Re: *mumble* *grumble* sound changes *mutter*

Paul Bennett skrev:
 > So, I'm notating the sound changes I have been using for Thagojian. I
 > have  about 5KB so far, which seemed quite nifty, until I looked at
 > Thrjotran's  50KB file.

Indeed.  My English_sch.sch(*) is now at 8KB, and I've
hardly reached Anglo-Frisian!  Moreover there is a lot of
comment, explaining my notation of PIE and making all kinds
of technical notes -- mainly to myself, but I try to make
them useful for others too.

Perhaps we could/should co-ordinate our PIE notation so that
people easier can use different SCH modules together?  I
have thought out a version of my usual ASCII-friendly PIE
notation.  I have to use ^j ^w ^h rather than _j _w _h,
since there is no way to escape the underscore to make
schcompile see it as something else than the context
indicator.  Similarly my usual notation ,r ,l ,m ,n for
syllabic sonants doesn't work, so I came up with the really
ugly r^@ etc.  Add to that that ^ and @ have to be escaped
as \^ and \@, so you get r\^\@, and r\^\@: for the long!  I
didn't use r= because I use = to attach enclitic elements
(as well as - for proclitics, \+ for compound boundary and %
for "unstressable", e.g. %pr^@a-ghabho:n > for-giefan.
These "flags" seem to be the only way to sneak in the
morphological information needed to get Germanic stress and
loss of composition vowels right. The \ in \^ \@ \+ should
of course not be used in the input, but is necessary in the
rule and group declarations.

Of course it is quite possible to write rules for conversion between
different transcription conventions, but it is extra work.

BTW have you tried utf-8 I/O?  Did it work well? Did you
also try s/^\x{feff}//; to remove the BOM? I checked that
the BOM disappeared from the file, but not to actually
compile.  Personally I find typing unicode a nuisance, since
whichever way one has to look up the characters or codes in
some utility, either to create a keyboard or to enter them
in the file.  I rather then use something like CXS, possibly
with conversion to utf-8 later.

 > The more I look at the results, the less satisfied I am that they
 > plausibly represent an IE language at around 1000CE, when compared to
 > the  difference between PIE and (e.g.) Old English, or even Lithuanian.

Rate of change can be very different, but I see what you
mean!

 > There is going to me a *major* set of updates.

Been there, done that, with Slvanjek.  Happily I worked in
collaboration with Jan van Steenbergen and his Wenedyk.  It
may have taken more time, with all the mailing back and
fourth, but two pairs of eyes and two minds communicating
was probably for the better in the long run.

Rewriting the by no quite old Kijeb--Sohlob sound changes in
SCH syntax is also bound to lead to some, hopefully *not*
major, reworking. I will probably take the opportunity to
work out the fourth "dialect" I've been planning too. I know
some of its distinctive traits, but I'm sure more will come
up.

 > Be it noted that the language formerly known as Thagojian
 > should henceforth be known as Classical Thagojian (Version
 > 1.0). I guess I need to start paying attention to vowel
 > length and stress placement in PIE,

Are there *any* Old IE languages that simply lost length? I
think not.   OTOH the sources very seldom mark stress, I'm
afraid, which is bad news for me if I want to get Verner's
law and Siever's rule right...  I guess I'll mostly work
from Common Germanic forms anyway, with Torp being available
at the Germanic Lexicon Project.

 >
 > as well as learning  more about the nominal and verbal
 > stems, and the sound changes in both  Indo-Iranian and
 > Balto-Slavic. Not to mention the sound changes in Coptic
 > and Hebrew. Ach y fi.

How does B-S touch Thagojian?  For working out accent?

BTW how do you pronounce _Thagojian_?  I've been saying
[Ta'goj:an] in my mind, but I now see it's _ji_, not
_ij_, so is it [T&'goudZi@n]?

 > This will be no small undertaking, I fear...

You have my sympathy.

 > Paul



--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    "Maybe" is a strange word.  When mum or dad says it
    it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
    means "no"!

                            (Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)