Re: diachrony

--- O'Connell James <jamestomas2@...> wrote:
- what do I do
> with
> a proto-lang word like 'mayam'. - thst word would be
> perfectly acceptable in modern Elenyo, so what would
> cause it to change?
   First off, keep in minds that words don't change to
something else because they're not acceptable. From my
other post, matter and madder are both accepatable.
But matter > madder nonetheless.

 Should I simply come up with
> some
> arbitrary vowel shifts, and perhaps from there a
> longer vowel might force gemination or something, a
> little bit of insertion/deletion and metathesis, or
> is
> there another way?
   All of those are perfectly acceptable. Look at the
way you pronounce things, and the was other languages
pronounce things. for example, the y of Spanish, which
is pronounced almost like /dZ/. Or the voicing of
consonants between vowels (matter > madder).

  To me, an obvious change would be to strengthen the
y, because it sometimes gets lost in pronunciation.
Maybe, y > dy /dZ/ between vowels. And then later on,
y disappears after affecting a preceding vowel. And
maybe a little nasalization too, which eventually just
results in a long vowel. What you'd get from this
simple changes is:

mayam > madyam > mezham > mezha~ > mezhaa /meZa:/

  or something like medaa if you don't want dy > /Z/.

  What I often to is slur the words on purpose, to see
how sounds would naturally change.

> - however I do not see how I could
> do
> that with Elenyo and its protolang.
   Well, if you use suffixes, that solves the problem.
Even if the suffix gets mutated through time to be
unrecognizable, this could still be a derivational
process. Or you could go Chinese like, and compound
words together.


> Or is it perhaps
> a
> question or making mini derivational patterns. So
> perhaps sets of words all evolve in the same way,
> but
> in different ways to other sets - or should the
> derivational rules be universal and affect all the
> words in the proto-lang?
   What I do in Aelya is have several different levels
of sound change. Sound change level 1 affects Quenya,
but level 2 affects later Irish borrowings. The two
levels (at different points in history) don't have to
have the same changes take place. Perhaps you could
have a northern, an eastern, and a central sound
change system. They happen in East-North-Central
order.
So you spread your protolang out on a map, and apply
the North changes. But this little city here
eventually becomes big, and it's in NE central Blah,
so it gets all sounds changes applied, and becomes
standard. But this tiny village over in the East, it
only gets Eastern changes applied. Voila! You have
sister langs.


 Aidan


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