Let’s make a language – Part 16a: Time (Intro)

Time may be relative, or an illusion, or even on our side. However you think of it, it’s an important part of any culture. And culture is reflected in language, so every language is going to have ways of talking about time. Unlike many of the possible semantic categories, time is so vital that it’s often reflected directly in the grammar, as verb tense. But this part of the series will focus on how time affects a language’s lexicon. And to do that, we must first look at the calendar.

Timekeeping

Humans have been recording time for thousands upon thousands of years. After hunting and preparing food, some of the oldest tools we’ve found are instruments for recording the passage of time. This obsession has continued to the present day, where we’re treated to stories of new atomic clocks so precise and so accurate that they’ll only lose a second or two throughout the rest of our planet’s lifetime.

But let’s go back to those earlier days, because that’s when language was born. Our distant ancestors didn’t have atomic clocks or wristwatches or anything of the sort. They did, however, have the sun and the moon. Those celestial bodies aren’t perfect timekeepers, but they’re good enough for coarse measurement. Later, as civilizations arose, better methods of marking time became a necessity. “Better” in this sense means more accuracy (kept time is closer to “real” time) and precision (counting in smaller and smaller divisions).

The bigger units are mostly astronomical in nature. A day is the time it takes the Earth to rotate once on its axis. (Later, we figured out the difference between solar and sidereal days.) It doesn’t take much to realize that a day has two major components, day and night—some languages have different words for the two senses of day, but many don’t. The boundary periods can also be important: in English, we have dawn and dusk, plus the collective twilight. We’ve divided the two halves into finer portions: morning, afternoon, evening, etc. And a couple of times, noon and midnight, get special mention.

The month, as its name suggests, is loosely based on the orbit of the moon or, to put it in “ancient” terms, its phases. It averages a little over 30 days for us in the West, but other calendars do things differently. And the moon brings its own host of vocabulary. It waxes and wanes, and it can appear as new or full, crescent or gibbous.

Longer periods of time are based (unwittingly, at first) on the Earth’s orbit. The seasons come about from a planet’s tilt. We’re used to four of these, winter, summer, spring, and fall or autumn, but some cultures divide things differently. In the tropics, the temperature difference between the seasons isn’t so great, and rainfall is the deciding factor, so a culture in that region might speak of wet and dry seasons instead. Likewise, the monsoon is regular enough that places where it appears might consider it its own season. And non-tropical cultures will undoubtedly mark the equinoxes and solstices.

One full orbit of a planet around its star is a year, of course, and that also marks a full circuit of the seasons. Longer periods of time usually come from derivation. For decimal-based cultures, something akin to the decade, century, and millennium will likely appear. Non-decimal languages would instead develop similar terms for a dozen years, a gross, or whatever is appropriate. In addition, a few terms for larger amounts of time are based on the human body, such as generation and lifetime, while others (era, epoch) are historical in nature.

Switching to the other side of the coin, it wasn’t too hard to divide the day into hours. The specific number of them is culture-dependent, and this is a case where decimal numbers failed. Subdividing the hours was harder; talking minutes and seconds as anything other than theoretical requires the technology to measure them. But those terms are old enough to show that theory was around long before practicality. Our modern intervals of milliseconds and smaller come from the metric system, but moment and instant have a longer history, and heartbeat stands as a “legacy” unit of time.

The order of things

The units of time are important for precision, but just as useful are the nebulous terms of relative time. We can speak of the past, present, and future, for instance, and other cultures (especially if their languages have different tense systems) will have their own scheme. Something close to aspect also enters the vocabulary. Things or states can be temporary or permanent. They can begin and end, pause and continue. Some actions occur at regular intervals.

When something happens relative to when it should is another rich area of vocabulary. Someone can be early or late or, more rarely, on time (also prompt or timely). We can hurry to catch up with time, or we can wait if we’re ahead.

Mixing relative and absolute time also creates more possibilities for words. An event can take place today or tomorrow, but it also could have been yesterday. Or we can be more specific: phrases such as this morning and last night could be represented as a single lexeme in some languages.

Naming the calendar

The week is an outlier, and its vague definition illustrates that fact. It’s seven days for us, but that’s not a constant throughout history or the world. Anything between about four and ten days has been a “week” somewhere and at some point. It’s purely cultural, and it probably originated as a way to organize markets and the like.

With so few “moving parts”, it’s a simple thing to give each day of the week its own name. We did, after all. In English, we’ve got one named after the sun, another after the moon, four for Germanic gods of ages past, and somehow Saturn found his way in there. Other languages do things differently, though. The Romance theme is Roman gods, obviously, with a shout-out to Christianity on Sundays. Some cultures instead use a rather boring scheme of “first-day”, “second-day”, and so on. Still others can be more pragmatic, naming, for example, the market day as a compound meaning “market-day”.

Months can also have their own names. Our Western list is a mess, mixing in gods (January), emperors (July and August), and numbers (October, misnumbered because of a quirk of history). But that’s evolution for you. Tempting as it is to go all agglutinative here, other forces may intervene.

Specific days of the year can also get their own names: the holidays. These are highly sensitive to cultural aspects, especially religion. Some of them, though, become important enough to be lexicalized. Today, we talk of valentines in February and Easter eggs, Thanksgiving turkeys, and Christmas trees. Those are all noun-noun compounds that have become fixed in form and meaning over time, and they wouldn’t mean anything outside the context of our Western calendar.

Other units of time probably won’t be named, unless the culture has a reason for doing so. We have a few phrases like wee hours, witching hour, and leap year, but those are transparent compounds. We also give numerical or descriptive names to decades, centuries, and other periods: the Nineties, the 20th Century, the Middle Ages. These, however, aren’t lexical.

Making time

In a conlang, you’ll most likely want to start with the “relative” time terms, like before and future. Those are easy, and they cover enough ground to give your language a good amount of “meat” in its vocabulary. Some of them may even suggest themselves from the grammatical elements, such as tense and aspect markers or prepositions. Or you could go the other way, deriving new terms from the basic words of time. That’s how English got before, to name one example.

The “absolute” words are harder, because you need to develop at least a rudimentary outline of a culture. You need to understand the people who speak your language. Obviously, an auxlang has the easiest time here, since it will just copy the sensibilities of its “host” cultures. Artlangs need a bit more care. (If they’re on alien worlds, then they need a lot more care, but that’s a different post.) Remember who you’re dealing with, too. Ancient herders aren’t going to have a word for “nanosecond”, and a far-future spacefaring race might not use, say, weeks.

Finally, don’t forget that many words that seemingly have no connection to the passage of time are, in fact, derived from temporal terms. It’s thanks to time that we have words like tide, daisy, periodical, perennial, and menstrual, among many others.

