6
votes
Convergent evolution in languages
Some words are very consistent across the world for non-linguistic reasons. For example, "mama" consists of the earliest sounds infants are able to make. This is the same reason languages on ...
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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....
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3
votes
Do we have any conlangs which are "primitive" languages?
I don't know of any attested languages that work this way, constructed or natural. Humans are very good at finding ways to communicate, and if you put children together with no exposure to outside ...
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3
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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
2
votes
Do we have any conlangs which are "primitive" languages?
There is of course the Pleistocenese, somewhat plausible artlang meant for the Neanderthals. In many ways it breaks our preconceptions, it has no separate phonemes (word=morpheme=syllable≈phoneme), ...
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