Writing sound changes so I understand later

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LinguistCat
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Writing sound changes so I understand later

Post by LinguistCat »

I'm starting with Old Japanese to derive a fictional language related to Japanese, so my starting syllable structure is pretty strictly CV, with bare V only allowable at the beginning of a word. An early sound change is losing /a/ in many environments, but I don't want it to result in consonant clusters longer than 2 consonants. Also I'd like the sound change to generally move left to right through a word, but if a word had, for example, a CaCaCa structure I'd prefer it to become CaCCa as opposed to CCaC or CCaCa.

What rules could I apply to make this obvious/a regular process, so that if I put this down and come back to it later I know what past-me was thinking?
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cedh
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Re: Writing sound changes so I understand later

Post by cedh »

Are you okay with word-initial *#CaCu becoming #CCu? And with word-final *CVCa# becoming CVC#? Should word-final *VCaCa# typically become VCCa#, VCaC#, or VCC#?

(I'm using <#> to explicitly write out the word boundary.)
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LinguistCat
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Re: Writing sound changes so I understand later

Post by LinguistCat »

cedh wrote: 30 Oct 2018 09:00 Are you okay with word-initial *#CaCu becoming #CCu? And with word-final *CVCa# becoming CVC#? Should word-final *VCaCa# typically become VCCa#, VCaC#, or VCC#?

(I'm using <#> to explicitly write out the word boundary.)
I might just disallow consonant clusters at the beginning or ends of words, so #CaCV would stay #CaCV. *CVCa# becoming *CVC# isn't my preference but I'll accept it if everything else works. VCaCa# would become VCCa#
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cedh
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Re: Writing sound changes so I understand later

Post by cedh »

OK, so you want medial clusters only, and are not really in favor of word-final consonants. This means your sound changes could look something like this:

a > ɐ / _ except #(C)_ and C_#
ɐ > Ø / VC_CV (starting at the beginning of a word, and targeting the next vowel only if the preceding vowel hasn't already been deleted)
ɐ > a / _

It seems that in Zompist's sca2, you only have to write one single line to achieve this:
a//VC_CV
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LinguistCat
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Re: Writing sound changes so I understand later

Post by LinguistCat »

cedh wrote: 30 Oct 2018 19:54 OK, so you want medial clusters only, and are not really in favor of word-final consonants. This means your sound changes could look something like this:

a > ɐ / _ except #(C)_ and C_#
ɐ > Ø / VC_CV (starting at the beginning of a word, and targeting the next vowel only if the preceding vowel hasn't already been deleted)
ɐ > a / _

It seems that in Zompist's sca2, you only have to write one single line to achieve this:
a//VC_CV
Ah cool, both are pretty elegant. The second maybe more than the first but I could see uses for both. I don't know why I thought it would be more complicated than that. [xP]
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