Into the future

Next time (pardon the pun), we’ll be looking at how Isian speaks about time. Then, it’s Ardari’s turn. Beyond that, the future is less certain. But time and tide wait for no man, so we’ll get to them eventually.

Summer reading list 2016

In the US, Memorial Day is the last Monday in May, and it is considered the unofficial start of summer. Time for the kids to get out of school, time to fire up the grills or hit the water. Although the solstice itself isn’t for three more weeks, late May feels like summer, and that’s good enough for most people.

But there’s one hint of school that stays with us through these next glorious weeks of peace: the summer reading list. Many will remember that awful thing, the educational system’s attempt to infringe on a child’s last refuge. I hated it, and you probably did, too. The books they chose were either awful (Ayn Rand’s Anthem) or tainted by association with school (Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer). Just like the reading assignments of the other nine months, the summer reading list seemed designed to suck all the enjoyment out of a book.

Now that we’ve outgrown it, things are different. We no longer need to read to please others. But that doesn’t mean we stop reading. No, we instead choose our own path.

So here’s a bit of a challenge for you. Read three books between now and Labor Day (September 5). That’s roughly one a month, so it shouldn’t be too hard. There won’t be any reports due, so you don’t have to worry about that, either. Remember, adults can read for fun rather than work.

It wouldn’t be a challenge if there weren’t rules, so here they are:

  1. You have to read three (3) complete books between May 30 and September 5 of this year. (For following years, it’s the last Monday in May to the first Monday in September.) Giving up halfway doesn’t get you partial credit, so make sure you pick something you can stand to finish.

  2. One (1) of these books should be nonfiction. It can be anything from history to self-help, but it has to be real. (Historical fiction doesn’t count for this, by the way.)

  3. If you’re an aspiring fiction writer, then one (1) of the books must not be from your preferred genre. For example, a fantasy writer should read a non-fantasy book, perhaps sci-fi or a modern detective story. The idea is to branch out, expand your horizons.

  4. Graphic novels count, but comic books don’t. The distinction is subtle, I’ll admit. I’d say a comic book is a short periodical, usually in magazine-style binding, while a graphic novel is a longer work presented in the same way as a text-only work. You can be your own judge, as long as you’re honest with yourself.

And that’s it!

Rhyme in conlangs

I’ve been doing posts on here for a year now, and there’s been one glaring omission. The name of the place is “Prose Poetry Code”, but we have yet to see any actual posts about poetry. So let’s fix that by looking at how we can add a poetic touch to a constructed language by using that most famous of poetic devices: rhyme.

You most likely already know what rhyme is, so we can skip the generalities. It’s all around us, in our songs, in our video game mysteries, in our nursery rhymes and limericks and everywhere else you look. Do we need a definition?

The sound of a rhyme

From a linguistic perspective, we probably do. Yes, it’s easy to point at two words (“sing” and “thing”, for instance) and say that they rhyme. But where’s the boundary? Rhyme is a similarity in the final sounds of words or syllables, but we have to define how close these sounds must be before they’re considered to rhyme. Do “sing” and “seen” rhyme? The English phonemes /n/ and /ŋ/ aren’t too far apart, as any dialectal speech illustrates.

So there’s your first “dimension” to rhyme. Clearly, there are limits, but they can be fluid. (Poetry is all about breaking the rules, isn’t it?) Most languages would allow inexact rhymes, as long as there’s enough of a connection between the sounds, but how much is necessary will depend on the language and its culture. You can go where you want on this, but a good starting point is the following set of guidelines:

  1. A sound always rhymes with itself. (This one’s obvious, but there’s always allophonic variation to worry about.)
  2. Two consonants rhyme if they differ only in voice. (You can add aspiration or palatalization here, if that’s appropriate for your conlang.)
  3. Two vowels rhyme if they differ only in length. (Again, if this is a valid distinction.)
  4. A diphthong can rhyme with its primary vocalic component. (In other words, /ei/ can rhyme with /e/ but not /i/.)
  5. Nasal consonants rhyme with any other nasal. (This is a generalization of the explanation above.)

This isn’t perfect, and it’s especially not intended to be a list of commandments from on high. Feel free to tweak a bit to give your conlang its own flavor. And if you’re using an odder phonology, look for the contrasts that make it distinct.

Where to begin, where to end

Another thing to think about is how much of a syllable is considered for a rhyme. In Chinese, for instance, it’s basically everything but an initial consonant. English, with its complicated phonological and syllabic systems, allows more freedom. Clusters can count as simplified consonants or stand on their own. Reduced or unstressed vowels can be omitted, as can consonants: “’twas”, “o’er”.

Once again, this is creativity at work, so I can’t tell you what to do. It’s your decision. Really, the only “hard” rule here is that the initial part of a syllable rarely, if ever, has to match for a rhyme. Everything else is up for grabs.

With longer words, it’s the same way, but this is a case where different languages can do things differently. Stress patterns can play a role, and so can the grammar itself. To take one example, Esperanto’s system for marking word class by means of a change in final vowels is interesting from a mechanical point of view, but it’s awful for rhyming poetry. One could argue that all nouns rhyme, which is…suboptimal. (A better option there might be to require rhyming of the penultimate syllable, since Esperanto always stresses it, ignoring the “marker” vowel altogether.)

Going in a different direction, it’s easy to see that a language with CV syllables—think something in the Polynesian family here—will tend to have very long words. With a small set of phonemes, there aren’t too many combinations, and that could lead to too much rhyming. Maybe a language like that requires multiple matching syllables, but it might just discard rhyme as a poetic device instead.

And then there’s tone. I don’t speak a tonal language, so I’ve got little to go on here, but I can see a couple of ways this plays out. Either tone is ignored for rhyming, in which case you have nothing to worry about, or it’s important. If that’s true, then you have to work out which tones are allowed to rhyme. For “level” tones (high, low, medium), you could say that they have to be within one “step”. “Contour” tones may have to end at roughly the same pitch. Why the end, you may ask? Because rhyming is inherently tied to the ends of syllables.

Different strokes

As rhyme is tied to the spoken form of a language, it will be affected by the different ways that language is spoken—in other words, dialects.

One good example of this in English is “marry”. Does it rhyme with “tarry”? Most people would say so. What about “gory”? Probably not. “Berry”? Ah, there you might have a problem. Some dialects merge the vowels in “marry” and “merry”, while most other (American) ones don’t.

