Re: Too far in to make major changes?

Herman Miller wrote:

> Adding tones to a language that doesn't yet have them is probably safe.
> What often happens when I decide to add phonemes to a language is that the
> added phonemes tend to be used mainly for new words, which are often the
> less frequently used words. Olaetyan had distinct /f/ (labiodental) and /P/
> (bilabial) phonemes, but only a /v/. I added a /B/ for symmetry, but very
> few words used it, mainly a few cognates of words with /v/ that diverged in
> meaning. I think I'm going to eliminate /B/ from the Azirian version of
> Olaetyan (tentatively called "Olaetian").
>
> But if you're adding tones to every syllable, you can assign each
> individual tone to common words from the beginning. One thing you might
> want to do is deliberately create a number of new words that only differ
> from existing ones in the tone. (I always like to have a number of
> unassigned words available.)
>
This is pretty much what I had planned on doing. I have a really
large collection of words, but I am coming up short on a lot of
words that I use daily that aren't in my original word list
(ULD). I do have quite a few unassigned words still available,
but I had thought that tones would be an interesting addition as
I create new vocabulary. I am still not sure-- but there is that
secondary project (Proto-luna) that has been shelved for a while.
If I don't do this with ea-luna, I might do it with the
still-univented mother language.

--

Mia (tuozin@dmv.com)