Re: Too far in to make major changes?

On Sun, 19 Mar 2000 00:50:36 -0500, Mia <tuozin@...> wrote:

>ea-luna is just about 4 years old now. It's a pretty large
>language (particularly by my standards). It continues to grow and
>change, mostly becoming more complex. Is this any time to go
>changing the phonology?
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.)

--
languages of Kolagia---> +---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/languages.html>---
      Thryomanes        /"If all Printers were determin'd not to print any
   (Herman Miller)     / thing till they were sure it would offend no body,
   moc.oi @ rellimh <-/  there would be very little printed." -Ben Franklin