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Re: Too far in to make major changes?

From:Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Date:Sunday, March 19, 2000, 21:47
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