Re: diachrony

O'Connell James wrote:

> The thing is, I am just wondering - 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? 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?
Or, you could simply not have any shifts at all for a particular
word.  Usually, some words stay the same even through millennia of
surrounding changes.  I was just yesterday, for example, suprised
in a bookstore to discover how much Modern Greek I could
understand in a book I picked up just from my knowledge of
Ancient (mostly Homeric) Greek.  That is perhaps an extreme
example, since Greek has supposedly changed relatively little
since that time, but the principle applies generally to all languages,
I think.

===================================
Thomas Wier | AIM: trwier

"Aspidi men Saiôn tis agalletai, hên para thamnôi
  entos amômêton kallipon ouk ethelôn;
autos d' exephugon thanatou telos: aspis ekeinê
  erretô; exautês ktêsomai ou kakiô" - Arkhilokhos