Goal: Organize notes and select sound changes
Note: There is no “correct” number of sound changes you need to select for your language.
Tip: You can always return to your sound changes later and add to them as you expand the language.
Work focus: Solidify/Write/Share
Whatever day it happens to be when you reach this prompt, congratulations for making it through the first month’s worth of prompts! By now, you have an overview of your conworld and its speakers, goals for your language, a working sound inventory for your proto-language, descriptions of the phonotactics for the proto-language, a small set of proto-forms as vocabulary, and a list of sound changes you might be interested in to evolve your language to a more modern form. Today’s focus is on starting to solidify the ideas you’ve had brewing on sound changes.
Go back through your notes on sound changes (and organize them, if needed!) and select the sound changes that will make the “final cut,” so to speak, to be worked into your language development. You can have as many or as few as you’d like to reach the sound you want for your language.
If you’re new to conlanging or new to the historical approach in general, you may want to start small by only selecting 3-5 sound changes to incorporate for right now. You can always come back to these notes and add more sound changes later, but starting small can help you keep track of the sound changes and ensure you’re properly applying them to your proto-forms.
As you select your sound changes, order them in the way you want them to apply. Tomorrow’s prompt will expand on this, but the basic gist of it is that sound changes tend to apply in a particular order as a language evolves. That is, a sound change will apply and then the next one will apply, and so on. That’s important because re-ordering the sound changes can actually end up giving you different results. So put your chosen sound changes into an order today, and then tomorrow you can spend time testing them to ensure the order works for you.