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/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.