Re: Some conlang questions

On Friday 27 December 2002 01:15 pm, Michael Fors wrote:
> Hello everybody!
        Welcome! I see Christophe has already extended his greeting (Jan? You there?
:), so you are now officially inducted into (onto?) the list.

> To my questions:
> 1. I am having problems with the vowels of my conlang. Since I want to make
> a naturalistic language, I want a naturalistic vowel system. The only
> problem is that I don't know what that is. I mean, is it natural for a
> language to have many front vowels, rounded and unrounded, and two rounded
> back vowels? That's one of the questions that keeps me awake at night. =)
        Sure. Languages can have really strange and wacky vowel patterns, as well as
disgustingly regular ones. I recommend that you check
http://www.cix.co.uk/~morven/lang/vowels.html for a survey of vowel system.
I've found only one (minor) error on the page, in which the author claims
that there are no languages with less than three vowels--to the best of my
knowledge, Abhaz and Adygh have only one vowel, although some claim that they
have two.

> 2. I also want to make "daughter"-languages to my language. I have been
> reading some about sound change, but I wonder if there is some sort of a
> table for sound changes? So I can see which changes that are likely to
> occur and which that are less likely.
        A couple of months ago, I considered compiling a list of all known sound
changes, but abandoned it because a.) it would require too much time and
effort and b.) I have too many other projects that I need to focus my
attention on. My recommendation is to find a book on historical linguistics
and learn all the ways in which languages change--not only phonological
change, but syntactic and semantic change as well.

> Micke Fors
> Human
        Relieved to hear it, but isn't this slightly redundant? :)
        :Peter

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