Three Dollar Quill

Okay, I've done some work on the phonological evolution side, and I've realized a few things. Most importantly, the Index Diachronica isn't really useful to me, not yet. This is because, and I swear I'll come up with a good reason I didn't notice this before, it present the sound changes in a given section in lexical, rather than chronological order.

Figuring this all out myself does mean that I have more of a handle on how the sound changes actually fit together, where to look going forward, and also just the proper way to make up Proto-Indo-European roots, and to apply ablaut.

At this point, my plan is to make sound change files for regular ablaut application, and early and late Proto-Germanic. At that point, I can check that they actually work by comparing them with actual historical derivations. And then just keep going until I've run it forward enough.

At that point, I can start experimenting with fictional roots, and get a sense for stuff like "if I need a laryngeal to fill out a consonant slot, which one do I prefer?" and "do I get nice results if I give this root a laryngeal, as a treat?" and "which plosive would I like to use?" I can try to describe what conclusions I come to there, but it will probably end up being very personal/tacit knowledge. Still, I'll see what I can do.

Anyway, it's getting late, and I want to wind down. Hopefully, I'll make some progress on this tomorrow.

Good night.