Re: Help! (Dragons)

James Comer wrote:

> Hey all,
>
> I am conlanging on Urasti, and also on the Yorash dialect, for a  possible
> upcoming novel.  Here is my question.
> The ancestors of the Urasti, a people dwelling in a wealthy mercantile
> city-state,
Assuming they have trade contacts with all sorts of people, their language
might have many more loan words, for trade & luxury items, commercial terms,
higher numbers, among other things.

 and the Yorayash, human tribes living in symbiosis with giant
> carnivorous lizards, last spoke a common language between five hundred and
> a thousand years ago.
In this case they might be more tradition-bound, retaining archaic terms
(hunting, animals-- things that might be disused in the urban dialect).
Minor sound changes between dialects could be common-- e.g. k > ?, a > & or
Q or @ etc. etc.

 I want to use Urasti as the basis for conlanging a
> dialect for the Yorayash,
Are the two people related linguistically? In that case I'd suspect the
country language would be the original.

 but am not sure *how* different dialects should
> be after such a time. A vowel shift makes sense, and I am going to do one.
> I am also reading Kroeber's handbook of California Indians and goggling
> over how the Karok, Hupa and Yurok had the same material culture but spoke
> wildly different languages.  Hmm.
> Who's done this on the list, and how do you do it, besides assuming
> loanwords, making up new words for things that a Yorash hunter or herder
> would know and a Urasti shoemaker or blacksmith doesn't.....adding fifty
> words for bamboo, or seven for rain, and sixteen for dragons?
> How useful is glottochronology as a tool?
Useful as a guideline or to play around with maybe. The assumption is/was
that related languages replace vocabulary at approx. 19% per millennium--
for the 200 word list; cut that in half for the 100 word list I guess. .  So
language A loses 19%, Language B loses some of the same + others to make up
19%; Language C replaces yet a different 19% and so on. But OTOH some
languages are more resistant to vocabulary change than others.

I read Latin, Greek, French,
> Spanish, German, and know some Esperanto, etc. Any useful books for a
> non-linguist? (History prof, actually, at a little college in the Mojave).
Some have been mentioned recently, in particular Payne's "Describing
Morphosyntax, though it might be a little technical for a beginner. Some of
the older intro. texts might be useful-- Gleason "Intro. to Linguistics" or
Hockett's "Course in Modern Linguistics"-- unless they've been revised over
the years, they're pre-Chomsky.