Re: diachrony

At 10:26 AM Friday 7/27/01, you wrote:

>I need some help with the dachrony therefore - how do
>imake realistic changes <snip>
>Also, if I start with the protolang, how do I ensure
>that the later lang will have the texture and beauty I
>want it to have?
>Hope someone here can help...
Sound changes are definitely a good place to start, and I agree with what
Aidan said about that. Note that sound changes may expand or reduce the set
of phonemes, or leave it the same. It just depends on what rules you set
up. One way that sound change can add richness to a language is in how it
affects borrowings or coinages from different periods. Words that come into
the language before the sound change will be subject to it, but words that
come in later probably will not be.

Something that goes along with sound change (at least in the way I work) is
shift in the meanings of roots. If you're creating two or more languages
from a proto-language, the roots will not only change phonemically but (in
many cases) semantically as well. Perhaps the speakers of one of the
evolved languages are agricultural, and speakers of the other are nomadic.
A root word meaning "stream" might shift to mean "ditch" for the first
group and "river" for the second.

Another important thing to bring in at this point is word-forming
mechanisms. These are not static, but change with time. Different affixes
may fall in and out of use, and other strategies, such as compounding or
stem modification, may vary in their application over time. Every language
has word-forming strategies that are "productive" (meaning speakers can use
them freely to coin new words that they haven't heard before but which are
completely natural to speakers of the language) and others that are
fossilized--we can recognize and understand them in words where they have
been used, but can't use them spontaneously without the resulting words
seeming odd. Of course, there is a continuum between these extremes.

So on this level of getting words out of roots, you will be thinking about
sound change, semantic change, and changes in word-formation strategies.

Moving from morphology into syntax, you need to consider changes in the
inflectional structure (presuming your language uses inflection), and also
changes in idiom and in how phrases and clauses are constructed. The latter
is easy to neglect, especially if you're not envisioning so massive a
change as to go from a VSO to SVO language, for example. Is there a shift
from noun inflection to use of prepositions, or vice versa? (It need not be
total, just a change in the relative scope of the two strategies would be
significant.) A change in the idiom for expressing questions? Subordinate
clauses? What about verb tense and aspect? A shift from using inflection to
using auxiliaries (or vice versa)?

A third aspect to consider is more external. What is the cultural situation
at different times? What other languages is your language in contact with
during different eras? What effect would that have? Was the culture
involved in new activities that would require a new vocabulary? Would the
cultural situation encourage fragmentation into dialects, or homogenization
under a single standard? These last questions (about cultural history) are
something that should be addressed (at least in general terms) before you
do anything else. To evolve a language, both endpoints need some anchor in
time, place, and cultural millieu.

If you address all these questions, there is no danger of the evolved
language losing "richness"--it'll have a lot more depth than the form you
started out with.

Cheers, Tom


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tom Tadfor Little            tom@telp.com
Santa Fe, New Mexico (USA)
Telperion Productions        www.telp.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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