though even the modern literacy rate is not
above 30%.

One question that I'll have to answer is whether loan-words ending in a
consonant become -in declension or labialization declension.

>I'm reminded of Welsh, which has had a very
>similar history and so inherits a rediculously large number of plural
>formations--but only one or two of those are active for neologisms.
I'm always wishing that I'd studied more Welsh when I had the chance...

Isidora

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