Re: Can realism be retro-fitted?

Alex Fink wrote:
> On Sun, 14 Jan 2007 20:00:03 -0600, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
>
> Could there have been a lost consonant that changed the common tone-patterns
> into the uncommon ones in these words, or a lost phonation type or laryngeal
> feature, or something like vowel length?
Yes, a number of syllable-final consonants have vanished in Simîk.
Syllable-initial p- changed to h- before vanishing entirely. Finding one
set of rules that can consistently produce the modern forms, though,
would be tricky. One case I know of a root deriving historically from an
original p- has a perfectly normal tone pattern. The patterns do vary
according to vowel length, but I'm taking that into account already.

>> In the long run, is it better to start with one or more artificial
>> proto-languages and develop them forward through time (which involves a
>> lot of work on features that may not even make it into the future
>> language system), or to start with an existing language and develop a
>> history for it?
>
> Well, 'better' is, as usual, not really applicable except with respect to a
> particular explicit set of goals.  But it's easier to get a solid diachrony
> working forward than backward, the more so if you're resistant to changing
> the daughter language.
Well, if you're working forward, you know by definition that your later
forms have a history that makes sense. Working backward is more like
putting together a puzzle, except that you don't know if all the pieces
are even from the same puzzle.

> How fleshed out do you want to make the protolang?  If you're going to make
> a full-fledged conlang of it, then unless you don't wish to have another
> conlanging project I wouldn't worry about spending effort on features that
> don't make it into the daughter, since the proto-lang will be just as
> presentable on its own.  On the other extreme you could start with only a
> sketch of a phonology (you seem to be focusing on phonology) and avoid that
> lot of work.
Well, that's a good place to start, but I want to work out the
morphology and syntax as well. Tirelat morphology is pretty
straightforward, mostly agglutinative. I'd like to spend some time
figuring out the tense/evidential suffixes, which you might expect to be
separate elements that fused together. But the past tense suffixes have
no apparent relation to the non-past suffixes, so I think it's more
likely the symmetry in the modern language arose by filling gaps in what
originally would have been a more haphazard system. The infixes could be
interesting to work out (how do infixes get into a language, anyway?).
But even so, the details of the morphology and syntax are likely to be
more easily managed than the phonology.

>> For a specific example, I thought of taking Tirelat and trying to
>> develop a history for it. Tirelat is a very regular and artificial
>> language, which may actually be a result of engineering a more natural
>> language to eliminate irregularities.
>
> Too bad... if Tirelat was less regular, you could look to the irregularities
> for starting points for figuring out sound changes in working backwards.
> Since that's not the case, are there, say, any patterns in the lexicon that
> look like they might be remnants of formerly productive morphology,
> distorted by sound change?
There might be a handful of features, but it'd be purely coincidental;
many words end in -pa for instance, but I can't figure out what they
have in common.

> I'd go for the 'arbitrary' history that plays off whatever distributional
> peculiarities you have, even if it's not a perfect match.  In a natlang the
> synchronic distribution is bound to be a little bit off the diachrony, both
> because of words without an internal history (borrowings but also
> ideophones, onomatopoeia, sound symbolism, whatever) and because of
> exceptions to the rules.  And if there's a problem that's too large-scale
> for these sorts of explanations you can invoke dialect mixture and say that
> some words come from a dialect with a given set of changes and other words
> from a dialect without.  This last seems especially appropriate to Tirelat
> if you imagine it to have undergone some imposed standardization, with the
> standardizers picking words from multiple dialects.
>
> Alex
Well, I might be able to make something out of these patterns, but it
looks pretty haphazard at the moment.

Combinations which don't occur in the limited sample that I checked: ży,
ñe, ño, ŕo, fy, ġo, wu, ji. Wu and ji are easily explained; ñ (actually
[N]) is a rare enough initial consonant that the absences could be due
to chance.

Combinations that do occur, but are less common than expected: pe, py,
be, to, tu, żi, ky, ge, ne, ñi, si, zy, žo, le.

Combinations that occur more frequently than expected: by, te, ċy, żo,
no, ñu, fo, xo, xy, ġy. Of these, "te" is so much more frequent than
expected that I realized it's just the possessive prefix te-, which I
use in the vocabulary to mark inherently possessed nouns. Oops! I might
have to be more careful about the text I use.

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