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--- Mark G skrzypszy:
> Hey all,
Welcome!
> I'm guessing this is a fairly obvious question, but I feel the need to
> ask it for the sake of my own understanding.
Not as obvious as obvious!
> But even in the instances in which they supposedly "always"
> occur, are there ever more-than-minute exceptions to those
> rules?
It is important these "rules" were not really rules, but rather tendencies. No one has ever been sentenced to death for violating art. 58 sub 15 of the Law on Sound Changes, i.e. by saying "porto" instead of "puerto". In my view, modern sound change charts don't give much more information than just an overview some general phenomena, based on tendencies that could only be established a posteriori. Reality, on the other hand, always behaves in its own strange and often unpredictable way. Just realise that the French words "elle" and "la" both derive from Latin ILLAM, and there you go with all your sound changes. Obviously, consistently applying all the rules that make French develop from Vulgar Latin still doesn't make it French. Whatever rule you invent, there will always be a whole legion of exceptions.
Yet, those tendencies were undeniable, and for the sake of constructing a language, we may as well stick to them. But it is important to realise that there are various complicating factors:
* Modern languages are not only the result of an autonomous process (let's call it: sound changes". There is also a lot of interaction with other languages.
* Dialects were everywhere, and it's quite possible that village A said "puerto", village B said "puorto", and village C said "porto". People were moving from one village to another, got married there, and sometimes adopted the local version, while in other cases the locals adopted his version. Also keep in mind that modern standard languages are often based on (or at least, influenced by) a lot of dialects at the same time.
* One thing that makes things really hard to follow sometimes in Romance is the fact that Latin words could make it into a language at various stages of its development. There are cases of one Latin word that made it no less than three or four times into a modern Romance language: first, it was inherited from Vulgar Latin; it was reborrowed from early medieval Latin, thanks to the church; it was borrowed from another language, like Italian; it was borrowed again as scientific vocabulary.
> I realize this is a pretty general question, but for
> some reason, this one dilemma seems to be holding up
> my creative processes.
It obviously shouldn't!
Well, but the choices you make must of course be based on other design principles of your language. Care to tell us about it? Is it intended to be the language of a fictional place somewhere in the world, and if so, where? Would it belong to an existing subfamily of Romance? Is it related to an existing non-Romance language (like Andrew's Brithenig to Welsh and my own Wenedyk to Polish)? And if not, what else should make it different from other Romance languages?
If you really want to be very very very realistic, you should probably created long and complicated lists of sound changes for more than one dialect, establish rules of interaction between them, borrow Latin words into the language in various stages, borrow foreign words, depending on who are the neighbours, apply influences from various substrate and superstrate languages, etc. On the other hand, don't be too tough on yourself! Language creation should in the first place be fun, and if you are working with rules that are too complicated, you won't get anywhere.
I have a pretty elaborated "Grand Master Plan" for Wenedyk (http://steen.free.fr/wenedyk/gmp.html). At present, I rarely consult it, not only because I know most of it by heart anyway, but also because I don't want to follow it slavishly. Sure, I've tried to mimic all the developments I mentioned above, but when it comes to coining new words, I mostly follow my own intuition anyway. Sometimes a GMP-generated word simply "feels" wrong, in which case I won't use it (or, I use both, giving them different meanings).
Does that help?
Cheers,
Jan
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