Re: sound change question

On Wed, 24 Jan 2001, jesse stephen bangs wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee sikayal:
>
> > Thanks!  I feel better.  I keep looking at lists of common sound changes
> > trying to find ones that get me to the target phonology (I'm working
> > bass-ackwards trying to construct a protolang that will result in
> > something like the conlang I had in mind), but sometimes I can't find
> > ones that I think might be plausible.  Unfortunately I screwed up the
> > original query (I apparently did away with aspirates in the latest
> > version of Arakis), but maybe I should go back to having aspirates...
>
> <<laughing>> Don't worry, I've done the exact same thing with Yivríndil
> and its "parent" languages.  It *is* a pain, but in many ways it's more
> like what real linguists do trying to reconstruct proto-languages ;-).  I
> danced for joy the day that I realized I could relate the words
> "kenda" and "kéha", and I danced again when I realized I could solve so
> many problems in explaining Yivríndil morphology by positing syllabic
> consonants!  So I encourage you to keep plugging along.  It's frustrating
> and insane and rewarding, just like everything else in conlanging.
<wry g>  I wish the structure of my language let me do that.  What I did
was have Arakis, "evolve" it slapdash into Chevraqis, discovered that I
hated my original Arakis because it was d*** ugly, and am now back to
square one.  There are some words and suchlike I want to keep around (the
some of the inflected forms are based solely on the desire to keep the
word "jenar," frex) but since a lot of the actual word-forms only got
used in the creation myth for the phonological relay (what happened to
that, BTW?), I now only have to worry about the words that got used in
the conlang t-shirt and the random poetry samples.  =^)  The
phonetics/phonology class that I probably will have to drop is actually
pretty evil in that I keep being tempted to pull out my notebook and do
conlang things instead of paying full attention, but since I never
actually took the prereq (Linguistics 101) I'm scared I'll miss something
crucial.  :-)

Cheers,
YHL