Re: Can realism be retro-fitted?

Roger Mills wrote:
> Herman Miller wrote:
> But not all tone patterns
>> fit into that system, so I had to assume they were borrowed from some
>> other language, or were different in some other way (having a special
>> tone pattern that was used for emphasis).
>
> It could be that surrounding consonants could cause tonal variation; maybe
> the morphology? also dialect borrowing, the catch-all culprit.
Actually, now that you mention it, I think the answer I came up with at
the time is that (at least some of) the anomalous words may have been
compounds of shorter roots; the tone patterns for monosyllabic roots may
have been different.

>> In the long run, is it better to start with one or more artificial
>> proto-languages and develop them forward through time (which involves a
>> lot of work on features that may not even make it into the future
>> language system), or to start with an existing language and develop a
>> history for it?
>
> Starting with a proto-lang. is probably more desirable and realistic; and as
> you create the rules, you'll get ideas as to how they could differ in other
> branches; but that's probably too late for your purposes since you already
> have several completed languages. Assuming some of them are related, it
> should be possible to figure out some immediately preceding stages, then
> extrapolate to even earlier stages.
I tried to work out the common ancestor of Cythin and Rynnan (related
Nelya languages, which back then I would've called Elvish) a long time
ago, but I really didn't know anything about historical linguistics back
then. I could give that another try and see what I come up with.

>> For a specific example, I thought of taking Tirelat and trying to
>> develop a history for it. Tirelat is a very regular and artificial
>> language, which may actually be a result of engineering a more natural
>> language to eliminate irregularities.
>
> Is there a full description of the phonology, and a reasonably large vocab.
> we could look at?  A few years back 4 of us (IIRC) did a sort of
> reconstruction-game; I got Elliot Lash's Silindion and some very
> well-thought-out relatives; David Peterson got Kash and a bunch of very
> ad-hoc created relatives; but it worked, even though there were loose ends
> and mysteries remaining at the end.
http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/Tirelat/script.html has a reasonably
complete description of the sounds of the language, with examples of
each phoneme in various positions.

Much of the Tirelat vocabulary is in a disorganized state (from all the
changes that happened to the language; unfortunately I got carried away
with the search-and-replace feature), but that could be an advantage
since if one explanation doesn't work in one case, an alternative form
of the same word may exist. One problem is that I developed the
vocabulary for years as a language that could be used by humans on
present-day Earth, but later assigned it to the non-human Sangari on a
different planet. Still, even though I need to assign new meanings to
many of the words, I should be able to find local equivalents for many
of them.

> But to start with something
>> simple, the vowel system: Tirelat has 7 vowels /a e i @ 1 o u/, which
>> may be long or short. Diphthongs do exist, but only /ai/ is common;
>> combinations like /ia/ and /ui/ can be analyzed as consonant + vowel
>> (/ja/, /wi/), except for the fact that there is no /ji/ or /wu/. So
>> where do these 7 vowels come from?
>
> Umlauting? Stressed vs. unstressed? Pre-tonic vs. post-tonic position? Older
> diphthongs? Lost consonants (things like h,?,G et al.) resulting in vowel
> coalescence? etc. etc.
I only just started looking into this question, so it's possible that
one of these things might turn out to work out. But for every possible
explanation, it takes time to examine the vocabulary for possible
counterexamples. Actually, stress could be a good possibility to
consider; it's not distinctive in the modern language.