Re: Idea: diachronic change wiki

On Sun, 21 Jan 2007 13:53:57 +0800, Eugene Oh <un.doing@...> wrote:

>We could always create an article on Frath called, say, "Attested
>sound changes" and categorise those changes by way of ubiquity
>("universal, widespread, common, occasional, seldom, rare"), by
>language family, by trigger ("spontaneous, emulative, sprachbund") or
>some other such criteria. On the other hand we could just have a very
>long table with all these parameters listed.
We seem to be agreeing on Frath, so I've taken the initiative of creating a
skeletal page of this sort, with only a few section headings:
  http://wiki.frath.net/Attested_diachronic_changes
Maybe what I've made sections would be better off as separate pages, though.

I've always thought (have I mentioned this before?) that a useful
categorisation for a repository of sound changes from the conlanging
viewpoint would be to organize them according to what kind of interesting
sound or phonological process or system of contrasts they produce; or
perhaps the same but with a parallel organization for sounds in the input,
or in the conditioning environment.  This would help with figuring out where
some feature of some conlang you're trying to provide history for has come
from, or what's likely to happen with a given phonology.

Alex

>2007/1/21, Eric Christopherson <rakko@...>:
>> I've had the idea for a while of using a wiki as a place where people
>> could list diachronic changes they've run across -- especially
>> interesting or non-intuitive ones, but even obvious ones would be
>> cool, since what's obvious to one person might not be to another. I
>> have come across a lot of interesting changes, but never had any
>> centralized place to note them, and I figure a collaborative
>> repository for such information would be even better than a personal
>> one.
>>
>> I am interested in pretty much any sort of diachronic change --
>> phonological, lexical, semantic, morphological, syntactic, you name
>> it. (I suppose dialect variation might work into this somewhere too,
>> but it might complicate things.) Ideally, all entries would cite
>> sources, although as far as conlanging is concerned I'd rather read
>> about an interesting change without a source than not read about it
>> at all.
>>
>> What does everyone think of this idea? If it were to go forward,
>> would it be possible to use existing conlang wikis? What are some
>> potential problems?
>>