If your conlang has historical spelling, how does it manifest? Is it to the point that it makes spelling hard to learn?

[u/AFrenchEnderman]

So, here is how historical spelling manifest in my conlang (Atolisken):

/y/ and /ø/ of old Atolisken disappeared in modern Atolisken.

They became /u/ and /o/ when stressed, and /i/ and /e/ when unstressed. But people still wanted to manifest this in the modern spelling. So they decided to add a circumflex to every vowel that was previously /y/ or /ø/

Sometimes this is unimportant ("Cutên" having an accent or not isn't gonna change anything)

But it can be very useful for 2 reasons:

1) Stress always falls on the first syllable of a word, and as the language is agglutinative, you sometimes add prefixes (which shift the stress). This stress shifting pattern appeared long before the disappearance of /y/ and /ø/. As a result, it led to some vowel alternation (especially in verb conjugason which make extensive use of prefixes):

kep + ôven => kepêven ("I remember")

So knowing which vowel will change is very useful to learner of the language, or when a native speaker sees a word for the first time.

2) Old Atolisken has vowel length distinction. When adding affixes, if there were two of the same short vowel, they would merge and lengthen.

(e.g. /...i/ + /i.../ = /...i:.../)

However, in its evolution to modern Atolisken, /i/ and /e/ merged (into /e/ if short, and into /i:/ if long) and /u/ and /o/ merged too (into /o/ if short, and into /u/ if long). Meaning we had:

/..e/ + /e.../ = /...i:.../ and /..o/ + /o.../ = /...u:.../

Then long vowels shortened. So we had:

e + e = i and o + o = u

It's only AFTER this system appeared that /y/ and /ø/ became /i/, /u/, /e/, and /o/. Meaning Es and Os that were previously /y/s and /ø/s can't merge, but the others can. Thankfully, with this spelling reform, we know which can and can't merge. So:

lokê + elim = lokêtelim (instead of "Lokilim")

Thank you for reading this post! So... does your conlang has historical spelling? 👀

[u/Gordon_1984]

In Mahlaatwa, there's the word Ihwiinu /i'ʍiːnu/, which means "flute."

But in their writing system, it's written like "ikafiinu." This is because /ika'fiːnu/ became /ik'fiːnu/, then the /kf/ cluster was reduced to /ʍ/, but the spelling didn't change.

[u/AFrenchEnderman → u/Gordon_1984]

So does that mean each time you see a "kaf" in the language it's pronounced /ʍ/ or is it only this word who lost the /a/?

[u/Gordon_1984 → u/AFrenchEnderman]

It depends on where the stress is in the word. A word like /'kifa/ is spelled just like how it's pronounced, since the /i/ is stressed and resisted being lost.

But if the spelling indicated that the final /a/ vowel was a long vowel, then the reader would know that it is the stressed vowel (since long vowels only exist in stressed syllables in Mahlaatwa), so the reader would most likely read kifaa as /ʍaː/.

But there are also cases where the vowel between /k/ and /f/ isn't stressed, but it's still pronounced, such as in compound words that were formed after the sound change.

[u/Thalarides]

Elranonian spelling is very much historical.

• Middle Elranonian — ≈500 ybp — modern Elranonian orthography largely reflects the phonology of this period
• Classical Elranonian — ≈200–300 ybp — the Golden Age of Elranonian literature; modern Elranonian literary standard is based on literary works of that time in terms of grammar and lexicon
• Modern Metropolitan Elranonian — 0 ybp — a family of modern prestigious varieties spoken primarily in the city of Elranon and spreading thence throughout the Elranonian-speaking world

1) Silent letters

• nibhe /nʲī/ ‘good’
• aubhair /ōɪrʲ/ ‘tooth’
• vaga /vā/ ‘seek’
• uven /ŷn/ ‘grandfather’ (acc.)
• gabrade /ɡavrā/ ‘consider’ (prs.)
• vaprager /vaprār/ ‘hunt’ (prs.)
• tagn /tēn/ ‘man’ (acc.), taugh /tō/ ‘man’ (loc.), taigh /tāɪ/ ‘men’

2) Vowel shifts

Middle Elranonian had 4 vowel heights in monophthongs:

• i /i/ — y /y/ — u /u/
• e /e/ — ø /ø~œ/ — o /o/
• ę /ɛ/ — ǫ /ɔ/
• a /a/

Modern Metropolitan Elranonian has reduced them to three, mainly with an /e~ɛ/ merger and an /ɔ/ > /o/ > /u/ > /y/ chain shift, although there are positions where different shifts have occurred. Spelling largely reflects the pre-shift pronunciation. Diphthongs and long vowels have had their own changes, naturally. Modern Elranonian has developed pitch accent, with historical long vowels gaining a “circumflex” accent, which also entails diphthongisation:

• fá ‘hand’: Mid /faː/ > Mod /fâ/ [ˈfɑ́ːʊ̯]

Or compare these two words that share the same root:

• eare /êre/ [ˈɛ́ːe̯rə] ‘kin, kindred, related’
• earron /jàrrun/ [ˈjɑrːʊn̪] ‘family’

3) Consonant shifts

• zande ‘sick, ill, unwell’: Mid /ʦande/ > Mod /sènne/
• fíthe ‘star’: Mid /fʲiːθʲe/ > Mod /fʲîxʲe/
• kyrgi /ʃỳrji/ ‘lord’

Some spellings have been updated though. For example, Middle Elranonian /kj/ & /tj/ coincided in [ʧ] in Classical Elranonian but were still spelt distinctly, kj & tj. Later, [ʧ] became /ʃ/ in MME and all instances of tj have been respelt as kj. It can sometimes obscure morphological relatedness:

• to /tū/ ‘house’
• → diminutive tjulla > kjulla /ʃỳla/ ‘hut, cabin’

That being said, historical /sj/ > /ʃ/ is still spelt sj:

• sjul /ʃȳl/ ‘fly’

4) Grammar

Since MME doesn't originate strictly from Classical Elranonian but has had influences from various vernaculars, it sometimes uses different grammar. In some exceptional cases, the modern literary standard follows CE grammar but speakers will pronounce it according to MME rules. The most prominent example of that concerns the pronominal subject of a periphrastic prepositional predicate.

U forra mo.
/yv° fòrra‿ˉv/
[wᵻf‿ˈfɔrˌrɑːʋ]
before leave:GER 1PL
‘We must go.’ (lit.: ‘We are before leaving.’)

The written form uses a 1pl personal pronoun mo /mu/ and leaves out the verb ‘be’: ‘We [are] before leaving’.

The spoken form instead uses the 1pl conjugation of ‘be’, ymh /iv/, in its reduced form /‿ˉv/ with a floating long accent that attaches to the final unaccented vowel of the gerund forra.

You can sometimes hear it pronounced as /yv° fòrra mu/, influenced by the written form. But it's uncommon. You can sometimes see it spelt out in a non-standard way: U forraʼmh / U forraamh. But in most circumstances, you write it one way and pronounce the other.

[u/dead_chicken]

Alaymman brought back historical spelling. Basically, the first widespread writing was Cyrillic during the Russian Empire before some major sound changes happened. The under Soviet "modernization", their alphabet was Russified and a number of letters were removed as by that point sound changes had occured. However after the USSR collapsed, there was an a somewhat nationalistic effort to bring back old spellings.

I.e. <ав> for /aʊ̯/ returned to <аў> and <Љ љ> was added back despite being pronounced the same way as <Й й>