> 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
>