Sound Change Quickie Thread

[náʼoolkiłí]

Well, conlanging is an art. Experiment. Try different combinations. Be creative and play with something wacky that's *gasp* unattested in a natural language. Choose the processes that lead to outcomes you find personally appealing, or go with them all and make a language family. Read grammars of languages you like or historical analyses of languages families you like for inspiration, or use the I Ching to determine outcomes. There's no bible of sound changes that establishes of the relative likelihoods of glide epenthesis vs. coalescence. There is no dogma.

[bradrn]

Well, conlanging is an art. Experiment. Try different combinations. Be creative and play with something wacky that's *gasp* unattested in a natural language. Choose the processes that lead to outcomes you find personally appealing, or go with them all and make a language family. Read grammars of languages you like or historical analyses of languages families you like for inspiration, or use the I Ching to determine outcomes. There's no bible of sound changes that establishes of the relative likelihoods of glide epenthesis vs. coalescence. There is no dogma.

Very poetic, and somewhat reminiscent of my own attitude. Unfortunately, this doesn't actually help all that much, especially since I struggle a bit with finding plausible sound changes. Indeed, there is no 'dogma', but a couple of guidelines can go a long way...

[náʼoolkiłí]

Here's a whole dissertation on hiatus resolution: Casali (1996) [pdf]. That might give you some concrete ideas.

[linguistcat]

The problem I have is - exactly what happens? Take vowel deletion: if I have (say) 5 vowels, that makes 25 vowel pairs; which vowel gets deleted? What sort of rules have languages used to resolve this situation? (e.g. always delete first vowel, always delete second vowel, etc.) The same happens with epenthesis (which semivowel gets epenthesised?), coalescence (what do they coalesce to?), and diphthongization (it's unrealistic to have a diphthong for every vowel pair).

Old Japanese had vowel deletion early on (there were rules about whether the first or second vowel deleted), and vowel coalescence later. You could use a straight rule for which vowel to keep if you go he deletion route (the first deletes; the second deletes; the one that's lower deletes; etc) or you could base it on other constraints.

With coalescence, it's usually a vowel intermediate in the vowel space between the two (like au > o or ɔ, ai > e or ɛ), and whether these would tend to merge with existing vowels or avoid that would be up to you.

And that's the thing, we could give you options from real languages and speculate on what is possible even if not attested, but you have to be the one to decide what you do. It would probably be better to just work out a system you like, get some feedback on it and then make minor changes if you want to, because even if something is unattested and generally seen as unlikely, it is your language a you can make it however you like.

[Xwtek]

Is this sound change realistic?

d > r / V_V
[+plosive]d > [+plosive +voice]r

My language previously doesn't have r. Also, the cluster occurs both word initially and word medially.(The first one is rather obvious, but how about the second.)

[Whimemsz]

Ooh, nice! I say go for it.

[bbbosborne]

are there any known sound changes about piraha?

[dɮ the phoneme]

ai > æ(ː)? (in a system that already has [æ], as well as [e], but no [ɛ])

[missals]

That sounds completely fine. It's just a merger.

[Frislander]

are there any known sound changes about piraha?

No because there's no other language to compare it to, and no earlier records of the language before the modern day.

[mae]

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[Frislander]

That's not true. Although all other Mura languages are now extinct, it's not true that there's no data to compare. There's a small amount of lexical data from at least one related language, Bohura, and I've seen mention of 'word lists' for it that I haven't been able to find myself.

But a word-list is not sufficient data, since 1 there's the issue of how well the written form represents the language's pronunciation, 2 lexical replacement will mean that a significant proportion of the forms will not be cognate with the corresponding semantic matches in Pirahã and 3 comparing only two languages against each other is not good at producing reconstructions, since there is often no way to resolve when two languages have clashing phonetic values for a single sound (for example just comparing Maori and Hawaiian we can't tell whether the proto-language to both had *l or *r).

Either way, I still don't think there is enough material available that enables us to come up with sound changes for Pirahã,

[bradrn]

There are many, many examples of inflectional morphology which is irregular or fusional. However, it seems to be fairly rare to have any sort of irregularity in productive derivational morphology (although admittedly I don't have any source for this). Why is this? Do sound changes not affect derivational morphology at the same rate? Or is it analogy, or something else?

