When you design conlangs over long periods of time, do you find that as you tweak them, the tweaks create out-of-universe sound shifts?
Concrete example: I've been working on a conlang that represents 4th-millennium English since about 2002. In 2003-4, I came up with a list of sound shifts, initially based on New York and Inland Northern accents. Among these changes was /ɪ/ > /e/ before nasals (where /e ~ ɛ/). I also wanted to have an /ɛ/ > /æ/ change in various environments. By 2005 or 2006, I settled on /ɛ/ > /æ/ in precisely the same environments where /æ/ gets tensed in New York, i.e. before nasals, fricatives, and voiced stops, excluding open syllables. Much more recently, perhaps 2 years ago, I decided that /ɪ/ > /e/ should also fill in the gap left, and occur before fricatives in closed syllables. (Before voiced stops, /ɪ/ > /jo/, /i/ > /ja/, /ʊ/ > /we/, going back to 2003.) Essentially, a sound change I came up with in 2004 triggered a chain shift that took me about ten years to complete, out-of-universe.
A much more recent example of the same language: there are several rounds of affricate simplification occurring in the 1400-year history of the language from the early 2000s. One is in the 25th century, and also involved /dɹ/ > /dʒ/, and before certain vowels also /tɹ/ > /tʃ/ and /stɹ/ > /ʃ/. Originally, in the sound shift document I created in 2004, the reflex of /stɹ/ in those environments was /sɹ/, but perhaps in 2014 I decided it should be /ʃ/, effectively leading to an out-of-universe /sɹ/ > /ʃ/ soundshift. The second round of affricate simplification, reducing the new affricates created from coronal stop + r clusters, was supposed to have taken place in the 31st century, but I decided to move it forward to the 27th century, just so that I could run games set in the 29th century without having to deal with ugly-looking <tsh> and <dzh> in names.
[If people are curious, I will try posting a full sound shift file. Warning: the original document from 2004, which I wrote 3 computers ago, was ~5,000 words if I remember correctly.]
Out-of-universe sound changes
Re: Out-of-universe sound changes
Sorry this isnt a reply to your question directly, and in fact Im not sure I quite understood it, but, Im curious to see your game(s). Are you talking about online role playing games? Is this for a low-technology future or are there robots and computers all over the place?
And now Sunàqʷa the Sea Lamprey with our weather report:
Re: Out-of-universe sound changes
No, it wasn't online - it was a LARP. The language only ever crops up in the names: <Zhun> rather than <June>, <Naed> (/næd/) rather than <Nat>, etc. But it's a full language, not just a naming language.
And it's not a future that regressed technologically. It's a future in which economic growth from 2000 to 2900 is a lot slower than between 1900 and 2000, for reasons like "economic stagnation in the richest countries" or "technological stagnation for 300 years on a generation ship." But it's clearly more technologically advanced than today. No sentient AIs, though.
And it's not a future that regressed technologically. It's a future in which economic growth from 2000 to 2900 is a lot slower than between 1900 and 2000, for reasons like "economic stagnation in the richest countries" or "technological stagnation for 300 years on a generation ship." But it's clearly more technologically advanced than today. No sentient AIs, though.