Re: First Post and Proto-Conlang rough sketch

On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 05:04:36 -0800, Joseph Fatula <joefatula@...> wrote:

>----- Here's one way you could make a gradation system through
>historical sound change.  It's not your language, as I don't know much
>of it, but it might give you some ideas as to how to do this with your
>own.  Let's start with some vocabulary for the proto-language.
>
>met = eat
>sen = sing
>ba = will (future tense auxiliary)
>a = what, that (relative clauses)
>uz = done, completed (perfect)
>du = they
>ga = it
>av = I
>
>----- It's all isolating, VSO, nothing too odd.
>
>original:
>   met av ga  "I eat it"
>   a met du  "what they eat"
>   a met uz av  "what I have eaten"
>   ba met uz du  "they will have eaten"
>   sen av  "I sing"
>   a sen du  "what they sing"
>   sen av a sen du  "I sing what they sing"
>
>----- Simple enough, right?  Let's look at what happens when we apply
>some changes:
>
>changed:
>   meta ga  "I eat it"
>   mot  "what they eat"
>   tuza  "what I have eaten"
>   bamtu  "they will have eaten"
>   sena  "I sing"
>   son  "what they sing"
>   sena son "I sing what they sing"
>
>----- The verb roots show clear alteration in different environments:
>met/mot/(m)t, sen/son.  (Though in retrospect, those might not be the
>most interesting environments for vowel gradation...)  With a little
>reanalysis of meanings, we have:
>
>reanalyzed:
>   met  "eat"
>   mot  "food"
>   bamt-  "eat (fut.)"
>   sen  "sing"
>   son  "song"
>   basn-  "sing (fut.)"
>
>----- Here are the sound changes I'm using:
>
>Historical Changes:
>   little grammatical words become affixes
>   e > o / _Cu
>   o > 0 / VC_CV
>   V > 0 / #_C or C_# (except in single-syllable words)
>   C > 0 / #_C or C_#
>   voiced fricative > 0 / _#
Wow! That's actually far fewer steps than I thought it would take.

I did some thinking after my last post as well. I had speculated on earlier
stages where words were CVC and CVCV, and that the phonology was all
voiceless, the intervocalic Cs become voiced. However, this doens't explain
the rise of initial voiced Cs.

C = Voiceless Consonant
G = Voiced Consonant
@ = schwa (X-SAMPA)
V = Vowel

1. CVC > 2. CVC > 3. CVC > 4. CVC
1. CVCV > 2. CVGV > 3. CVG@ > 4. CVG@
1. VCVC > 2. VGVC > 3. @GVC > 4. GVC
1. VCVCV > 2. VGVGV > 3. @GVC@ > 4. GVG@

1. original stage
2. intervocalic Cs voice
3. V > @ / #_C or C_#
4. @ > 0 / #_C

Is that okay? Or is that unrealistic?

Reply