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How to create a language
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Nobody knows why, but sounds change in all languages. The only languages that don't change are the dead ones.
Sounds change into other sounds, sometimes influenced by others. Sound changes
can be classified into spontaneous and influenced (I don't remember the exact
word). A spontaneous sound change transformed the Old English sceadu /'sk&adu/
into shadow /'S&dow/
, as well as every word beginning
with /sk/
into a new one beginning with /S/
(sh)
. Most modern English words in /sk/
are Scandinavian borrowings,
in case you were wondering. An influenced sound change transformed French marbre
into English marble, the second /r/
being dissimulated by
the presence of the first one.
The main types of influenced sound change are:
/d/
became /s/
because of the neighbouring /s/
. Also cupboard, pronounced
no more as cup-board but as cubbord. Assimilation can transform
two sounds at the same time: don't you becoming donchu.
/El@'mEntri/
(elision), in French au revoir /or'vwa/
; boatswain
/bOws@n/
(syncope); the loss of final -e in English is an
apocope, as well as the alternative forms of certain words in Spanish (grande
'big', gran casa 'big house').
/sE'mwa/
vs.
C'est Anne /sEt'an/
.
/e/
at the
beginning of many English loanwords, such as escáner, estándar
for scanner, standard) .
Spontaneous and influenced sound changes are not always easy to take apart.
If we take the definition as a strict rule, almost all changes are influenced;
very few are absolutely spontaneous. For example, the change of Latin /k/
(written c) in Romance languages is regarded as spontaneous, but it was
actually produced by the influence of vowels: Latin /k/
changed into
/s/
in Spanish and French (although continued to be written c)
when the next sound was a front vowel (/e/
or /i/
).
Sound change most often produces irregularities. In Spanish, the different
forms in which the Latin /k/
changed produced the following forms
of the verb decir 'to say': digo 'I say', dice /'dise/
'He says', dijo 'He said', he dicho 'I've said'. But one specific
type of change can be actually regularizing. It's called analogy,
and it will treated in its own section.
Sound changes can be of a lot of different types, as we have seen above. But all kinds of sound change obey some rules:
These rules have exceptions, but they must be adequately explained. If you write down the history of your language, you may explain them or use 'for some unknown reason...', but don't let this become an excuse for violating linguistic rules.
Exceptions to the rules are mostly caused by analogy or related processes tending to regularize the language. For example, if a sound change makes X become Y and this makes two pronouns sound the same, one of these things will probably happen: 1) nothing, 2) the pronouns will be merged into one, grammatically as they were phonetically, 3) the pronoun to be changed will 'refuse' to change, 4) people will stop using one of the pronouns, replacing it by another construction.
Also, sound change might be slowed down or sped up. Some people have tried to come up with a set of factors that may cause a language to enter a rapid change phase (such as economic and social chaos, wars, a new religious movement, etc.) These theories have proven useless. There are surely social factors that regulate the speed and quality of sound change, but they depend on so many 'social variables' that they are impossible to calculate. Some you can imagine: if an enclosed country (in an island, for example) suddenly gets in contact with a massive and constant amount of foreign visitors, its language will probably begin to change faster, borrowing new words and structures, creating or copying new idioms, and inventing new words for concepts they had no previous knowledge of.
Another cause for exceptions is the fact that some words are less common than others. Words may change if they are said and repeated over and over, thus being "worn out"; strange, rarely used words, are likely to stay unchanged. These rarely used words usually include educated terms, or very formal or specific words. Sometimes they are not exactly preserved, but reborrowed from the ancient language (or another one), like English foreign, which comes from Proto-Indoeuropean *dhwor-, hence also door; or semaphore, where -phore "carry" has the same origin *bhero- as the verb to bear. Other examples include pairs of related words like night-nocturnal, viril-werewolf, blanch-blank, etc.