Re: OT: What makes a good conlang? (was Re: Super OT: Re: CHAT : JRRT)

En réponse à Trebor Jung :


>"I'll defer to others on this, but if you've got the directionality of these
>sound changes listed right, they seem...well, backward.   I can't imagine
>them happening--at least not categorically.   Any thoughts on this, anyone?"
>
>I agree, these sound changes seem quite unreasonable. I would expect
>something like this instead:
>H -> w (doesn't /H/ represent French <u> in <nuit>?)
I think Teoh isn't using X-SAMPA here, so H doesn't necessarily have this 
value. Indeed, in Kirshenbaum, H is SAMPA X\: voiceless pharyngeal 
fricative. But I don't know whether Teoh was writing in Kirshenbaum here.

>h -> ?/t/k/f
>x -> k_h -> k
Actually, neither your sound changes nor Teoh's are reasonable. Unless 
strong influence from the phonetic environment, phones usually don't go 
"stronger". They tend rather to weaken (law of least effort). So stops will 
naturally fricativise, but fricatives will only rarely become stops (why do 
languages still have stops nowadays then you may ask. Simple: there are 
things "stronger" than simple stops: aspirated stops, geminate stops - 
which can arise from vowel deletion, also a natural sound change going in 
the way of the least effort -, etc... Those will naturally weaken into 
simple stops, and as I indicated for the geminates, can themselves occur 
naturally :) ). Instead, they will tend to become approximants or even 
disappear completely.

Also, sound changes rarely go further than one step in the chart at a time. 
A change h -> t, besides being already unreasonable for having a fricative 
turning into a stop, is even more unreasonable for having a *glottal* 
fricative turning into an *alveolar* stop! How do you justify such a leap?! 
:) (note that it's not impossible. French has an uvular fricative evolved 
from an alveolar trill, through an uvular trill step. Still, that's less 
distance than h -> t :) )

The only way to have such "backwards" sound changes would be to justify 
them through their environment, i.e. having a fricative becoming a stop 
because of an influence from another sound. But even then it seems quite 
difficult.

Sounds always change for a reason, most often inertia (law of the least 
effort). It will tend to assimilate neighbouring sounds (or even less 
neighbouring ones, look at the German umlaut), erase the weakest ones 
(unstressed vowels for instance), etc... It will *not* strengthen sounds. 
So the presented sound changes are indeed unreasonable, at least until they 
are given a proper environment.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.