Finlaesk is starting to collapse

I've been building sandhi/liaison into Finlaesk (aka fínlǣsk), as well
as all three of harmony, umlaut and ablaut in vowels (including
breaking and merging operations). It started out great for a while,
giving forms that had a good touch of naturalistic irregularity to
them while still being vaguely classifyable into manageable,
"instinctively apparent" groups based on their surface forms. It was,
in short, pretty believable as a modern European language.

I think I'm coming close to the point where the rules stop working in my favor.

In fact, I'm running the risk of effectively lexicalizing just about
every morphological form of every root. This is certainly not what I
thought I was getting myself into.

Take, for example, the NP "with the son". Straightforwardly (and
underlyingly), this glosses to 'son-DAT.DEF-MASC-SG.with', i.e.
/so~4-u.in.meD/. However, even playing fairly gently with my notions
leads to /so~4wim:eD/ and just a very little more determination will
take it to /s2:4y~m2D/, which is just barely recognizable (if that) as
related to the root /so~4/, the article /in/, or the postposition
/meD/.

So, in your aesthetic opinion, how much is too much? Can/should I take
the development and use of sound changes all the way to producing
/s9:42~d/ (or even further?) if I'm trying to stick within the bounds
of a plausible modern-world Northwest Germanic language? Right now,
I'm going as far as /so~4wim:eD/, but the potential to go further is
not ruled out (though personally a touch unappealing).

For more flavor on the language, the skeleton of the WIP reference
grammar is on the Frath wiki, at http://wiki.frath.net/Finlaesk -- any
other comments or questions you've got are welcome. Please also feel
free to add/change/delete things on the Talk page, too.






Paul

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