Re: Constructing plausible language evolution

轡虫 skrev:
> Apologies if this question has been asked before. I vaguely remember
> something similar, but wasn't able to find it in the archives.
>
> Is there any good resource for learning how to create plausible
> sound/morphosyntactic changes for a conlang? Right now, I can only
> guess based on what I know about a (very) limited number of (mostly
> Slavic) languages, but I'd like to be able to go further than that.
>
> I assume that there's no resource that sets out to teach just this,
> but I'm hoping that there are some books  that you think would be
> helpful, even if it's not the main thrust of the book; I accept
> learning something else as a possible price to pay. ;)
>
> --
> kutsuwamushi
> (Gmail warning: Beware of a wrong reply-to address!)
>
>
Indeed reading a lot about actual language change to get
a feel for how it works, and I agree that Campbell's book
(which I finally got from my library) is probably THE best
place to start.  Once you worked through that you may want
to read some historical grammars (that's what they're called,
they usually contain historical phonology as well) of specific
languages and language groups the "style" of which you want
to emulate.

I have often done this kind of thing but am horribly bad at
creating human-readable descriptions of the changes.  For an
example that atypically *did* make it into a description see
<http://wiki.frath.net/Knoshke>.

--

/BP  mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X!)
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As Uriel Weinreich said (in Yiddish), a language is
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