7
votes
What are the most common sound changes in natlangs?
By far the most common changes are assimilation, one sound becoming more similar to a nearby sound, and lenition, a sound shifting to require less articulatory effort. These are both broad categories ...
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5
votes
Accepted
How to prevent all of my words being eroded away to nothing
As a general rule, regular sound changes wear away at words, reducing their information content.
Countering this, morphosyntactic changes restore the lost information.
For example, let's look at Latin....
- 4,016
3
votes
Accepted
How to create irregular pronoun paradigms
To get a disconnect that extreme between different cases of the same pronoun, there's really only one tool for the job: suppletion.
Suppletion is the process where Word A gets reanalyzed as an ...
- 484
3
votes
Accepted
How much of the irregularity caused by sound change (e.g. vowel loss) will be retained in inflectional paradigms?
The way I put it in historical linguistics classes is:
Sound laws are entirely regular, and create irregularity
Analogy is entirely irregular, and creates regularity
In other words, neogrammarian-...
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3
votes
From what could I derive a morpheme that explicitly marks a noun as being a phrase head?
How about a topic marker, like Japanese wa? You could start with a deictic of some sort ("this thing right here"), which got semantically bleached into a general marker of new information (&...
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3
votes
How to prevent all of my words being eroded away to nothing
Sound shifts are to some amount irreversible. Long before your words are completely gone, the rate of homophones rises and the speakers of the language have to deal with it in some way or another.
The ...
- 11k
3
votes
What are the most common sound changes in natlangs?
Here are a couple sound changes I use when I'm not sure what to do:
Voiceless consonants becoming voiced between two vowels (intervocalic voicing)
[u] and [o] becoming [y] and [ø] in the environment ...
- 413
3
votes
What are the most common sound changes in natlangs?
Things are probably hard to quantify, but some specific sound changes seem to be more frequent than others, most notably:
/h/ -> /∅/ (loss of /h/)
The consonant system often has gaps at /p/ and /g/:...
- 11k
2
votes
Conlangs based on lesser known antique languages
I've got an ongoing project of creating languages for a world where the Carthaginians won the Second Punic War, where Punic occupies a roughly analogous position to that that Latin has in our world.
...
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2
votes
How do tones disappear from a language?
One well-known example of tonal loss is Swahili; unlike other Bantu languages, it is not a tonal language. In the absence of historical data, all we have left is reconstruction and (not unfounded) ...
- 1,239
2
votes
How much of the irregularity caused by sound change (e.g. vowel loss) will be retained in inflectional paradigms?
Define "huge amount". Let's say this is for verb conjugation (maybe it's avtually for nouns; you didn't specify). If there's some commonality - e.g. vowel syncope as you mention - among ...
- 484
1
vote
Can core argument markers swap roles? If so, how?
Straight up swapping the meaning of two case markers (let's call them like that for simplicity's sake) seems a pretty strange occurrence. There are however, theoretical ways this could happen:
You ...
- 1,562
1
vote
How to create irregular pronoun paradigms
Hungarian is an interesting example - the (personal) pronouns are not inflected by the (agglutinative) suffixes, but vice versa, the suffix is inflected by the pronoun.
E.g. the dative suffix is -nek (...
- 1,239
1
vote
How could the future "Kesh" language from the book "Always Coming Home" by Ursula K. Le Guin develop from modern languages?
It's also worth noting that we currently have no attested examples of a language evolving over 5,000 years. We have attestations of languages from 5,000 years ago (that's right about when writing was ...
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