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Hi! Mark G writes: >... > I know a lot about historical linguistics and phonological changes, > and I even know a lot about the evolution of Classical Latin to > Vulgar, but to be honest, my expertise is more deeply rooted in the > modern Romance languages, especially Spanish. I know that phonological > changes are sweeping, contextual, and consequently fairly easily > traceable. But even in the instances in which they supposedly "always" > occur, are there ever more-than-minute exceptions to those rules? For > instance, might there be an instance in a Western Romance language > where, though most voiceless stops became voiced, there are a cluster > of words where, for some reason, "t" was expected to become "d" but > somehow didn't? ... A language is usually a continuum of dialects that all have different sound change tendencies: either only slightly different, or vastly. I tried to find a coherent sound shift system from Proto Germanic to Modern Icelandic for my romlang Þrjótrunn, and it is basically impossible. Some examples clearly showed contradicting shifts. For very coherent languages like Modern Icelandic, you might reach 90% prediction rate with a decent GMP for 2000 years of slow change (for good ones, maybe more, dunno, but that's when I stopped for my GMP). For other languages, maybe only 50% are possible, e.g. due to strong dialectal mixing. So I think there is nothing at all wrong with a GMP that involves non-determinism. On the contrary: it makes the design more naturalistic. Which degree is part of the design goals of your conlang. One example from German I read about recently on Conlang: _Strom_ (cognate to English 'stream') should rather be *_Straum_ if the regular sound changes had been applied. But language is a living thing, and a more Dutch- and Low-German-like vowel has survived. This reminds me of my agenda for conlangs: Proto Germanic to Modern German sound shifts applied to Vulgar Latin. It was done a few times, and great conlangs have emerged, and I want to share the fun. :-) I already know the lexicon entry for 'leg': _Krauer_ < CRU:S. It is _krýr_ in Þrjótrunn, and I like the word a lot. :-) **Henrik