zompist bboard

Okay, so you have a list of sound changes for your language, dating all the way to its earliest reconstructed ancestor which existed thousands of years ago. It's clear your language has a complex linguistic history, being in a subgroup of a subgroup of a subgroup, etc. of its overall language family.

My question is, how would you divide up and organize the list of sound changes? Like, do you just do the changes from one node to the next, or do you list the changes that happened during each stage? Or do you do it some other way?

I do the "one node to the next" approach, but keep in mind that, due to the existence of dialects, it's actually simplified from real life. You may want to do the dialectal differences as the first changes you make when going to the next node.

Ive been editing a single HTML file for almost 10 years now with all my sound changes. http://3centsoap.com/pabappa13.html for example, thgough even that is very outdated .... Im on version 22B now. although its true that there isnt a giant thunderclap every time a language splits into two, it is a convenient place to end a list, since youll be looking back at it fr4equently.

I have mine organized in a series of html tables, heavily inspired by http://steen.free.fr/wenedyk/gmp.html, Although I store the actual data in a much simpler text file, with a program I wrote for formatting it all prettily. That way, if I decide to change the formatting, I just have to change the program, rather than the data file, and multi-line cells are much easier to deal with.

Typically "one node to the next". I'll also tend to subdivide the list of changes by period: exactly what lengths of time varies, but 200 year intervals is fairly typical.