I've been sitting on this one a while, trying to do some more research for it, but, as ever, the time just isn't available. Maybe one day someone will pay me to do this, and I can write more substantive blogs. Nonetheless, I will post what I have so far, which aims to dig a little deeper and get more substantive, addressing one of the central theses of this blog's existence: that conlanging can be of value to Linguistics.
As a matter of fact, I recently listened to the conlangery podcast episode "How to Read Linguistics Papers", and it made me realize what should have been a very obvious fact: what I mean when I say that conlangs can be of value to Linguistics is that they can be of value to Linguistic Theory. The entry pasted below suggests one way that might happen.
The
main constructed language, or conlang, I have worked on is the
language of wider communication throughout the nations descended from
a former empire, a bit like Latin in the centuries after the Fall of
the Roman Empire. This naturally implies that there are other
languages spoken at the time my stories take place, many of them
presumably descendants of the main language, Paiodd. I have sketched
out bits of notes considering what kind of changes might have
occurred in each language, and how they might differ from the parent
language and each other, but one of the issues that I have come
across in doing so is what Paul Kroeger (2006) refers to as
'non-linear morphology'. That is, indicating grammatical
relationships in words not by affixes or word order, but by changes
to the stem word itself. We see this in English with many of our
irregular verbs: run - ran, see - saw, etc. In other languages, this
might take the form of a tone change, nasalization of a vowel,
voicing or de-voicing of consonants, and other changes of features
that do not involve adding or subtracting from a word stem.
In
fact, the English system was the inspiration for the Paiodd system,
prompting me to wonder what a language would be like if all
verbs were 'irregular'. To be fair, the system in Paiodd is in fact
regular, based on a vowel hierarchy which is always consistent. But I
went a step beyond that as well, since nouns also undergo vowel
changes, based on the same hierarchy, and moreover also experience
voicing and devoicing, as well as fricativization of final
consonants. All of these changes indicate different grammatical
relationships. When we consider this historically, however, we have a
bit of a problem.
In
English, and perhaps in most languages that exhibit non-linear
morphology, these changes were originally motivated by the effects of
neighboring sounds. The
i-umlaut
of English, which is where our irregular plurals
men
and
women
come from, among others, occured due to the presence of a palatal
vowel in the plural suffix, which in Proto-Germanic was *-
iz
(Smith
1896). This vowel caused the vowel in the stem to move towards its
own place of articulation, changing /a/ to /
ε/,
ultimately resulting in our modern pronunciation of men.
Likewise, I have heard of work going on in some of the Mixtec
languages of Mexico analyzing their tone systems historically. It may
well be that apparent irregularities in the tone system there are due
to the phenomenon of 'floating tone', or tone
sandhi,
which in this case results in a different phonetic form for a
different grammatical meaning, even if the difference is only one of
tone. This raises the question of whether all such non-linear
morphology is the result of historical processes. I'm not sure if
we'll ever know the answer to that, since many of the languages
exhibiting such features are minority languages either without any
written tradition, or with one which has been lost or suppressed.
When it comes to my fictional language of Paiodd, however, the
question is reversed. As far as I know, these non-linear forms are
not the result of historical processes but simply the method which
the language employs to show grammatical relationships. Thus,
considering what kind of changes might occur in the daughter
languages of Paiodd leads me to believe that these vowel changes
would in fact be fairly stable. That is, the daughter languages would
still show vowel alternation in stem words indicating grammatical
relationships or meanings.
However,
what those relationships or meanings are could very well change. If a
'weakened' vowel in Paiodd verbs indicated a very general irrealis
state, perhaps a daughter language uses a weakened vowel to show only
one specific irrealis state, say the future, as in Ex. 1 below, where
PO
represents Paiodd, and PoD represents a Paiodd Daughter language:
1)
PO ta
'put',
te
irrealis 'may put' > PoD ta
'put',
te
'will put'
Another thing that could change is the nature of the hierarchy
itself. That is, the daughter languages might have merged some of the
vowels that Paiodd considered distinct, which would have two possible
results: either the relative strength and weakness of the vowels
would shift to accomodate the missing vowels, as in 2a, or the stem
would no longer change at all, as in 2b.
2a)
PO hierarchy: ludd
'dog', uninflected > lod-
weakened, lut-
no change
PoD hierarchy, u
merges with o:
lodd
'dog' > lad
weakened, lot
no change
2b)
PO hierarchy: vur
'speed, haste' > vor-
weakened,
vul-
no
change
PoD hierarchy: vor
> vor,
vol
no
vowel change in either form
In the first scenario, whatever the original vowel was would now
change to an entirely different vowel from its ancestor language, as
indeed happens in 2a. The second scenario would have to result from a
merger of two vowels that were stronger or weaker than each other
into one, so that the vowel simply doesn't change at all, because
both historical vowels have changed into the one modern vowel, as in
2b.