Rhyming verse is made to be spoken, recited, chanted, or sung, not merely read, so this is not a theoretical problem. It’s important for anyone writing in a natural language with any significant dialectal variation. Nor is it limited to slight changes in vowel quality. What about English /r/? It disappears at the end of words in England, but not America…at least in speech. Except for country music, most singers tend to drop the R because it sounds better, which has the side effect of creating more opportunities to rhyme.

Of course, for a conlang, you probably don’t have to think about dialects unless you’re specifically creating them. Still, it might be useful to think about for more “hardcore” worldbuilding.

Sing a song

Rhyming isn’t everything in poetry. It’s not even the most important part, and many types of verse get by just fine without it. But I started with it for two reasons: it’s the easiest to explain, and it’s the simplest to build into your conlangs. In fact, you’ve probably already got it, if you look close enough. (If you’re using random generation to create your words, however, you may not have enough similar words to get good rhymes. That’s where author fiat has to come in. Get in there and make them.)

If you don’t care for rhymes, that’s not a problem. Others do, and if you’re making a language for other people to speak, such as an auxlang, you have to be prepared for it. Poetry is all about wordplay, and creativity is an unstoppable force. Whether song or spoken word, people will find ways to make things work.

On writing systems

Most conlangers work with text: text files, wordlists, and the like. It’s very much a visual process, quite the opposite of “real” languages. Yes, we think about the sound of a language while we’re making it, but the bulk of the creation is concerned with the written word. It’s just easier to work with, especially on a computer.

Writing, of course, has a long history in the real world, and many cultures have invented their own ways of recording the spoken word. For a conlang, however, the usual form of writing is a transcription into our own alphabet. Few go to the trouble of creating their own system of writing, their own script. Tolkien did, to great effect, but he was certainly an outlier. That makes sense. After all, creating a language is hard enough. Giving it its own script is much more effort for comparatively little payoff.

But some are willing to try. For those who are, let’s see what it takes to create writing. Specifically, we’ll look at the different kinds of scripts out there in this post.

Alphabet

The alphabet is probably the simplest form of script, from the point of view of making one. You don’t really need an example of an alphabet—unless this post was translated into Chinese while I wasn’t looking, you’re reading one! Still, our familiar letters aren’t the only possibility. There’s the Greek alphabet, for example, as well as Cyrillic and a few others.

Alphabets generally have a small inventory of symbols, each used (more or less) for a single phoneme. Obviously, English is far from perfect on that front, but that’s okay. It doesn’t have to be perfect. The principle stands, even if it’s stretched a bit. None of our 26 letters stands for a full syllable, right?

That’s why alphabets are so easy to make, and why they’re (probably) the most common form of writing for conlangs. You only need a few symbols—and there’s nothing saying you can’t borrow a few—and you’re all but done. Writing in the script you make can be as simple as exchanging letters for glyphs.

Abjad and abugida

These two foreign terms name two related variations on the alphabet. The abjad is a script where only consonants are directly written; vowels are represented by diacritics, if at all. That’s the basic system used by Arabic and many of its cousins, as in “ةباتك” (kitāba). Note that Arabic isn’t a “pure” abjad, though. The third letter (reading right-to-left) stands for the long a, while the final a has its own letter. As with English, that’s fine. Nobody’s perfect.

The abugida is similar to the abjad, but it does mark vowels. Unlike an alphabet, this is usually with some form of diacritic or as an “inherent” vowel, but it’s always there. Many of the various languages of India use this type of script, such as the Devanagari used by Hindi: लेखन (lekhan). This particular word has three “letters”, roughly standing for l, kh, and n. The vowel a (actually a schwa) is implicit, and it’s omitted at the end of words in Hindi, so only the first letter needs a diacritic to change its vowel. Once more, the scheme isn’t perfect, but it works for a few hundred million people, so there you go.

Syllabary

Alphabets, abjads, and abugidas all have one thing in common: they work on the level of phonemes. That makes intuitive sense, particularly in languages with complex phonotactics. When there are hundreds of thousands of possible syllables, but only a few dozen individual phonemes, the choice is clear. (That hasn’t stopped some crazy people from trying to make a syllabary for English, but I digress.)

The syllabary, by contrast, gives each syllable its own symbol. Realistically, to use a “pure” syllabary, a language almost has to have a very simple syllabic structure. It works best with the CV or CVC languages common to Asia and Oceania, and that’s probably why the most well-known syllabary comes from that region, the Japanese kana: てがき (tegaki).

A syllabary will always have more symbols than an alphabet (about 50 for Hiragana, plus diacritics for voicing), but not an overwhelming number of them. Syllabaries made for more complicated structures usually have to make a few sacrifices; look at the contortions required in Japanese to convert foreign words into Katakana. But with the right language, they can be a compact way of representing speech.

Featural

A featural alphabet is another possibility, sitting somewhere between an alphabet and a syllabary. In this type of script, the letter forms are phonemic, but they are constructed to illustrate their phonetic qualities. Korean is the typical example of a featural script: 필적 (piljeog). As you can see (hopefully; I don’t seem to have the right font installed on this computer), each character does encode a syllable, but it’s obviously made up of parts that represent the portions of that syllable.

Featural alphabets might be overrepresented in conlanging, because they appeal to our natural rationality. Like agglutinative languages, they’re almost mechanical in their elegance. They only require the creation of an alphabet’s worth of symbols, but they give the “look” of a more complex script. If you like them, go for it, but they’re probably rare in the world for a reason.

Logographic

Finally, we come to the logographic script. In this system, each glyph stands for a morpheme or word, with the usual caveat that no real-world system is perfectly pure. Chinese is far and away the most popular logographic script these days: 写作 (xiězuò). Chinese characters have also been borrowed into Korean, Japanese, and other neighboring languages, but they aren’t the only logograms around. Cuneiform, hieroglyphs (Egyptian, Mayan, or whatever), and a few other ancient scripts are logographic in nature.

It should be blatantly obvious what the pros and cons are. The biggest downside to logograms is the sheer number of them you need. About half of Unicode’s Basic Multilingual Plane is composed of Chinese characters, and that’s still not enough. Everything about them is harder, whether writing, inputting, or even learning them. In exchange, you get the most compressed, most unambiguous script possible. But the task might be too daunting for a conlanger.

The mix

In truth, no language falls neatly into one of the above categories. English is written in an alphabet, yes, but we also have quite a few logograms, such as those symbols on the top row of your keyboard. And with the advent of emoji, the logographic repertoire has grown exponentially. Similarly, Arabic has alphabetic properties, Japanese uses Chinese logograms and Latin letters in addition to its syllabic kana, and the phonetic diacritics used by languages such as German are essentially featural.

