Re: Can realism be retro-fitted?

Hallo!

On Fri, 19 Jan 2007 12:19:46 +0100, 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. If it were all-
> persuasive comparative reconstruction would be impossible,
> which it probably isn't -- even though cases where the
> ancestral language is known, like Romance, show that reality
> is rather complicated, and that reconstructed protolanguages
> are highly idealized. However few today would go so far as
> to deny the regularity of sound change as Schuchardt
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Schuchardt> did. If you
> read German the whole story is at:
> <http://tinyurl.com/2emh6j>. The WP article on the
> comparative method takes up most of the issues too:
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method>.
Yes.  The Neogrammarian assumption of strictly regular, exceptionless
sound changes is a simplification of the facts, but a useful one.
There are surely cases of analogy and sporadic sound changes (which,
however, could be considered conditioned regular sound changes with
especially complex and specific conditions that happen to occur only
in a small handful of words, maybe even only one word), but sound
change *is* overwhelmingly (though not perfectly) regular, and as
test cases such as the Romance languages show, most reconstructions
based on the Neogrammarian hypothesis happen to be more or less correct.

> In spite of all this the assumption of exeptionless sound
> laws is a methodological necessity for doing reconstruction,
> since it is the only thing that allows us to project
> anything backwards at all, and experience from Romance and
> other similar cases show that it is correct very much of the
> time -- over 90% usually. In fact we have to assume
> regularity until actual evidence points another way, since
> else the line between evidence-based reconstruction and
> arbitrary a-priori conlanging would be erased.
Exactly.  It is the only guideline we have when it comes to
reconstructing common ancestors of language families.  If one was
to throw out the notion of regular sound changes, one would also
have to give up the comparative method - and end up standing alone
in the dark.

>        (This is not
> to denigrate arbitrary a-priori conlanging, but if you are
> into both conlanging and comparative linguistic
> reconstruction you need to keep in mind which hat you're
> wearing at any moment! :-)
Well put.

>  > I'm familiar in a general sense with how the sounds and
>  > meanings of words can change over time. But one of the
>  > problems I've always had in reconstructing the history of
>  > a language that doesn't have one is trying to come up with
>  > a consistent set of rules that relate the sounds of the
>  > hypothetical older language to the already documented
>  > language.
>
> 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.
Exactly.  This is a common situation for the diachronic conlanger.
You have a language A which looks this way, and you want to evolve
a language B from it which you want to look that way; which way
to go?  That is indeed an interesting challenge, especially if
the phonemics of both languages are typologically very different.

>       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
Let me mention a case in point, namely my own Albic language family.
As those of you who have been around long enough probably remember,
it started as a derivative of Tolkien's Quendian languages, and the
phonology of Proto-Albic still owes a lot to that of Proto-Quendian.
However, I have managed to draw a connection to Indo-European.
I found that the phonologies of both families could be reconciled with
each other quite well.  Of course it helped that I could change
Albic to fit, but it turned out that I could do it without major changes.
What I did was to apply internal reconstruction to
Proto-Indo-European in order to recover an earlier stage of it,
and use *that* as the protolanguage from which I developed
Proto-Albic by means of regular sound changes.

You may ask why I connected Albic to Indo-European at all.  Well,
this connection suggested itself to me, especially after reading
the book _Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans_ by T. Gamkrelidze
and V. Ivanov.  I found that Proto-Indo-European showed traces
of an earlier type of the language that was coming close to what
I was about to do in Albic, so I decided that Albic could be a
sister family of Indo-European which preserved this pre-PIE
linguistic type.  It also made sense in light of the discovery
of the Black Sea Flood, which gave me a historical nucleus for
a variation on Tolkien's Cuiviénen myth.  And so on.  It just
made sense.

>  > 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).
>  >
>  > In the long run, is it better to start with one or more
>  > artificial proto-languages and develop them forward
>  > through time
>
> That's the way I usually do it.
Yes.  Same to me.  Working forward is much easier than working
backward, especially if you try to work backwards from more than
one language :)

>  > (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.
>
> This makes a reconstructed protolanguage a rather special
> thing, and different from the actual prehistoric language(s)
> that once existed in that you can only reconstruct the
> regularities and those parts of structure which survive --
> or leave a mark, the technical term is "leave a reflex" or
> "be reflected" -- in the descendant languages.
Yes.  Proto-Romance, as reconstructed from the Romance languages,
is not the same as Latin.  Much of Latin has not survived in *any*
Romance language and thus cannot be reconstructed for Proto-Romance,
and is only known because Latin is richly attested in itself.
The case of Romance, used abundantly in textbook to demonstrate
the comparative method, also shows the limits of said method.

>       Any
> irregularities and anything which analogy, phonetic loss
> ('merger with zero'), syntactic and morphotactic change
> (which AFAICT are forms of analogy -- spontaneous or
> deliberate innovation by speakers is probably possible but
> even less reconstructible than irregularity) has done away
> with cannot be reconstructed, so a protolanguage (
> '*asterisk language' ) is only a subset of the actual
> prehistoric language. Interestingly Tolkien implicitly
> raised some of these issues -- notably deliberate innovation
> by speakers -- in his historical conlanging.
>
> However the real fun begins when you develop a protolanguage
> with certain phonemics, phonotactics and grammatical
> features, then design different historical phonologies(*)
> leading to different descendants, and see what kind of havoc
> the different historical phonologies wreak with the
> phonemics, phonotactics and grammar. That is IMNSHO the real
> gratification of diachronic conlanging.
Yeah!  I call diachronic conlanging the "royal discipline" of
naturalistic conlanging.  Geoff Eddy, in an earlier version of
his page on Liotan, wrote about "conlanging fun you just can't
get from Esperanto(*)".  It gives a good measure of depth and
realism to your language.  Besides, most worlds will have languages
which are related to each other (a world in which all languages
are isolates is not very realistic), and *the* way to do that is
to derive all those related languages diachronically from a single
ancestor.  And it is of course *fun*.

(*: You *can* get that kind of fun from Esperanto - by using it
as the protolanguage for a family of your own, of course.)

> [...]
>
>  > or to start with an existing language and develop a
>  > history for it?
>
> I tried that with Sohlob, but the protolanguage (Kijeb)
> ended up somewhat bland and as I made the phonological
> changes more and more interesting the descendant language
> ended up changing almost as much as the protolanguage. At
> least for me this is a Good Thing and not something to
> resist, since it enhances naturalism in both ends. I regard
> it as a natural part of a-priori historical conlanging. The
> more organic it is the better!
Yes.  It is the same to me.  There are people who delight at
perfectly regular engelangs, and there is nothing wrong with that,
but that is not what I want.  I want naturalism.  I want something
that looks *real*.

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