Messy orthography (Re: Sound change rules for erosion)

This was supposed to have gone to the list.  Unfortunately, I did not check
the address in the To: field before I sent and it went directly to Heather
instead.  So I'll try again.  My apologies, Heather.

At 02:52 PM 11/19/03 -0800, Heather Fleming wrote:
>Sound changes are fun. I also highly recommend setting up your orthography
>before you run your sound changes, especially your vowel shifts, because
>that makes things nice and messy.
Oh, please! :-)  That's why the Trehelo had the sense to overhaul their
orthography (at least once.)  Sound changes for Trehelo are nowhere near
complete or set in stone, but they almost certainly involve the shortening
of word-final long vowels and complete loss of word-final short vowels in
order to end up with labialized consonants at the ends of words.  And with
modern literacy rates at no more than 30%, you really don't need to make
things any harder on people by insisting on spelling [tat_w] as <tatwi> or
<tatui> instead of <tatw> 'leaf'.  (Though I think their alphabet uses some
sort of ligature for my <tw> digraph.)  (And, BTW, those voiceless stops
are both heavily aspirated, but I didn't transcribe it.)

And I am definitely *not* setting up the orthography before their vowel
harmony rules go into effect and then later cease to be productive.  Once
they stopped harmonizing the vowels and mostly forgot what was underlying
the harmonized versions, they had the good sense to start spelling things
the way they sounded.  (Not that that didn't leave them with a bunch of
interesting relic forms in the language to complicate speaking and spelling.)

If I were to set up the orthography and then keep it the same after the
sound changes, I would have to spell the Trehelo word for 'fox' as
<siotune> (which is the proto-form, and quite possibly attested in writing
somewhere) and pronounce it as [So?On].  That's a little too far out of
synch for my sanity, so I spell it <shohon>.

I did think of a neat thing this evening to do to do with the Trehelo
labialized obstruents.  I've been saying that there were two grammatical
genders in the language.  Some of the nouns take their plural in -in, and
some of them take it in something else.  I think I thought of something a
little wicked to do with the "something else."  A reasonable way to divide
up the genders would be roots that end in a consonant vs. root that end in
a vowel.  (Of course, some of the roots that used to end in a vowel no
longer do, and I'll have to decide what to do with those words both in the
proto and the modern language.  I may have to make some major adjustments
to my thinking.  The -in suffix may have originally been simply -n.  I
think I have a good idea how to deal with these, and it is suitably
messy.  I just have to find a way to entirely eliminate the distinction in
vowel length.)  In any case, if the second gender is nouns which originally
ended in a consonant (and still do), then I can make the plural suffix for
that gender *-ua in the proto-language, and here's what happens:

First of all, all /u/'s before another vowel --> /w/.  Then the /w/ is
dropped and the preceeding consonant is labialized.  Final short vowels are
dropped entirely.  (Up above, you saw how *tatui --> tatwi --> tat_wi -->
tat_w by this process.)  This process has some ramifications for words
ending in a consonant taking their plural in *-ua.  Let's try a
hypothetical noun <cet> [ket].

*cetua --> cetwa --> cet_wa --> cet_w

What that means is that, in the modern language, the singular of the noun
is /cet/ and the plural is /cet_w/.  The second gender in Trehelo is made
up of nouns that form their plurals by labializing the final consonant,
whatever that consonant happens to be.  (I think I'm kind of glad that I am
not required to speak this language for communication purposes.)  There are
also plenty of consonant-final nouns in the modern language that do not
form their plurals by labialization.  Anyhow, I think I've done my
weirdness for the evening and should probably go and do something with my
children before I send them to bed.

Isidora

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