For your conlang, the style you choose is just that: a style. It’s an artistic choice. Alphabets (including abjads and abugidas) are far easier. Syllabaries can work if you have the right language, or are willing to play around. Logograms require an enormous effort, but they’re so rare that they might be interesting in their own right. And featural systems have the same “logical” appeal as conlangs like Lojban. Which you choose is up to you, but a natural script won’t be limited to one of them. It will borrow parts from the others.

Creating a script for a conlang can be a rewarding task. It’s not the type of thing to undertake lightly, however. It’s a lot of work, and it takes a bit of artistic vision. But you wouldn’t be making a language if you weren’t something of an artist, right?

Let’s make a language – Part 15b: Color terms (Conlangs)

So we’ve seen how real-world languages (or cultures, to be more precise) treat color. Now let’s take a look at what Isian and Ardari have to say about it.

Isian

Isian has a fairly short list of basic color terms. It’s got the primary six common to most “developed” languages, as follows:

Color Word
white bid
black ocom
red ray
green tich
yellow majil
blue sush

We’ve actually seen these before, in the big vocabulary list a few parts back, but now you know why those colors were picked.

There are also three other “secondary” terms. Mesan is the Isian word for “gray”, and it runs the gamut from black to white. Sun covers browns and oranges, with an ochre or tawny being the close to the “default”. In the same way, loca is the general term for purple, pink, magenta, fuchsia, and similar colors. Finally, mays and gar are “relative” terms for light and dark, respectively; gar sush is “dark blue”, which could be, say, a navy or royal blue.

All these words are adjectives, so we can say e sush lash “the blue dress” or ta ocom bis “a black eye”. Making them into nouns takes the same effort as any other adjective, using the suffix -os. Thus, rayos refers to the color of red; we could instead say rayechil “red-color”.

Derivation is also at the heart of most other Isian color names. Compounds of two adjectives aren’t too common in the language, but they are used for colors. In all cases, the “primary” color is taken as the head of the compound. Some examples include:

  • raysun, a reddish-brown or red-orange; some hair colors, like auburn, might also fit under this term.
  • majiltich, a yellow-green close to chartreuse.
  • tichmajil, similar to majiltich, but more yellow, like lime.
  • locasush, a mix of blue and purple, a bit like indigo.

Most other colors are named after those things that have them. “Blood red”, for instance, is mirokel (using the adjectival form of miroc “blood”). Halakel is “sky blue”, and so on. As with English, many of the names come from flowers, fruits, woods, and other botanical origins. We’ll look at those in a later post, though.

Ardari

To look at Ardari’s color terminology, we’ll need to work in stages, as this uncovers a bit of the language’s history. First, it seems that Ardari went a long time with four basic colors:

Color Word
white ayzh
black zar
red jor
green rhiz

Yellow (mingall) and blue (uswall) got added later, likely beginning as derivations from some now-lost roots. (The sun and the sky are good bets, based on what we know about real-world cultures.)

Next came a few more unanalyzable roots:

Color Word
brown dir
orange nòrs
purple plom
pink pyèt
gray rhuk

That gives the full array of eleven that many languages get before moving on to finer distinctions. Add in wich “light” and nyn “dark”, and you’re on your way to about 30 total colors.

Ardari doesn’t use compounds very often, so most of the other color terms are derived in some fashion. Two good examples are the similar-sounding wènyät “gold” and welyät “sky blue”. These started out as nothing more than adjectival forms of owènyi “gold” and weli “sky”, turned into adjectives by the -rät suffix we met not too long ago, and worn down a bit over time.

Another color word, josall, is an example of a more abstract or general term. It covers very light colors like beige and the pastels. It’s lighter even than wich nòrs or wich jor would be, but with more color than pure white. The word itself probably derives from josta “shell”, so you could describe it as a seashell color.

Grammatically, Ardari color terms are adjectives, so they inflect for gender just like any other. They can be used directly as nouns. And you can add the suffix -it to make something like English “-ish”: jorit “reddish”. That’s really all there is to it.

Moving on

Both our conlangs could easily have a hundred more words for various colors, but these are enough for now. You get the idea, after all. So it’s time to head to the next topic. I still haven’t thought of what that will be. At some point (probably by the time I write Part 16), I’ll have to make some tough decisions about the world around Isian and Ardari, because we’re fast approaching the point where that will matter. So the series might go on a hiatus of a few weeks while I brainstorm. We’ll see.

Let’s make a language – Part 15a: Color terms (Intro)

Once you have the grammar parts figured out, most of the rest of the conlanging process is making words. We began to see that in Part 14, when we discussed deriving new words from existing roots. This time around, we’re going back to the roots (pun intended) and looking at a very specific set of words: the color terms.

Color terms are, well, terms for colors. They’re the names you see on crayons or paint swatches. As anyone who has been to a hardware store knows, there are thousands of these, but we’ll focus on the absolute basics. Most colors are named after things that are that color, like “violet” or “salmon”. A few, however, are truly basic: “red”, “yellow”, “black”, and so on. These are the ones that most interest us here.

More importantly, which color terms are considered “basic” turns out to be a way in which languages differ. That makes this subject an excellent illustration of how a language can divide up the “semantic space”. Not every language is the same in this respect, and realizing that is a good step towards creating a more naturalistic conlang, rather than a simple cipher of your native tongue.

The color hierarchy

Every language has at least two basic colors. That seems to be a linguistic and cultural universal. But according to a study by Berlin and Kay (1969), what comes next follows a fairly regular trajectory. To be sure, there are outliers, but the past few decades have only reinforced the notion of a developmental hierarchy of color terms, making it a useful model for conlangs.

The first distinction in color is near-universal: light and dark. This can also be black and white or warm and cool; the specifics won’t matter too much. Mostly, yellow and red fall in with white in this scheme, while blue and green are dark. Other colors, like purple, brown, or orange, fall in somewhere along this spectrum. Exactly where is different for each language. It’s easy to see pink as “light” and purple as “dark”, but what about a soft lavender or a deep ruby?

At some point, probably fairly early in a culture’s history, a new color term comes about, splitting “light” into white and red. This seems obvious, as blood is red, and it’s a very important part of humanity. Yellow also tends to get lumped in with red in this scheme, meaning that most oranges do, too.

The next two colors to “break off” are green and yellow, in either order. Green can come first or yellow can, but they both need to be present before the next stage can begin. Once a language has these five color terms—black, white, red, green, yellow—then it’s on to the sixth and final major color: blue.

These six are the main group, then, and there’s a very good reason why. Human vision, as anybody who took biology knows, has two key parts: rods and cones. The rods are monochromatic, distinguishing only light and dark; in other words, just like a two-color-term language. The cones, however, are how we see color. They come in three flavors, roughly corresponding to red, green, and blue.

