Goal: Create five more animate nouns to test sound changes
Note: If you want to create more forms, keep a running list of potential proto-forms not yet assigned to meanings.
Tip: Really focus on creating forms that introduce sounds in new positions to test your sound changes.
Work focus: Create/Make/List
Now that you have selected your sound changes and their ordering, it’s time to do a bit more testing! Sometimes conlanging means trying something out, creating new forms, and trying it out again. And that’s exactly what I’m asking you to do today.
Create at least five more proto-forms for your conlang. The prompt says to create five more animate nouns because it’s handy to have a solid list of animate nouns in your inventory for later stages when it comes to creating clauses. Of course, you are welcome to create any types of nouns or verbs you’d like at this stage, but the goal is to expand your vocabulary in a way that includes more phonological shapes you may not have created yet. Creating forms that target features of your sound changes is helpful.
For instance, let’s say you have a sound change that palatalizes alveolar stops before front vowels. If that’s the case, it’s good to have forms that will trigger this sound change and also forms that will not, such as having forms like *til, *dena, *duas, *tok, where the first two forms will be affected by the sound change but the second two will not. Being able to show examples and counterexamples is really helpful for exploring a language’s features.
And so today’s focus is creating forms and testing your sound changes on those new forms. If you hit any tricky spots, you may need to reassess your changes and/or the ordering of them. If you make any tweaks to your sound changes, be sure to update all your notes to reflect those shifts!