[mae]

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[Kuchigakatai]

There are many, many examples of inflectional morphology which is irregular or fusional. However, it seems to be fairly rare to have any sort of irregularity in productive derivational morphology (although admittedly I don't have any source for this). Why is this? Do sound changes not affect derivational morphology at the same rate? Or is it analogy, or something else?

I think derivational morphology is just as susceptible to irregularities actually, even when limiting yourself to productive affixes. Partly because of the effects of sound change in common words as you are asking (e.g. Spanish bueno 'good' > bondad 'goodness, quality of being good' instead of expected *bonidad or *buenidad), partly because uncommon derived words often make use of "higher" or more "learned" forms of word stems (e.g. Spanish estómago 'stomach' > estomacal 'of the stomach' instead of expected *estomagal), partly because of phonologically awkward lexical stems (e.g. Spanish monosyllabic words and their chaotic diminutives: in my dialect, that of El Salvador, pie 'foot' > piecito or piececito, but pan 'bun of bread' > pancito (*panecito and *panito are not used), and also Dios 'God' > Diosito 'dear God' (*Diosecito is not used), but luz 'light' > lucecita (*lucita is not used, even though luz ends in /s/ just like Dios)).

[Ælfwine]

I am introducing some front rounded vowels to Crimean Gothic, and after thinking about how it will be represented in the orthography, I have decided that <ё> and <ю> are pronounced /jo/ and /ju/ initially and after vowels, and /ø/ and /y/ respectively elsewhere.

Now, to get this state of affairs, would it be possible that /iu~iw/ monophthongizes to /y/ while /ju/ remains? (/eu/ > /ø/ is less of a problem as it is unlikely to be mixed with /jo/)

[mèþru]

Yeah, that sounds plausible.

[dɮ the phoneme]

Starting from an initial inventory with a three-way, voiced-voiceless-'fortis' contrast, where the 'fortis' consonants are (in the dialect under consideration) realized as geminates (even intially), how do the changes

ts͈ ts > ts dz

x͈ x > x h

look? This is without a broader chain shift among the obstruents.

[dhok]

This seems thoroughly plausible, but it should probably apply to all geminate-singleton pairings.

Proto-Abazi is thought to have had the opposite shift: *T: *T > D T (?!)

[Hallow XIII]

Let's say I have a language where vowels are not allowed to be next to each other (is there a technical term for that?); that is, no diphthongs or hiatuses. However, there is a glottal stop, so e.g. /gaʔen/ is allowed. If glottal stops are lost intervocalically (which seems fairly reasonable), what happens to the massive amount of vowels now in contact?

Well the world's your oyster. Any one of these, or conceivably more than one depending on the vowel sequence, might happen. There are probably other processes that could happen that I'm not thinking of, too.

• Vowel deletion (with or without compensatory lengthening): **gaʔen → *gaen → ga(ː)n, ge(ː)n
• Consonant (e.g., glide) epenthesis: **gaʔen → *gaen → gajen
• Coalescence (±compensatory lengthening): **gaʔen → *gaen → gɛ(ː)n
• Diphthongization/glide formaiton: **gaʔen → *gaen → ga͡ɪn, gajn
• Metathesis: **gaʔen → *gaen → gane (This one might be a little cooky)

The problem I have is - exactly what happens? Take vowel deletion: if I have (say) 5 vowels, that makes 25 vowel pairs; which vowel gets deleted? What sort of rules have languages used to resolve this situation? (e.g. always delete first vowel, always delete second vowel, etc.) The same happens with epenthesis (which semivowel gets epenthesised?), coalescence (what do they coalesce to?), and diphthongization (it's unrealistic to have a diphthong for every vowel pair).

If you look at real-world examples of this, then the answer is that every vowel pair is liable to change individually. Sometimes you get patterns, like e.g. all back vowel + i diphthongs do the same thing, but not necessarily. For instance, Mongolic languages lost /j/ before /i/, and in modern dialects the resulting Vi diphthongs change in several ways: In Khalkha, <ai ei oi öi> coalesce into /{: E: 9: 2:/, but <üi ui> retain their original values of /uj Uj/ (except in the negative <-güi> /gwi, gHi/). In Chakhar, on the other hand, <ai> largely continues unchanged, but the front rounded vowels happen; and in Buryat <ai> coalesces but <oi> becomes /oE/ with a mid onglide (<öi> is lost as part of a general merger of short <ö> into <ü> initially and <e> elsewhere).