THEORY: on the teleology of conlanging (was: RE:terminaldialect?)

Joshua Shinavier wrote:
> Did consonant mutations evolve in the individual
> Celtic languages or did the original ancestral tongue already have them?
I'm pretty sure that they evolved independently, that's why I mentioned
it as an example.

> I don't think an entirely regular language is neccessarily more stable, though;
> often irregular forms crop up which are more convenient (e.g. the slang "gotta"
> as in "he's gotta go" is quicker than "has to" or "must"), and evidently
> convenience is what it's all about in language change...
Well, that's ONE factor in language change.  But, overall,
irregularities tend to be regularized faster than regular forms become
irregular.  Irregular forms tend to evolve rapidly, sometimes the result
of sound-changes.  The classic example is the radical-changing verbs of
Spanish.  In Old Spanish, there were seven vowels, /i/, /e/, /E/, /a/,
/o/, /O/, and /u/.  Later, when stressed, /E/ and /O/ became /je/ and
/wo/ (later /we/), while remaining in unstressed position.  Thus, a verb
like /pO'der/ had the first-person singular present indicative form
/'pwo.do/ --> /'pwe.do/.  This was a complication, but still regular.
/E/ became /je/, while /e/ remained /e/.  They became irregular when /E/
and /e/ and /o/ and /O/ fused in unstressed position, thus /pO'der/
became /po'der/, identical stem to /po'dar/.  It thus became impossible
to predict whether the /o/ would change or not.  Compare /po'dar/ -->
/'podo/, but /po'der/ --> /'pwe.do/.  Then, irregular forms are slowly
regularized.  Another example is Old English.  Pre-Old English had one
plural form ending in -i, so that mu:s (mouse) became mu:si.  This
caused the <u> to front, making it my:si, later the -i was dropped,
creating /mu:s/ vs. /my:s/, later /mi:s/.  We still keep this, with the
vowels changed by the Great Vowel Shift, as /maus/ and /majs/.  However,
some other -i changes have been regularized.  We no longer say "kine"
for "cows" (actually, "kine" itself was an earlier semi-regularization,
the plural ending -(e)n was added to the plural form "ky", analogous to
dialects that have "childrens (or /tSIlInz/) and "mens")

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