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 ...
- 4,086
7
votes
Accepted
Is there a set of sound change rules that undoes Grimm's law?
Define categories for aspirated and unaspirated voiced stops, voiceless stops, and fricatives:
A=ḅḍġǵ
U=bdgɠ
V=ptkƙ
F=φþxẍ
(I’m forced to use strange characters for each of these phones due to the ...
- 652
6
votes
Accepted
What is the variety of ways one can deal with absorbing words from different languages in a conlang?
If you want to be strict, coerce them into your phonological rules.
Macy's: that would fit as macys; if /y/ is not a vowel, then macis
Outback: start with a consonant, so use one that is not too ...
- 4,058
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....
- 4,086
5
votes
Are words based on acronyms treated differently when the language changes over time?
It depends on the word in question. Not that many English speakers would recognise laser as an acronym, so it has effectively become a 'normal' word. And it can be inflected, as in She was lasering ...
- 4,058
4
votes
What is the variety of ways one can deal with absorbing words from different languages in a conlang?
There must be rules of some sort to guide the transformation of any word, is that correct?
If you believe in optimality theory (OT), this comes down to the constraints on valid words in the language. ...
- 4,086
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/:...
- 11.1k
3
votes
Are words based on acronyms treated differently when the language changes over time?
Acronyms are, for the most part, a relatively recent phenomenon (as they make the most sense with a high level of literacy), and so it's hard to really look at what's happened in natural languages.
...
- 466
3
votes
What is the variety of ways one can deal with absorbing words from different languages in a conlang?
You can look at how it is done in real languages. What typically happens is that the word is phonologically morphed to match the phonotactics of the adopting language.
Japanese provides some obvious ...
- 741
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-...
- 4,086
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 ...
- 11.1k
2
votes
An all consonant language? (Part Two)
I personally don't think it is possible to have a language without vowels unless you are talking about a sign language or some code like language that doesn't use syllables (as in clicks or taps or ...
- 41
2
votes
Accepted
An all consonant language? (Part Two)
Well, over time, you're almost certainly going to gain vowels. Vowels are very easy to pronounce (think about the first sounds babies make as they're learning to use their mouths), and very easy to ...
- 4,086
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 ...
- 539
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