Assuming none of the morphemes have changed in position, I suppose a gloss would look like this?
Sæs sɔŋm šɔʔle æl sæŋ wæl yel fawle, ‘naʔŋ xæyʔənbəy sɔl pæws?’, aŋsæŋ sæwse læm yošəs.
wind DEF.SG=PST follow-CONT sun DEF.SG do.IPFV-CONT argument say.IPFV-CONT, "Who strong-NMLZ=Q leave all?" person=MIR have.PFV-DIM cloak come.PFV-DIM
sæs = "wind"
sɔŋ-m = an umlauted form of the definite article (probably showing initial [tʰ] > [θ] > [s̪] > [s]), the vowel mutated by the lost historic /u/ a past-tense marker
šɔʔ-le = "and", but it functions verbally; presumably showing sound changes [t͡ɬ] > [ɬ] > [ʃ], deletion of an intertonic syllable (but not before) /u/ could umlaut the /a/ | suffixed with a continuative marker
æl = "sun"
sæŋ = the uninflected form of the definite article
wæl = appears to be a much-reduced form of /waqli/ "do" (continuative), showing loss of final /i/ (I suspect posttonic vowels and codas were regularly deleted), and the glottal stop (probably conditioned by another coda consonant) without compensatory lengthening
yel = "argument" (the language does not appear to have an indefinite article)
fawle = presumably from faw(etl)li; I suspect this terminal /e/ is the result of some sort of secondary stress falling on inflectional syllables in trisyllabic words) "say" (also continuative)
naʔŋ = "who"
xæyʔ-ən-bəy = "strong" | a nominaliser (in this case, probably changing the meaning to "stronger person, stronger thing") | a question word, potentially shifting the meaning of
naʔŋ to "who?", though it may also be a pleonasm)
sɔl pæws = I expect this is a fixed expression, meaning "exceeding all (others)"?
aŋsæŋ = I expect
aŋ means "person" and that
sæŋ is a mirative suffix, expressing surprise at the person being there;
sæwse = In context, certainly meaning "having, who had", presumably
sæw "have, possess" +
-se, a perfective marker
læm = "cloak"
yošəs = presumably from a verb form "yošə" +
-s, an allomorph of
-se that probably appears after longer morphemes.
bradrn wrote: ↑Wed Oct 06, 2021 6:20 am
But I’m not quite sure how this helps, given that phonological changes are largely orthogonal to grammatical changes.
I don't think this is quite true. Sound change often forces structural change through erosion of morphological elements, as it did to the Latin case system. It wasn't a foregone conclusion that it would do this, but it was also not an unlikely outcome. What sound changes occur can consequently very much affect what your grammatical outcome is. You're more likely to replace one marker with another if that other can be more distinctly understood. You might also expect certain elements to be articulated in a single breath:
[Sæs sɔŋm] šɔʔle
[æl sæŋ] [wæl yel] fawle, ‘naʔŋ xæyʔənbəy
[sɔl pæws]?’, aŋsæŋ sæwse læm yošəs.
I would expect all of these to stick together, with the articles becoming fused case markers —
Sæs sɔŋm >
Sæsɔŋ (the sequence [ŋm] is rather difficult to articulate, so I think the [m] would drop),
æl sæŋ >
ælæŋ —
sɔl pæws to become a fixed expression
sɔpæws "be something above all" (or simply "above all", with a copula being inserted into sentences that contain it), and
wæl yel to do something similar, though I'm not exactly sure how that last one would turn out, since I think
wæl is the conjugable element.
With the erosion that's happened already, I expect the language has a tendency to put a rather strong emphasis on the main element of a cluster of morphemes, which tends to cause structural words to be deemphasised, and consequently more susceptible to erosion: as discussed before,
šɔʔle >
šɔl, and
fawle >
faw do now strike me as extremely likely developments, and you're only a tendency to parallelism of structure away from
Sæs sɔŋm šɔl æl sæŋ šɔl wæl yel, which could then shift to
Sæs sɔŋm šɔl æl sæŋ šɔwæl yel. If more words undergo semantic bleaching similarly, you end up with more markers. Looking for points of ambiguity and inserting more structural words to resolve them, then eroding away the word till it's just a little marker that can be reanalysed further, and so on and so on.