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<h1>Re: Secret History of Verduria VI: Real Linguists Follow the Regularity Principle</h1>
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Posted by Mark Rosenfelder
(64.16.210.2) on November 29, 2000 at 15:12:41:<p>
In Reply to: <a href="61.html">Re: Secret History of Verduria V: The novels you can't read yet</a> posted by Mark Rosenfelder on November 20, 2000 at 18:00:52:<p>
Around 1992, I decided to learn all about historical linguistics and re-do all the Eastern languages.<p>I started by reading Theodora Bynon's <i>Historical Linguistics</i>. I learned a lot, but perhaps the most important thing was to learn what I'd been doing wrong in previous amateur attempts: I didn't know about the regularity of sound change. Sound changes don't apply sporadically; they apply across the board, in every word that has the triggering environment.<p>(Theoretical note: Well, actually, they <i>start</i> sporadically, affecting certain words. But the sound change keeps on hitting more and more words, and generally it ends up getting them all. So if you look at a sound change in progress, you see wide variation and even confusion; but if you look at a historical sound change, it looks exceptionless. And in any case the regularity principle remains an excellent guideline: it makes you keep looking for subtle regularities that underlie apparent exceptions. You learn more that way.)<p>The regularity hypothesis simplifies creating multiple daughter languages, largely reducing it to a problem of finding a nice set of sound changes and applying them to a lexicon (I use <a href="http://www.zompist.com/sounds.htm">a program to do this</a>). <p>That's fine for working forward (e.g. Cadhinor to Barakhinei), but trickier for working backward (e.g. Verdurian to Cadhinor). I worked through the vocabulary word by word, thinking about the possible parent forms (with good rules, there's usually a choice). (I don't have a program for this sort of multiple-outcome reverse engineering, but I knew the rules well enough to do it by hand.) Sometimes I just didn't like the possible Cadhinor form, or (worse yet) the Verdurian form was simply impossible to generate given the rules. In such cases I could tweak the rules, or change the Verdurian form, or borrow the word from some other source (I figured that would add verisimilitude anyway).<p>At the same time I revised a good deal of the vocabulary. I had an embarrassing number of words that were direct steals from English or Russian-- e.g. <i>antelop</i> for 'antelope', now changed to <i>gudun</i>. I also had lots of long unanalyzed words-- a rare unfixed one is <i>lelitsala</i> 'art'. There was some idea of deriving this from <i>elir-dhalec</i> 'life-enriching', but unmotivated phonetic distortions like that are no longer allowed! I got rid of many of these forms by using derivations instead; others were divided properly into morphemes. (E.g. <i>shrifta</i> 'knowledge', diverging oddly from <i>shrifec</i> 'know' is now explained as incorporating a Cadhinor collective suffix <i>-ta</i>.)<p>I also complicated the morphology. Probably anyone who's tried learning Verdurian curses me for this-- or ignores those parts-- but I'm rather proud of this, since it's a naturalistic feature of real languages. Most of the complications come from the regular sound changes: e.g. the irregular 1s form <i>lagao</i> 'I get' preserves the <b>g</b> that was fricativized in the infinitive <i>lazhec</i>. (If you think that's bad, you'll <i>really</i> hate Barakhinei.)<p>A particular challenge was to provide some sort of historical justification for the verbal inflections of Verdurian, which exhibit teasing hints of regularity. I had no restrictions on the Cadhinor and Proto-Eastern forms, of course, but I did want the two sets of sound changes to start with something more regular and end up with the Verdurian forms (perhaps tweaked a little by analogy). This proved to be surprisingly difficult. The best I could do was to unify the three conjugations in one (<a href="http://www.zompist.com/eastern2.html#cverbs">here</a>), and that system could hardly be more arcane... though it's any worse than many real-world examples.<p>Much of what I learned during all this ended up distilled into the Language Construction Kit.<p>I know nobody will follow this advice :) but I will say that it's easier to do it right the first time. Writing Verdurian, I still have to check the dictionary all too often to make sure I'm not remembering the old form rather than the revised one.
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: Around 1992, I decided to learn all about historical linguistics and re-do all the Eastern languages.
: I started by reading Theodora Bynon's <i>Historical Linguistics</i>. I learned a lot, but perhaps the most important thing was to learn what I'd been doing wrong in previous amateur attempts: I didn't know about the regularity of sound change. Sound changes don't apply sporadically; they apply across the board, in every word that has the triggering environment.
: (Theoretical note: Well, actually, they <i>start</i> sporadically, affecting certain words. But the sound change keeps on hitting more and more words, and generally it ends up getting them all. So if you look at a sound change in progress, you see wide variation and even confusion; but if you look at a historical sound change, it looks exceptionless. And in any case the regularity principle remains an excellent guideline: it makes you keep looking for subtle regularities that underlie apparent exceptions. You learn more that way.)
: The regularity hypothesis simplifies creating multiple daughter languages, largely reducing it to a problem of finding a nice set of sound changes and applying them to a lexicon (I use <a href="http://www.zompist.com/sounds.htm">a program to do this</a>).
: That's fine for working forward (e.g. Cadhinor to Barakhinei), but trickier for working backward (e.g. Verdurian to Cadhinor). I worked through the vocabulary word by word, thinking about the possible parent forms (with good rules, there's usually a choice). (I don't have a program for this sort of multiple-outcome reverse engineering, but I knew the rules well enough to do it by hand.) Sometimes I just didn't like the possible Cadhinor form, or (worse yet) the Verdurian form was simply impossible to generate given the rules. In such cases I could tweak the rules, or change the Verdurian form, or borrow the word from some other source (I figured that would add verisimilitude anyway).
: At the same time I revised a good deal of the vocabulary. I had an embarrassing number of words that were direct steals from English or Russian-- e.g. <i>antelop</i> for 'antelope', now changed to <i>gudun</i>. I also had lots of long unanalyzed words-- a rare unfixed one is <i>lelitsala</i> 'art'. There was some idea of deriving this from <i>elir-dhalec</i> 'life-enriching', but unmotivated phonetic distortions like that are no longer allowed! I got rid of many of these forms by using derivations instead; others were divided properly into morphemes. (E.g. <i>shrifta</i> 'knowledge', diverging oddly from <i>shrifec</i> 'know' is now explained as incorporating a Cadhinor collective suffix <i>-ta</i>.)
: I also complicated the morphology. Probably anyone who's tried learning Verdurian curses me for this-- or ignores those parts-- but I'm rather proud of this, since it's a naturalistic feature of real languages. Most of the complications come from the regular sound changes: e.g. the irregular 1s form <i>lagao</i> 'I get' preserves the <b>g</b> that was fricativized in the infinitive <i>lazhec</i>. (If you think that's bad, you'll <i>really</i> hate Barakhinei.)
: A particular challenge was to provide some sort of historical justification for the verbal inflections of Verdurian, which exhibit teasing hints of regularity. I had no restrictions on the Cadhinor and Proto-Eastern forms, of course, but I did want the two sets of sound changes to start with something more regular and end up with the Verdurian forms (perhaps tweaked a little by analogy). This proved to be surprisingly difficult. The best I could do was to unify the three conjugations in one (<a href="http://www.zompist.com/eastern2.html#cverbs">here</a>), and that system could hardly be more arcane... though it's any worse than many real-world examples.
: Much of what I learned during all this ended up distilled into the Language Construction Kit.
: I know nobody will follow this advice :) but I will say that it's easier to do it right the first time. Writing Verdurian, I still have to check the dictionary all too often to make sure I'm not remembering the old form rather than the revised one.
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