So that’s probably a good explanation for the first six basic color terms. Red has the longest wavelength, so it’s the easiest to see, hence why stop signs and a car’s brake lights are red. It stands to reason that it would be singled out first. The eye’s green cones tend to be the most sensitive, but green and yellow are pretty close together, spectrally speaking, so they’re the next two, but their similarity leads to the flip-flop in which comes first. And then that leaves blue.

What about the others, though? Well, there it gets murky. Brown is usually the seventh basic color, distinguished from red and yellow. After that, there’s no real set order among the next four: orange, pink, purple, and gray. But those eleven, possibly accompanied by one or more lighter or darker shades (cyan, magenta, azure, etc.), make up the core color terminology of the majority of languages.

The rest of the box

All the other colors’ names will be derived in some way, and that can include some from the above list, if a language doesn’t have a full complement of basic terms. One way of doing this is with adjectives that specify a particular shade of a color. English has lots of these: dark, light, pale, deep, etc. The new color names produced with them aren’t single words, but phrases like “dark blue” or “pale pink”; other languages might have ways of compounding them, though.

Compounds give us another way of making new color words. By combining two basic colors, we can get new ones. That’s how we have “red-orange” or “blue-green”, to name but two. They’re in-between colors, and they tend to be composed of two colors adjacent on the spectrum. It’s hard to imagine a “yellow-blue” that isn’t green, for instance.

Another possibility is the abstract color word. These aren’t basic terms; instead, they tend to come about as finer distinctions of shade. They may have started off with some other meaning, but they now refer almost exclusively to a specific range of colors. Maroon and cyan are a couple of English examples.

By far, though, the best way of making names for colors is through description. Something that has a certain color becomes a descriptor for that particular color—“navy blue”, for instance—then, eventually, the color’s name. That’s how it worked for salmon, coral, violet, lavender, and hundreds of others. It may have even been the case for orange, as the fruit’s name seems be older than the color term. And if the original reason for one of these names is lost, then it may come to be considered an abstract term; indigo is one color that has gone through this process.

Using all these, a language can easily fill up even the biggest box of crayons. But the more color terms you have, the less of the color space each one covers. There will be overlap, of course, and the general terms will always cover more area than the more specific ones. And every language makes its own distinctions. The border between, say, red and yellow isn’t set in stone.

Even weirder

A few conlangers like making languages for speakers that aren’t ordinary humans. Since we’re moving into more culture-specific parts of language, this is a good opportunity to look at what needs to be done for that sort of conlang.

If the prevailing theory is accurate, basic color terms come about in the order they do because of human vision, as we saw above. A race that doesn’t follow normal human rules, however, will have a different color hierarchy. Some people, for example, have a fourth set of cone cells, purportedly letting them see otherwise “impossible” colors. Tetrachromats, as they’re called, effectively have a fourth primary color at their disposal.

An entire race (in the literary sense) of tetrachromats would have a language that reflects this. Where their fourth color fits into the hierarchy would depend on the specifics of how that fourth cone cell works, but it would certainly be in that first group alongside red, green, yellow, and blue.

Similarly, red-green colorblindness could be the norm for a race. In that case, red and green wouldn’t differentiate, obviously, but the rest of the diminished color space would also be changed. In fact, it’s easy to imagine such a race never getting past the light/dark stage.

And no discussion of color vision would be complete without including the neighboring portions of the spectrum. The human lens blocks ultraviolet, but some people report being able to see it. Vision reaching into the infrared is a little more plausible for our species. Aliens, though, could have their equivalent to cones reach their peak sensitivity at different points of the spectrum, allowing them to see into the deeper or higher ranges. Their color terms would likely reflect this, and an alien race could have a whole collection of words for color combinations that we simply cannot see.

Next up

Next time, we’ll look at our two conlangs and their color words. Then, it’ll be off to another part of the semantic realm, but I don’t yet know exactly which one. Stay tuned.

Let’s make a language – Part 14c: Derivation (Ardari)

Ardari takes a different approach for its word derivation. Instead of compounding, like Isian does, Ardari likes stacking derivational affixes. That doesn’t mean it totally lacks compounds, just that they take a bit of a back seat to affixes. Therefore, we should start with the latter.

Ardari’s three main parts of speech—noun, verb, and adjective—are mostly separate. Sure, you can use adjectives directly as nouns, and we’ve got ky to create infinitives, but there are usually insurmountable boundaries surrounding these three. The most regular and productive derivation affixes, then, are the ones that let us pass through those boundaries.

Making nouns

To make new nouns from other types of words, we’ve got a few choices:

  • -önda creates abstract nouns from verbs (luchönda “feeling”)
  • -kön makes agent nouns, like English “-er” (kwarkön “hunter”)
  • -nyn creates patient nouns from verbs, a bit like a better “-ee” (chudnyn “one who is guarded”)
  • -ymat takes an adjective and makes an abstract noun from it (agrisymat “richness”)

All of these are perfectly regular and widely used in the language. The nouns they create are, by default, neuter. -kön and -nyn, however, can be gendered: kwarköna denotes a male hunter, kwarköni a huntress.

Two other important nominal suffixes are -sö and -ölad. The first switches an abstract or mass noun to a concrete or count noun, while the second does the opposite. Thus, we have ichurisö “a time of peace”, oblasö “a drop of water”, sèdölad “childhood”, or kujdölad “kingship”. (Note that a final vowel disappears when -ölad is added.)

Ardari also has both a diminutive -imi and an augmentative -oza. These work on nouns about like you’d expect: rhasimi “puppy”, oskoza “ocean”. However, there is a bit of a sticking point. Diminutive nouns are always feminine, and augmentatives always masculine, no matter the original noun’s gender. This can cause oddities, especially with kinship terms: emönimi “little brother” is grammatically feminine!

The other main nominal derivation is po- (p- before vowels). This forms antonyms or opposites, like English “un-” or “non-“. Examples include poban “non-human” and polagri “gibberish”.

Most other derived nouns are, in fact, adjectives used as nouns, as we’ll see below.

Making adjectives

First of all, adjectives can be made by one of three class-changing suffixes:

  • -ösat makes an adjective from an abstract noun (idyazösat “warlike”)
  • -rät makes an adjective from a concrete noun (emirät “motherly”)
  • -ròs creates a “possibility” adjective from a verb (dervaròs “livable”)

Diminutives and augmentatives work as for nouns, but they take the forms -it and -ab, and they don’t alter gender, as Ardari adjectives must agree with head nouns in gender. Some examples: pòdit “oldish”, nejab “very wrong”.

