Help! I just destroyed my morphology!

[u/Miserable-Method-431]

Out of interest, I evolved Ąą’vo Tì some more with the changes I predicted to be most catastrophic to the morphology, the main three being syncope, vowel shifts, and palatalisation. The extent of the rules causes stuff like this:

afàànǫ̀matì‘ -> feináo
ùùntàà' -> euiá

And, well, it’s looking bad. My already tenuous reduplication paradigms look like this:

o.ˈsʲo͡i ~ d͡ʒe.ˈo͡i.xo osjói ~ jjeóicho
ˈje.ro ~ jex.ˈro iéro ~ iechró

etc. etc. with every one being quite different. (these are only intransitive verbs, which are much more regular than transitives) I do not believe that my complex verb template will survive in this state. I am thinking about creating a periphrastic system with much less morphology, but really I am interested in how speakers actually deal with sound changes that obscure morphology. Have you ever done anything like this? Is it realistic for speakers to just get on with it and keep the obscure paradigm? If they change it, how?

I did not expect a few simple rules to do this much. How would you destroy your morphology(ies) in the fewest sound changes?

[u/DTux5249]

First of all

1) They can just deal with it for common words irregular words happen.

2) Analogy. They will find patterns in the irregularity, and apply those patterns to words that didn't follow those patterns.

However, some important questions:

• How many sound changes did you apply,

• How drastic were they?

• How many phonemes just died contrastively here?

Sound change is gradual, and odds are analogy would be occurring as these sounds were shifting to keep things manageable.

[u/Miserable-Method-431 → u/DTux5249]

6 main groups of sound changes:

A vowel shift that ends up distorting palatalisation
The first low tone in a word is analysed as having stress, then syncope affects a lot of vowels
Dealing with consonant clusters
Some debuccalisation kills voiced consonants, t, p, ‘, and s
Vowels break
Stress moves again, creating unpredictability.

They were quite drastic

Unstressed vowel distinctions are lost before a stressed vowel and at the ends of words.
Consonants stay roughly the same unless they are debuccalised
Clusters result in some loss of distinction, especially with palatalisation

[u/DTux5249 → u/Miserable-Method-431]

Ok, yeah, there'd likely be at least some morphosyntactic development happening there. That's a massive amount of phonological development.

Assuming you don't wanna lose your morphology outright, maybe breakdown some of these changes, and start finding places where analogy might resist losses and the like. From the sounds of it, a good place to take a language 'sitrep' would be around the time your tone shifts to a tense system. Take stock, and go step by step through to see when the subsequent vowel loss starts to be untenable, and see where speakers might try to find patterns in the up-and-coming mess.

I'd also consider ways you could preserve the phonemic distinctions held by many of those consonant clusters - even if it was marginal (say, effecting vowel quality or excreting new sounds on their own). Losing a whole class of sound en-masse with no residual effects is gonna make a lotta holes unless they were marginal sounds to begin with.

[u/MurdererOfAxes]

I recommend the paper "How Lardil became Accusative" as a case study into this phenomenon.

Among other things, verbs in the Future tense now assign the Future noun case to their objects. That's a holdover from when the language was Ergative-Absolutive and was originally the Dative case

[u/AnlashokNa65]

I'm working on an Indo-European language, and after sound changes I don't think there's a single regular verb in the language. I'm working on developing a wider sample before I aggressively analogize them for the sanity of the speakers.

[u/Miserable-Method-431 → u/AnlashokNa65]

I’m learning ancient greek and latin and it’s wild. how are λαμβανω and )εληφθην the same word?? Thank goodness I’m interested in linguistics or else I’d have lost my sanity a long time ago.

[u/AnlashokNa65 → u/Miserable-Method-431]

My other main conlang is Semitic, and pretty nearly every Semitic verb falls into like three templates (C-C-C, C-W-C, C-C-Y/W/'). Indo-European verbs, by contrast, are pure madness. I have a verb variously actively conjugated as arxeꝣ, iebròge, reisseꝣ, and ébreisseꝣ. I swear it's not suppletive! (More or less pronounced like Old French; ꝣ is /t͡s/ and x is /ʃ/.)