R: Re: Language changes,spelling reform (wasConlangeaDreaming)

Nik Taylor wrote:

> Sound changes caused most of the gramatical changes.
Yeah - in the ancestor language of the language family I'm working on, a
lot of the noun declensions end in vowels, but not all of them. For
example, "zjg" (star) becomes "zjgit" in the dative, while "sjdu" (word)
becomes "sjdo" in the dative. If I drop final vowels, being unstressed
and all, "zjg" still becomes "zjgit", but "sjdu" changes to "sjd" in
both the nominative and the dative -  in fact, "sjdu" would change to
"sjd" in all situations except in the nominative plural, where it is
"sjduka" before the sound change, and thus "sjduk" afterwards. Sounds
like a ripe situation for grammatical changes.

> French has also changed radically over the past few centuries, in some
> tenses, personal inflections have been virtually eliminated, and
> pronouns have become clitics, and are evolving into new personal
> inflections (like the famous "Moi, Marie, je la detéste" discussed a few
> times here)
>
Yeah, French is another one that changed a lot - BTW, do you know of any
good books about Old French and such.

> Yeah, most descendants of Utakassí will have conservative spelling
> systems, which should create interesting alphabet/syllabry mixes, like
> the /sw/ -> /f/ change would make the <su> syllable be <f> before
> vowels!
That'd be really cool! I look forward to hearing more about that.

--
Robert