We’ve already seen the general adjective negator ur- in the Babel Text. It works very similarly to English un-, except that it can be used anywhere. (The blended form u- from the Babel Text’s ulokyn is a special, nonproductive stem change.)

Most of the other adjective derivations are essentially postpositional phrases with the order reversed. Here are some of the most common:

  • nèch-, after (nèchidyaz “postwar”)
  • jögh-, before (jötulyan “pre-day”)
  • olon-, middle, centrally (olongoz “midnight”)
  • är-, above or over (ärdaböl “overland”, from dabla)
  • khow-, below or under (khowdyev “underground”)

Many of these are quickly turned into abstract nouns. For instance, olongoz is perfectly usable as a noun meaning “midnight”. Like any other adjective-turned-noun, it would be neuter: olongoze äl “at midnight”.

Making verbs

There are only two main class-changing suffixes to make verbs. We can add -ara to create a verb roughly meaning “to make X”, as khèvara “to dry”. The suffix -èlo works on nouns, and its meaning is often more nuanced. For example, pämèlo “to plant”, from pämi “plant”.

Repetition, like English “re-“, is a suffix in Ardari. For verb stems ending in a consonant, it’s -eg: prèlleg- “to relearn”. Vowel-stems instead use -vo, as in bejëvo- “to rethink”.

Ardari also has a number of prefixes that can be added for subtle connotations. The following table shows some of these, along with their English equivalents.

Prefix Meaning English Example
ej- for, in favor of pro- ejsim “to speak for”
èk- against anti- èksim “to speak against”
jès- with co- jèzgrät “to co-create”
nich- wrongly, badly mis- nichablon “to mishear”
ob- after post-/re- opsim “to reply”
sèt- before pre- sètokön “to precut”
wa- into in- wamykhes “to inquire”
zha- out of ex- zhalo “to expire”

Making compounds

Compounds aren’t as common in Ardari as they are in Isian, but they’re still around. Any noun can be combined with any other noun or adjective, with the head component coming last, as in the rest of the language.

Adjective-noun combinations are the most regular, like chelban “youth, young person”. Noun-agent is another productive combination: byzrivirdökön “bookseller”. Noun-noun compounds tend to be idiosyncratic: lagribyzri “dictionary”, from lagri “word” and byzri “book”.

Reduplicated adjectives are sometimes used for colloquial superlatives: khajkhaj “topmost”, slisli “most beautiful”.

A few words derived from nouns or verbs sit somewhere between compounds and derivational morphemes. An example is -allonda, from allèlönda “naming”. This one works a bit like English “-onomy”: palallonda “astronomy”. Another is -prèllönda, more like “-ology”: ondaprèllönda “audiology”. Finally, -benda and -bekön, from bejë-, work like “-ism” and “-ist”: potsorbekön “atheist” (po- + tsor + -bekön).

Make some words

As before, these aren’t all of the available derivations for Ardari. They’re enough to get started though, and they’re enough to accomplish our stated goal: creating lots of words!

Let’s make a language – Part 14b: Derivation (Isian)

Both of our conlangs have a wide variety of ways to construct new words without having to resort to full-on coinages. We’ll start with Isian, as always, since it tends to be the simpler of the two.

Isian compounds

Isian is a bit more like German or Swedish than English, in that it prefers compounds of whole words rather than tacking on bound affixes. That’s not to say the language doesn’t have a sizable collection of those, but they’re more situational. Compounding is the preferred way of making new terms.

Isian compounds are mostly head-final, and the most common by far are combinations of two or more nouns:

  • hu “dog” + talar “house” → hutalar “doghouse”
  • acros “war” + sam “man” → acrosam “soldier” (“war-man”)
  • tor “land” + domo “lord” → tordomo “landlord”

Note that acrosam shows a loss of one s. This is a common occurrence in Isian compounds. Anytime two of the same letter would meet, they merge into one. (In writing, they might remain separate.) Two sounds that “can’t” go together are instead linked by -r- or -e-, whichever fits better.

Adjectives can combine with nouns, too. The noun always goes last. Only the stress patterns and the occasional added or deleted sound tell you that you’re dealing with a compound rather than a noun phrase:

  • sush “blue” + firin “bird” → sufirin “bluebird”
  • bid “white” + ficha “river” → bificha “rapids” (“white river”)

In the latter example, which shows elision, the noun phrase “a white river” would be ta bid ficha, with bid receiving its own stress. The compound “some rapids” is instead ta bificha, with only one stress.

Most verbs can’t combine directly with anything else; they have to be changed to adjectives first. A few “dynamic” verbs, however, can be derived from wasa “to go” plus another verb. An example might be wasotasi “to grab”, from otasi “to hold”.

Changing class

Isian does have ways of deriving, say, a noun from an adjective. The language has a total of eight of these class-changing morphemes that are fairly regular and productive. All of them are suffixes, and the table below shows their meaning, an example, and their closest English equivalent.

Suffix Function English Example
-do State adjective from verb -ly ligado “lovely”
-(t)e Verb from noun -fy safe “to snow”
-el Adjective from noun -y, -al lakhel “royal”
-m Agent noun from verb -er ostanim “hunter”
-mer Adjective from verb -able cheremer “visible”
-nas Abstract noun from verb -ance gonas “speech”
-(r)os Noun from adjective -ness yaliros “happiness”
-(a)ti Verb from adjective en- haykati “to anger”

For the most part, these can’t be combined. Instead, compounds are formed. As an example, “visibility” can be translated as cheremered “visible one”, compounding cheremer with the generic pronoun ed.

-do is very commonly used to make compounds of verbs (in the form of gerund-like adjectives) and nouns. An example might be sipedototac “woodcutting”, from which we could also derive sipedototakem “woodcutter”.

More derivation

The other productive derivational affixes don’t change a word’s part of speech, but slightly alter some other aspect. While the class-changers are all suffixes, this small set contains suffixes, prefixes, and even a couple of circumfixes. (We already met one of those in the Babel Text, as you’ll recall.)

  • -chi and -go are diminutive and augmentative suffixes for nouns. Most nouns can take these, although the meanings are often idiosyncratic. For example, jedechi, from jed “boy”, means “little boy”, and secago “greatsword” derives from seca “sword”.

  • -cat, as we saw in the Babel Text, turns a noun into a “mass” noun, one that represents a material or some other uncountable. One instance there was gadocat “brick”, meaning the material of brick, not an individual block.

  • a-an was also in the Babel Text. It’s a circumfix: the a- part is a prefix, the -an a suffix. Thus, we can make ayalian “unhappy” from yali “happy”.

