Re: diachrony

I have already dealt with some of these matters - both
the proto-lang, Elenyo (and another sort of proto-lang
between the big proto-lang and Old Elenyo) are all
ergative. The other secondary proto-lang on the big
proto-lang is a split erg/acc which then leads its
descendent languages to be accusative.
I also know how all the tribes and languages interact
and the cultures of them. If I stick with my current
Elenyo grammar I already know what most of the changes
will be syntactically between it and its ancestor. The
proto-lang also uses vowel shifts to show case which
would explain the sole vowel shift left in Elenyo -
that which shows the ergative case.
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? It is possible with many English
words that one does not know the etymology of, to work
it out logically - however I do not see how I could do
that with Elenyo and its protolang. 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?

James

 --- Tom Tadfor Little <tom@...> wrote: > 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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