Re: Can realism be retro-fitted?

Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
> Sorry for late answer.  Real Life and so on...
>
> Herman Miller skrev:
>  > I've been wondering about the possibility of taking some
>  > of my existing languages and developing their historical
>  > background to make them more realistic and less artificial-
>  > seeming. I recently finished reading Guy Deutscher's _The
>  > Unfolding of Language_ which has been mentioned here
>  > lately; one of the things that stood out was the role of
>  > analogy in creating new patterns.
>
> Analogy is important, but it should not be overdone or
> overstated, especially not in phonology.
Agreed, but here I was mainly thinking of some kind of process that
could end up producing something like the regular morphology of Tirelat.
I can see how it's confusing to jump from there to a question about the
historical sound changes. But I assume the sound changes were for the
most part regular.

> I would recommend to decide a-priori on the lámatyáve --
> phoneme inventory, phonotactics -- of the ancestor, compare
> it to that of the descendant and brainstorm for ideas how
> the phonemes of the descendant may derive from the phonemes,
> allophones and phoneme combinations of the ancestor. Even
> though real language change isn't telic it has its
> advantages to work telically in historical conlanging! :-)
> In fact I think it's necessary, unless you devise a computer
> program which randomly chooses and applies soundchanges --
> which of course would be an interesting thing to do! :-q
It sounds like that's worth a try. A few conditioned splits and mergers
should eventually provide enough raw material.

>  > (which involves a lot of work on features that may not
>  > even make it into the future language system),
>
> Not necessarily; since you are in a position to decide what
> features you want in the descendant language you need design
> only those features for the protolanguage. The analog in
> real historical reconstruction is that no features that have
> been lost in all descendants can be reconstructed for the
> protolanguage.
But in that case you're starting with two or more existing languages and
seeing what they have in common. If what you have to compare is French
and Spanish, you won't end up with the case system of Latin, but what
I'm trying to set up is a situation in which most of the complexities of
the ancestor language have been worn down over time. What I'd like to
end up with is a language that still has some quirks, some relics of its
history, which after some careful engineering by Sangari language
designers could be the source of the Tirelat language.

But Tirelat, like all languages, must have borrowed vocabulary and other
features from neighboring languages, so in order to simulate that going
forward, you need to start with a whole set of languages with their own
historical patterns of development. Most of the words of those other
languages won't end up as part of Tirelat. If you work backwards, on the
other hand, you can limit borrowing to the subset of words that don't
seem to fit the pattern of direct descendants.

>  > One thought that might explain the long vowels is that
>  > earlier versions of the language had more diphthongs,
>  > which simplified to single vowels. Notably, /a i u/ are
>  > more common than the other vowels.
>
> Of course /a i u/ is a perfectly possible vowel system. May
> the other vowels have arisen as positional allophones?
It's possible, but I haven't worked out the details.

> Looking at the Tirelat script page you referred to
> <http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/Tirelat/script.html> (there
> alas no table, but I sketched one to get an overview) i see
> that one way you could go would be to assuume an earlier
> phonemic system like:
>
>   *p *p;  *t *t;    *tS *tS;  *k *k;
>
>   *b *b;  *d *d;    *dZ *dZ;  *g *g;
>
>   *f *f;  *s *s;    *S *S;     *x *x;    (*?)
>
>   *v *v;  *z *z;    *Z *Z;     *G (*G;)
>
>   *m *m;  *n *n;               *N *N;
>
>   *w (*w;)             *j                (*h)
>
>           *r *r;
>
>           *4 *4;
>
>           *l *l;
>
> Items in parentheses may or may not exist: *w; and *G; may
> be non-distinct from *j.  *N; is probably not distinct from
> *n; and the single phoneme may be [J].  *? and *h may come
> in handy to get diphthongs later! :-)
/N/ is the least common of the nasal phonemes, so I can probably figure
some way of getting it -- from /nG/ for instance. I did have /H/ in some
versions of Tirelat, and I want to bring that back in some form or
another in one of the ancestral versions, so that could fit in the slot
for /w;/. But I don't know if I want a whole extra set of palatalized
consonants just to explain a few vowels in the modern language. Still,
one of the possibilities I've been considering is the former existence
of short vowels like the ь and ъ in the history of the Slavic languages,
which persist in the modern language as what I've been calling an
"epenthetic" schwa in words like "pnaav" [p@'na:v], which is left out
when a prefix is added: "le-pnaav" [lEp'na:v]. On the other hand, if the
original form of the word is something like "pъnaav" (or "pъnaavъ"), it
makes just as much sense that way; short unstressed vowels can easily
drop out in contexts like that.

> I see now that you may also start from an earlier
> seven-vowel system:
>
>     *i                       *u
>
>         *e               *o
>
>             *E       *O
>
>                 *a
>
> with a following somewhat skewed chain-shift:
>
> *e > *E
> *E > & > a
> *a > Q > O
> *O > o > @
> *o > u
> *u > i\
>
> o > @ happens when there are only three heights in
> the front vowels, to remove one height in the back,
> assuming that /E/ /O/ are really mean mid.
>
> As you see there are several possibilities! :-)
Yes, I think this sort of development might fit better with what I have
in mind. But of course I could come up with many alternatives (and
probably will, before I settle on something).

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