  • Two other productive circumfixes are i-se and o-ca, the diminutive and augmentative for adjectives, respectively. With these, we can make triplets like hul “cold”, ihulse “cool”, and ohulca “frigid”.

  • The prefix et- works almost exactly like English re-, except that you can put it on just about any verb: roco “to write”, eteroco or etroco “to rewrite”.

  • ha-, another verbal prefix, makes “inverse” forms of verbs. For example, hachere might mean “to not see” or “to miss”. It’s different from the modal adverb an.

  • mo- is similar in meaning, but it’s a “reverse”: mochere “to unsee”.

That’s not all

Isian has a few other derivation affixes, but they’re mostly “legacy”. They aren’t productive, and some of them are quite irregular. We’ll meet them as we go on, though. For now, it’s time to switch to Ardari.

Let’s make a language – Part 14a: Derivation (Intro)

By this point in the series, we’ve made quite a few words, but a “real” language has far more. English, for instance, is variously quoted as having anywhere from 100,000 to over a million different words. How do they do it? Up to now, we’ve been creating words in our conlangs in a pretty direct manner. Here’s a concept, so there’s a word, and then it’s on to the next. But that only takes you a very short way into a vocabulary. What we need is a faster method.

Our words so far (with a few exceptions) have been roots. These are the basic stock of a language’s lexicon, but not its entirety. Most languages can take those roots and construct from them a multitude of new, related words. This process is called derivation, and it might be seen as one of the most powerful weapons in the conlanger’s arsenal.

How to build a word

Derivation is different from inflection. Where inflection is the way we make roots into grammatically correct words, derivation is more concerned with making roots into bigger roots. These can then be inflected like any other, but that’s for after they’re derived.

The processes of derivation and inflection, however, work in similar ways. We’ve got quite a few choices for ways to build words. Here are some of the most common, with English examples where possible.

  • Prefixes: morphemes added to the beginning of a root; “un-” or “anti-“.
  • Suffixes: morphemes added to the end of a root; “-ize” and “-ly”.
  • Compounding: putting two or more roots together to make a new one; “football” or “cellphone”.
  • Reduplication: repeating part or all of a root; “no-no”, “chit-chat”.
  • Stress: changing the stress of a root; noun “permit” and verb “permit“.

Stem changes (where some part of the root itself changes) are another possibility, but these are more common as inflections in English, as in singular “mouse” versus plural “mice”. Tone can be used in derivation in languages that have it, though this seems to be a little rarer.

Also, although I only listed prefixes and suffixes above, there are a few other types of affixes that sometimes pop up in derivation. Infixes are inserted inside the root; English doesn’t do this, except in the case of expletives. Circumfixes combine prefixes and suffixes, like German’s inflectional ge-t. The only English circumfix I can think of is en-en, used to make a few verbs like “enlighten” and the humorous “embiggen”. Finally, many languages’ compounds contain a linking element. German has the ubiquitous -s-, and English has words like “speedometer”.

Derivations of any kind can be classified based on how productive they are. A productive derivation is one which can be used on many words with predictable results. Unproductive derivations might be limited to a few idiosyncratic uses. These categories aren’t fixed, though. Over time, some productive affixes can fall out of fashion, while unproductive ones become more useful due to analogy. (“Trans-” is undergoing the latter transformation—ha!—as we speak, and some are pushing for wider use of the near-forgotten “cis-“.)

Isolating languages are a special case that deserves a footnote. Since the whole point of such a language is that words are usually simple, you might wonder how they can have derivation. Sometimes, they will allow a more “traditional” derivation process, typically compounding or some sort of affix. An alternative is to create phrases with the desired meaning. These periphrastic compounds might be fixed and regular enough in form to be considered derivations, in which case they’ll follow the same rules.

What it means

So we have a lot of ways to build new words (or phrases, for the isolating fans out there) out of smaller parts. That’s great, but now we need those parts. For compounds, it’s pretty easy, so we’ll start with those.

Compounding is the art of taking two smaller words and creating a larger one from them. (And it is indeed an art; look at German if you don’t believe me.) This new word is somehow related to its parts, but how depends a lot on the language. It can be nothing more than the sum of its parts, as in “input-output”. Or the compound may express a subset of one part, like “cellphone”.

Which words can be compounded also changes from language to language. Putting two nouns together (“railroad”) is very common; which one goes first depends, and it’s not always as simple as head-first or head-final. Combinations of two verbs are rarer in Western languages, though colloquial English has phrasal compounds like “go get” and “come see”. Adjective-noun compounds are everywhere in English: “redbird”, “loudspeaker”, and so on.

Verbs and nouns can fit together, too, as they often do in English and related languages. “Breakfast” and “touchscreen” are good examples. Usually, these words combine a verb and an object into a new noun, but not always. Instrumental compounds can also be formed, where the noun is the cause or means of the action. In English, these are distinguished by being noun-verb compounds: “finger-pointing”, “screen-looking”. They start out as gerunds (hence the -ing), but its trivially easy to turn them into verbs.

Really, any words can be compounded. “Livestreaming” is an adjective-verb compound. “Aboveboard” combines a preposition and a noun. The possibilities are endless, and linguistic prescription can’t stop the creative spirit. You don’t even have to use the whole word these days. “Simulcast”, “blog”, and the hideous “staycation” are all examples of “blended” compounds.

All the rest

Compounds are all made from words or, more technically, free morphemes. Most of the other derivational processes work by attaching bound morphemes to a root. Some of these are highly productive, able to make a new word out of just about anything. Others are more restricted, like the rare examples of English reduplication.

Changing class

Most derivations of this type change some part of a word’s nature, shifting it from one category to another. English, as we know, is full of these, and its collection makes a good, exhaustive list for a conlanger. We’ve got -ness (adjective to noun), -al (noun to adjective), -fy (noun to verb), -ize (adjective to verb), -able (verb to adjective), and -ly (adjective to adverb), just to name a few. Two special ones of note are -er, which changes a verb to an agent noun, and its patient counterpart -ee.

In general, a language with a heavy focus on derivation (especially agglutinative languages) will have lots of these. One for each possible pair isn’t out of the question. Sometimes, you’ll be able to stack them, as in words like “villification” (noun to verb and back to noun) or “internationalization” (noun to adjective to verb to noun!).

Changing meaning

Those derivations that don’t alter a lexical category will instead change the meaning of the root. We’ve got a lot of options here, and English seems happy to use every single one of them. But we’ll look at just a few of them here. Most, it must be said, were borrowed from Latin or Greek, starting a couple hundred years ago; these classical languages placed a much heavier emphasis on agglutination than English at the time.

