Re: Can realism be retro-fitted?

On Sun, 14 Jan 2007 20:00:03 -0600, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:

>The problem with taking an existing language to start with is that I
>have to come up with a historical explanation for each feature of the
>language, or modify it in such a way that I can more easily explain it.
>For instance, when I examined the tone patterns of two-syllable words in
>Simîk, I noticed that a few patterns were much more comman than the
>others, which could be explained by development from a simpler tone
>systme in earlier versions of the language. 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).
Could there have been a lost consonant that changed the common tone-patterns
into the uncommon ones in these words, or a lost phonation type or laryngeal
feature, or something like vowel length?

>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?
Well, 'better' is, as usual, not really applicable except with respect to a
particular explicit set of goals.  But it's easier to get a solid diachrony
working forward than backward, the more so if you're resistant to changing
the daughter language.

How fleshed out do you want to make the protolang?  If you're going to make
a full-fledged conlang of it, then unless you don't wish to have another
conlanging project I wouldn't worry about spending effort on features that
don't make it into the daughter, since the proto-lang will be just as
presentable on its own.  On the other extreme you could start with only a
sketch of a phonology (you seem to be focusing on phonology) and avoid that
lot of work.

>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.
Too bad... if Tirelat was less regular, you could look to the irregularities
for starting points for figuring out sound changes in working backwards.
Since that's not the case, are there, say, any patterns in the lexicon that
look like they might be remnants of formerly productive morphology,
distorted by sound change?

>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?
>
>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. But any patterns
>in the data would have to be coincidental at this point, since the
>Tirelat vowel system wasn't developed with a history in mind. So in a
>case like this, would it be better to come up with an arbitrary history
>that doesn't fit all the facts (e.g. proto-language /o/ develops into
>/@/ except in the vicinity of a bilabial consonant, where it remains
>/o/, after which other phonetic changes occurred which caused /f/ to
>merge with /x/ resulting in a phonemic distinction between /x@/ and
>/xo/)? As it happens, /xo/ is slightly more common than might be
>expected, but /p@/ and /b@/ do exist, which can't be explained by the
>hypothetical sound changes.
I'd go for the 'arbitrary' history that plays off whatever distributional
peculiarities you have, even if it's not a perfect match.  In a natlang the
synchronic distribution is bound to be a little bit off the diachrony, both
because of words without an internal history (borrowings but also
ideophones, onomatopoeia, sound symbolism, whatever) and because of
exceptions to the rules.  And if there's a problem that's too large-scale
for these sorts of explanations you can invoke dialect mixture and say that
some words come from a dialect with a given set of changes and other words
from a dialect without.  This last seems especially appropriate to Tirelat
if you imagine it to have undergone some imposed standardization, with the
standardizers picking words from multiple dialects.

Alex

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