Examples 2a and 2b were both examples of nouns, which also show
vowel change to indicate grammatical relationships, and which would
also change in the daughter languages. So where Paiodd uses a weak
vowel and a voiced consonant to indicate adverbial force, this form
could come to have a more specific meaning, such as only indicating
the manner of the action, as in 3a, or a more general one, such as
becoming the form for nominative and accusative nouns, rather than
only adverbial.
3a)
PO: levodía
daemm sem armes. dagger.VBL-INSTR
bread 3p cut
He
cuts bread with a knife.
PoD: *levod
daemm sem armes. dagger.VBL
bread 3p cut
He cuts bread daggerly.
3b)
PO: Piviría
tuoss dhaia.
king.VBL-with/of poem sing
The poem sings of the king.
PoD: *Pivir
tuaz dhaia.
king.NOM/ACC poem.NOM/ACC sing.
The poem sings the king.
Another thing that is quite likely to happen in the development of
the Paiodd noun system is the loss of suffixes and affixes, at least
in certain cases, so that the inflected forms of nouns would actually
result in creating new parts of speech: adjectives and adverbs! We've
seen this to some extent in Examples 3a and 3b. But here are some
further examples:
4a)
PO: lodd
hapía.
man size.NML-with
The man is big.
PoD: lodd
hap. man
big.
The man is big.
4b)
PO: hapía
lodd dhaia. size.NML-with
man sing
The big man sings.
PoD: hap
lodd dhaia. big
man sing
The big man sings.
These changes don't even begin to touch on things like semantic
drift, other phonological changes, or innovations. But most of these
lie outside the specific concern of this blog post, which is
non-linear morphology, and how it might affect and be affected by
historical change.
In sum, then, the point is this: in some natural languages,
grammatical relationships or meanings are indicated by changes of
stems that do not involve adding prefixes or suffixes, but some other
change to a word's stem. In at least some of these cases, these
changes are historically motivated. However, in the case of my
constructed language, there is no historical motivation for such
stem-changing, non-linear morphology, and the language later split
into several daughter languages. Such stem changes being so important
to the grammar of the parent-language, it seems likely that they
would remain somewhat stable, in form if not in meaning.
Considering such issues also raises the question of whether
non-linear morphology in natural languages is always the result of
historical phonological processes. As far as I know, this is not a
question many people, if any, have pursued. Of course, there at least
two good reasons for this. First, many languages that exhibit this
are minority languages about which little is known today, and even
less the farther back in time we try to go. Due to suppression and
the influence of more dominant languages, these tongues may not have
a long written tradition, and speakers may not value their own
language at all. This makes it difficult to learn anything about the
language at all, much less its historical development.
The second reason is that it's not an easy task to collate and
analyze data from multiple, unrelated languages. The old saying,
'Jack of all trades, master of none' applies quite well here. Most
historical linguists focus on a language family, for obvious reasons,
while the kind of work it would take to answer this question requires
vast knowledge of very unrelated languages. It may not be impossible,
but it is certainly difficult, and would really have to be the result
of collaboration between experst in multiple fields. There is the
field of typology, which makes some attempt to do this, but I'm not
as familiar with typological methods as I would like to be, so I
can't sufficiently evaluate their effectiveness.
Nonetheless, the question of the origins of non-linear morphology is
an intriguing one, and I think it should be pursued, if it hasn't
already been. If anyone knows of studies pursuing this kind of
question, or even just work being done on non-linear morphology or
languages that exhibit it, I'd love to hear from you! I'd also love
to hear about examples from other natlangs or conlangs of non-linear
morphology, so feel free to comment with any you know about!
I
close with this: it is an ongoing central thesis of this blog post
that 'Hypothetical Linguistics', as I call it, can prove useful to
the field of Linguistics as a whole. I hope this entry serves as an
example of how that might work. By thinking about the historical
implications of a particular feature in my conlang, I've come across
an intriguing, and, so far as I know, unanswered question in
Historical Linguistics. This is precisely one of the most important
ways that I believe Hypothetical Linguistics can serve General
Linguistics - simply rephrasing questions from the opposite
direction. That is, rather than asking 'What do languages do?', we
can ask 'What could a language do?' and from that arrive at further
questions, which could serve to shape future research in Linguistics.
Works cited:
Kroeger,
Paul R. 2005. Analyzing
Grammar: An Introduction (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics).
Smith,
C. Alphonso. 1896. An
Old English Grammar and Workbook (Kindle Edition)