Negation is common, particularly for verbs and adjectives. In English, for example, we’ve got un-, non-, in-, dis-, de-, and a-, among others. For nouns, it’s usually more of an antonym than a negation: anti-.

Diminutives show up in a lot of languages, where they indicate “smallness” or “closeness” of some sort. Spanish, for instance, has the diminutive suffix -ito (feminine form -ita). English, on the other hand, doesn’t have a good “general” diminutive. We’ve got -ish for adjectives (“largish”) and -y for some nouns (“daddy”), but nothing totally regular. By a kind of linguistic analogy, diminutives often have high, front vowels in them.

Augmentatives are the opposite: they connote greatness in size or stature. Prefixes like over-, mega-, and super- might be considered augmentatives, and they’re starting to become more productive in modern English. By the same logic as above, augmentatives tend to use back, low vowels.

Most of the others are concerned with verbal aspect, noun location, and the like. In a sense, they replace adverbs or prepositions. Re-, for example, stands in for “again”, as pre- does for “before”. And then there are the outliers, mostly borrowed from classical languages. -ology and -onomy are good examples of this.

Non-English

We’ve heavily focused on English so far, and that’s for good reason: I know English, you know English, and it has a rich tradition of derivation. Other languages work their own ways. The Germanic family likes its compounding. Greek and Latin had tons of affixes you could attach to a word. Many languages of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific have very productive reduplication. Although I used English examples above, that’s no reason to slavishly follow that particular language when constructing your own.

In the next two posts, we’ll see how Isian and Ardari make new words. Each will have its own “style” of derivation, but the results will be the same: near-infinite possibilities.

Sound changes: everything else

Not every sound change works on just consonants or just vowels. Some can transmute one into the other. Others affect entire syllables or words. A few work on a different level entirely. So, we’ll finish this series by looking at these “miscellaneous” types of evolution.

Tones

Tones have to come from somewhere. One of the ways they can appear (tonogenesis) is through the loss of consonants preceding or following a vowel. A voiced consonant, for instance, can cause the vowel after it to be spoken at a lower pitch. If those consonant go away, the change in pitch can remain: a low tone. As another example, a number of consonant elisions led to the tonal system of Chinese, along with its restrictive syllable structure.

Once a language has tone, it becomes a target for evolution. Tones can change, merge, split, and disappear, exactly as phonemes. Unstressed syllables may develop a neutral tone, which might get reanalyzed as one of the existing tones. Sequences of tones can affect each other, as well, a complex process called tone sandhi.

Like any other part of language, tone is subject to the same forces that drive all sound change, which can be summed up as human laziness. More on that later.

Sandhi

The term sandhi comes from Sanskrit; roughly speaking, it means “joining”. In modern linguistics, it’s a catch-all term used for any kind of sound change that crosses the boundary between morphemes. The “linking” R in some English dialects is a kind of sandhi, and so is the use of the article “an” before vowels. Romance languages show a couple more instances of the process: Spanish de eldel; Italian delladell’; the heavy use of liaison in French.

When sandhi becomes systematic, it can create new words, like Spanish del and al. These, of course, can then be changed by any other sound change. And it’s not limited to vowels. Consonants can also be affected by sandhi. The most common expression of this is anticipatory voicing across word boundaries, but other types of assimilation are equally valid.

Epenthesis

Epenthesis is the adding of a sound, the opposite of elision. It’s another way of breaking up a cluster that violates a language’s phonological rules or aesthetic sensibilities. Some epenthesis is a kind of sandhi, like English “an”, and the diaresis discussed last week is another form. Those aren’t the only possibilities, though.

An epenthetic vowel can be inserted between two consonants, and this will usually be a neutral vowel, whatever the language considers that to be. Schwa (/ə/) is a common choice, but /e/, /a/, and /o/ also pop up. /i/ and /u/, however, are usually too strong.

Similarly, strings of vowels may be broken up by epenthetic consonants. Again, something weak and unassuming is needed, something like /r/, /n/, /l/, /h/, or /ʔ/. /w/ and /j/ can be used as glides, as we have seen, but they’ll tend to be used only when they can relate to one of the vowels.

Another option for consonant clusters is an epenthetic consonant, one that bridges the gap between the two. Greek, for example, shows a sound change /mr/ → /mbr/, as seen in words like “ambrosia”. Many speakers of English insert epenthetic consonants like this all over, without even knowing it, like the [p] in “something”. (If this became phonemic, it would be essentially the same thing that happened to Greek.)

Haplology

Two syllables that are fairly close in sound may not stay together for very long. Haplology is a sound change that involves the deletion of one syllable of such a pair. It can be either one, and there’s no standard for how “close” two syllables need to be to trigger the change. English examples include the common pronunciations of “probably” and “February”, and others aren’t hard to find. (In another one of those linguistic oddities, “haplology” itself can fall victim to this, becoming “haplogy”.)

Applying the rules

Although there are plenty of other sound changes out there—again, I refer you to Index Diachronica for more—we have gathered enough over the last three posts to start looking at how to apply them to a conlang. There are plenty of programs out there that can do this for you, but it helps to know the rules. These aren’t set in stone, mind you, but you should have a good reason for breaking them. (That reason would probably lead to more conlanging, so I’m not complaining.)

First, evolutionary sound changes are regular. They’ll almost always happen when the right conditions are met. If you’ve got devoicing of final stops, as in German, then essentially every final stop is going to get devoiced. Sure, there may be exceptions, but those exceptions can be explained. Maybe those words appeared in their current forms after the sound change.

Second, remember that sound changes don’t care. This is a subset of regularity, but it bears repeating. A sound change will affect a word no matter what that word’s history. A particular evolutionary condition may be met because of an earlier sound change, but later changes won’t know that. They’ll only “see” a word ripe for alteration.

Third, sound changes operate on a lower level. They’re “below” grammar and, as such, aren’t affected by it. But this means that grammatical ambiguity can arise, as when sounds of case endings are merged or dropped. (This one happened in both English and the Romance languages.) Speakers will then need to find ways of clearing things up, leading to innovations on the grammar side of things.

Fourth, sound change stems from laziness, a desire to minimize the effort required in speaking and conveying our thoughts. Weak sounds disappear, dissimilar sounds merge, and it’s all because we, as a whole, know we can get away with it. As long as there’s enough left to get the message across, all else is simply extraneous baggage. And that’s what’s most likely to change.

Finally, evolution is unceasing. When it comes to language, the only constant is change. Even our best efforts at writing and education and language academies can’t stop sound change. There will always be differences in speech. Those will form dialects, and then those may split into new, mutually unintelligible languages.