Re: OT: Time to cut loose? Mli Vjacgu nee Vjatjackwa

First:  All my best wishes for the delivery of your child. That's
something very special.
Now, you must feel your child already very intensely ... especially
when its protesting against something ;-)
NB: For me as foreign speaker, this sounds odd: "Delivery" for
"bringing birth to a child"? Is it really correct?

>I am looking for direction with the conlang I'm trying to take to
>usable-sketch status before I parturiate at the end of April.
>
>[snip]
>
>1) Are my latest additions to the sound change rules overboard?  The
>language description *with* the latest additions is at
>http://www.quandary.org/~langs/vjatjackwa/index.html , and without them
>at http://www.quandary.org/~langs/vjatjackwa/index.stage7.html .
>[snip]
A nice set of very different changes that surely wreak havoc ... .
Given enough time and intermediary stages for this changes to
materialise, there are for sure noot "overboard".

>2) Is it time to cut loose from running things endlessly through the
>sound-change engine, and start implementing what I called Stage 8 in
>the webpage:
>
>	"Stage 8: Regularize some paradigms by analogy. Add new affixes
>	and clitics using the new phonology. Apply considerable semantic
>	drift to obscure origins of word pairs/triads created in Stage 2.
>	Provide suppletive roots for extremely common words. Create a
>	grammar."
>
>Or shall I indulge my curiosity, and find out what happens to distinctiveness
>under the new sound-change rules if the noun-form prefixes "ke" and "ta"
>in the proto-language became infixes "ek" and "at", and similar infixation
>governed the table of correlatives?
It is for sure satisfying to fully flesh out a grammar as it brings
the language to life. Even more so if grammatical and sound changes
develop together, and a change in grammar is induced by a sound
change and vice versa. The possibilites! Btw, infixes are a very nice
thing. I don't know actually how or why they come into existence -
only that they are well attested and make a language even more fun to
learn. ("What, lirbniu is related to lio, just three infixes and a
different ending? How come I did not see that?")

I am for sure the wrong one to give any tips, though I would suggest
that you try the infix idea for one or two stages and a few words,
and look if the results are satisfying so as to not waste your time
on a language change that is ultimately unpleasant to you. I, for
one, have always problems discarding a change I already have worked
into my language's documentation. Thus, I try them out on a few
examples and look if I like the results.

On the correlatives: Your newest sound changes mean that the words
are actually easier to discern - a nice touch. I definitely like them
more than the older ones.

Christian