Re: History of Yasaro

Herman Miller wrote:
>In the interest of realism, I've been wanting to go more into the histories
>of some of my languages, trace the etymologies of words, and compare
>related languages. I'm starting with Yasaro, since it's not closely related
>to the other languages, so I can more freely design ancestor languages and
>pick sources for Yasaro words.
>
>One thing I'm wondering is how many sound changes are typical in languages
>over a historical period? In other words, what's an approximate number of
>different historical sound changes that would have occurred from Latin to
>the Romance languages, or Classical Chinese to the modern Chinese
>languages?
There's a thred with fairly comprehensiv lists of sound changes over a
certain period (many of the Latin  to Romance chains included) in the L&L
Museum of the ZBB. I think it masq'rades under the name of "Correspondence
Library".


>Between Middle Yasaro and Modern Yasaro, /a~/ and /u~/ merged to a single
>phoneme, /o~/ (but both /a~/ and /u~/ are preserved in the spelling).
>Before stops, a homorganic nasal was inserted after a nasal vowel (/e~p/ >
>/e~mp/), and the vowel then lost its nasality (/e~mp/ > /emp/). The
>question now is where did the nasal vowel come from in the first place?
>Does it make sense for /em/ to turn into /e~/ at some point, then go back
>to /em/? But I can't think of many other reasonable sources for nasal
>vowels. Could a sequence like /kna/ turn into /ka~/?
I suspect /kna/ would initially be more likely break to /k@~na/, but you
could then apply nasal spreading to get /k@~na~/ and then elide the /@n/
part...

There's also a phenomenon called "rhinoglottophilia" where glottals or
glottalization may spontaneously induce nasality in vowels: /ka?/ > /ka~/

An idea which I quite like (but don't know if it has any plausibility) would
be to shift phonation types like creakiness or low pitch into nasality...


>The other thing I'm concerned about at the moment is the origin of /tS/.
>Originally /k/ before /i/ seemed to be a reasonable starting point, but how
>to explain occurrences of /ki/ in the modern language? Well, there could
>have been another vowel /y/ or /1/, which merged with /i/ after the /k/ >
>/tS/ | _/i/ change. But now I'm thinking something like /kr/, /tr/, or even
>/pl/ could be a possible source of /tS/, and might be less problematic
>(since these clusters don't exist in modern Yasaro).
Oh, there's a multitude of possibilities for generating /tS/. If you wish to
retain /ki/, the next most obvious ones are probably /ti tj kj/. /j/ in
clusters has the good side that it can just disappear in the process - no
need to jumble vowels afterwards to phonemize the affricate. (Besides, beïng
an "extremity" vowel, regenerating /i/ tends to follow always the same few
patterns; not much room for originality.)

/tr kr tl kl/ could work too (possibly via /ts)`/ or /tK)/), but IMO /pl/
starts to sound a bit far-fetched.

Or how about fortiting stressed /s/ to /ts/ and then shifting this
universally to /tS/ & relocating stress?

Something to the extent of /t@k/ > /tk/ > /tS/ might work too. If you don't
have much consonant clusters, positing dropped schwas might be more trouble
than it's work ... but an additional tweak could be to interbreed this with
palatalization and only collapse, say, unstressed /tis kis tit tik kit kik/.

John Vertical

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