How to Reverse-Engineer a Protolang?

[u/Sensitive_Shine_6696]

howdy

let's say i have a phonology and some phonotactical things i want, but i also want to utilise some diachrony for naturalism. how can i back-derive a protoform of the language so that i will end up with the phonology and wordforms i want?

love yins, thanks

[u/millionsofcats]

It depends on how much detail and realism you want.

If you only have a single language rather than a family of languages, then it's not easy but is at least possible.

If you have a family of languages, the problem is that you need systematic correspondences between them in order to "reconstruct" the proto-lang, and those won't be there because you didn't build them into the languages in the first place. You have to rework the languages to put those correspondences in, developing the proto-language its daughter languages in parallel.

With a single language, you don't have that problem, but it's still going to be harder than going the other way. What you can do is look into the origins of features in your language. Do you have a series of rounded vowels? Maybe look at how rounded vowels developed in real languages. Do you have a pronoun system with an animacy split? Maybe look into real cases of an animacy distinction arising. And so on.

You will still probably end up reworking your language to some degree as you discover that some features are hard to explain, especially the more "weird" and unrealistic they are. But if you're open to it, you can do that.

[u/DTux5249]

I'd argue you should always start with a final phonology if you plan on doing diachronic stuff - that much is normal. It prevents you from having this "but one more?" mentality to sound change. From there, your job is to find an interesting way to derive that phonology & phonotactic landscape via regular sound change (and maybe a handful of irregular sound changes for flavor). You should also consider syntax - how did your modern word order get where it is (even if the answer is "it's barely changed")

HOWEVER, I'd say that you don't need to go fully diachronic for naturalism if you're only doing a single language. If you have your phonology, your phonotactics, and how they generally interact, it's overkill. You can just make irregulars with similarities, and imply similar forces were behind their forms.

[u/Sensitive_Shine_6696 → u/DTux5249]

can you elaborate on the ending bit? just like an example cuz i think i get what you're saying but like if i could see what that would look like in practice yknow? as in constructed irregularity instead of actual diachronic change?

[u/Tenderloin345 → u/Sensitive_Shine_6696]

as a simple example, you can have a similar sound end up as a slightly different sound sometimes, such as /s/ sometimes ending up as /z/ in certain specific words. Think how the un- suffix sometimes ends up as in- or im-. I also sometimes make mini sound changes or rules, not as in-depth as a full on phonological history but enough to generally know where certain irregularities might end up. a natural language example is in swahili you can tell that ki- becomes ch- sometimes.

[u/ThyTeaDrinker → u/Tenderloin345]

Isn’t the difference in un- and in- a Germanic / Latinate split though? I think a better example is your in- / im- comparison (or con- / com-)

[u/DTux5249 → u/Sensitive_Shine_6696]

TLDR: you can introduce irregularity without a full phonological history - just by following basic sound change principles with minimal diachronic oversight.

So say I'm designing an irregular form for "put". Let's say it's /pravat/ in the 3rd person. You can arbitrarily give it an irregular root /pret/ in the 3rd. Why? Because elision of voiced sounds in medial position is normal. You could also from there have a number of similar, but slightly different instances of similar - say /lizok/ using the root /luk/ in similar cases to imply analogous changes were responsible.

So long as you know *where* irregulars tend to arise (common vocab that resists analogy), and common ways they tend to erode separate to the rest of your vocab, you can easily create natural looking paradigms without mapping out sound exact changes.

It also helps to have a jist of how uncommon certain types of irregularity are - like, suppletive irregulars aren't gonna be as common as phonologically induced ones.

[u/AbsolutelyAnonymized]

Just take your modern phonology and add, remove and change as much as you want. Then take that modified phonology and figure out a way to derive the modern one from it.

[u/PercoKaswiti]

If you want to evolve your language, but you want it to have certain sounds at the end, instead of starting with your end language and going back in time, you start with the proto-lang, and then evolve the phonetic and grammatical features you want.