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On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 4:05 PM, MatthewDeanMartin <matt@hidden.email> wrote: > I'm noodling with a bunch of ideas, one about what can be done to stabilize a language's phonetics over time, and immediately after a non-natlang's creation. I saw some one criticize engelangs in general because the carefully chosen compounds and morphemes that lock together so nicely today, in a living community would be subject might be subject to things like Grimm's law and over time the compound words would morph back into meaningless blobs. Is there an optimal phonetic inventory or phonotactics that resists the warping of people's lazy tongues? Not that I know of; but I don't know enough of historical linguistics to say that there couldn't be such an optimal phonology that's least likely to suffer sound changes. My säb zjeda was designed to have high phonological redundancy, with no minimal pairs among its root morphemes. This sort of design seems as though it could improve comprehension in noisy environments, but in the unlikely event that such an engelang was used by a native speaker community, it would probably be *more* vulnerable to rapid sound change than the average conlang design; the higher-than-natural redundancy would offer speakers lots of chances to speak quickly or sloppily and still be understood, so I expect a lot of words would be divested of their unstressed syllables, consonant clusters would be simiplified, and some phonological distinctions would be lost. Looking at the history of the most widely spoken conlang, Esperanto has experienced a lot of change in its lexicon over time, not only coining and borrowing of new words but meaning drift in old words, and a small but significant amount of syntactic and morphological change -- but only one sound change, changing /x/ to /k/ in many environments, and that was more a matter of deliberate reform than of what we normally think of as sound change. This is probably going to remain the case for Esperanto and any other engelang or auxlang as long as the majority of its speakers are second-language learners; only when the majority of a conlang's speakers are native speakers would natlang-like sound change be likely. -- Jim Henry http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/