Sound Changes for Verb Conjugations

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DemoArgenti
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Sound Changes for Verb Conjugations

Post by DemoArgenti »

So I've been working on evolving a conlang from a protolang I have, and I realized that I have a pretty big problem: I have 15 conjugations for every verb, which means every conjugation of my verbs need to go through those sound changes so I can get the results I want. I'm comfy with sound changers, but the thought of conjugating every verb in my language by hand is daunting, to say the least. Are there any tools I could use for conjugations like this, or am I overthinking this whole thing?
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sangi39
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Re: Sound Changes for Verb Conjugations

Post by sangi39 »

DemoArgenti wrote: 08 May 2023 09:11 So I've been working on evolving a conlang from a protolang I have, and I realized that I have a pretty big problem: I have 15 conjugations for every verb, which means every conjugation of my verbs need to go through those sound changes so I can get the results I want. I'm comfy with sound changers, but the thought of conjugating every verb in my language by hand is daunting, to say the least. Are there any tools I could use for conjugations like this, or am I overthinking this whole thing?
Hmmm, I'm sure someone else might be able to correct me, but a big "work around" for this might be analogy. People don't keep a list of diachronic sound changes in their heads, for example, when conjugating a verb. They have rules in general, sure, which might be tied to diachronic sound changes, but they act synchronically(?... think that's the best way I can work that)

So, for example, if you've got a set of sound changes, you might be able to apply them to a handful of paradigms, see what pops out, and see if there are any patterns that exist within the resulting forms that could mean "hey, I don't need to apply sound changes every single time for this part of the conjugation, I can just apply this rule to the modern form"

It's still a bit of a pain getting to that point, but it's worth the effort, I'd think (plus you get to see where irregular verbs might pop up, and in what way they're irregular)


I think there are sound change appliers that you can throw whole lists of words at (I'm sure Zompist made one, for example, called the SCA), but I can't think of any off the top of my head. Hopefully someone else can
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Re: Sound Changes for Verb Conjugations

Post by Creyeditor »

Would this help? http://akana.conlang.org/tools/derivizer.html
I am sure there are other options. This could help you produce lists of conjugated forms which could serve as the input to any sound change applier you like.
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Re: Sound Changes for Verb Conjugations

Post by Salmoneus »

DemoArgenti wrote: 08 May 2023 09:11 So I've been working on evolving a conlang from a protolang I have, and I realized that I have a pretty big problem: I have 15 conjugations for every verb, which means every conjugation of my verbs need to go through those sound changes so I can get the results I want. I'm comfy with sound changers, but the thought of conjugating every verb in my language by hand is daunting, to say the least. Are there any tools I could use for conjugations like this, or am I overthinking this whole thing?
So, first off, yes, there are tools to automatically generate all the inflectional forms of a word, and there are tools to apply sound changes en masse. There are probably tools that do both at once. I don't use any derivers myself, and for soudn changes I just use SCA2, which isn't the most sophisticated by a long way, but I find it intuitive to use.

However, those don't really fully address your problem, since even automating hundreds and hundreds of entries is going to be tedious and time-consuming.

Fortunately, this is also a problem that real speakers have! They solve it through the concepts of 'verb class' (or 'conjugation') and 'principle part'.

Verb classes mean that big chunks of the verbs all conjugate analogously to one another. This can be because (and this is usually the ultimate reason for the phenomenon) similarly-shaped words naturally end up changing the same way. But it's also because when speakers have a rare word that conjugates slightly differently from any other word, they're going to want to make life easy for themselves and change the conjugation to match a lot of other words they know. [commonly-used words are less susceptible to this process of 'analogy']

Likewise, 'principle parts' are specific verb forms that are used as mnemonic representatives of a large bunch of verb forms that share a specific form of the root. And again, analogy operates here: if a verb naturally ends up having the third-person dual future perfect hortative form look totally different from all other forms, speakers will (probably) just ignore this oddity and change that form to match all the others. Often, all the verb forms end up sharing the same form of the root; other times, speakers narrow it down just to two or three or four different forms, from which all others can be derived predictably.

Some languages have convenient verb class systems; some have convenient principle part systems; some have both (ideally, principle parts are entirely predictable from verb class... but they aren't always). Others ahve neither and are just irrational nightmares of unpredictable forms all over the place. Conlangers tend not to make a lot of that last type, for some reason!

So my advice would be to pick a broad test set of verbs with features that you think will be salient to your expected sound changes. Then apply sound changes, not all at once but in stages, representing chronological stages in the langauge's developement. At each stage, look at whether sound change is making your test verbs diverge to an unmanageable extent; if so, look for patterns between verbs (to create standardised verb classes) and between verb forms (to reduce the necessary number of principle parts that must be learned).

Generally, analogy favours 'better' solutions where they are available - forms that are more predictable, more pronounceable, but also more distinctive. All else being equal, more common solutions tend to replace solutions that only occur in a few verbs or verb forms, but sometimes a rare solution, particularly if it occurs in a very frequently-used verb or form, can be analogised to replace more common solutions (eg in Germanic it's theorised that an entire verb class may have been derived from the distinctive past tense just of a single verb, "to eat").
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