do_shahbaz wrote:I am creating an a-posteriori conlang based on a real Indo-European language becoming extinct 1000 years ago.
I'm curious which language you're starting with; if it has any close relatives with more recent attestation, those are worth a look. The location and history of the conlang are also relevant.
1) In Indo-European languages, word for "hand", "dog", "do", "die", the numbers, etc. tend to change more slowly and less drastically, but the words "tail", "girl", "kick", among others get replaced and re-invented more often. Are there trends, universal and IE-specific, that governs which words and expressions are to be more "conservative" and "innovative" then the rest?
Just pulling off the top of my head here; I'm sure there's a more exhaustive answer out there on the interwebz. How common a word is is one of the factors. Less common words are more likely to get replaced or modified. The distinctiveness of a word is also a factor; if words used in similar contexts start to sound alike due to sound change, one or more could be changed (cf.
pen,
pin ->
ink pen,
stick pin; in some English dialects with the pin-pen merger).
A quick Wikipedia search got me the
Dolgopolsky list, which gives the 15 most stable words from a sample of 140 languages. The
Swadesh list and its variants are much better known, but they're not necessarily about measuring the likelihood a word will be replaced. An advantage to the latter is that it's larger, so more practical from a conlanging standpoint.
2) How much should a language change from 1000 A.D to 2000 A.D, lexically, syntactically, and grammatically?
At least some? There isn't a hard-and-fast rule here because all languages change at varying rates and in different ways. Certainly, I'd expect a language spoken now to be quite different from its ancestor a millennium ago, but exactly how much and how can vary widely. A thousand years gets you from Vulgar Latin to highly innovative French, but it also gets you to the conservative Sardinian. It also gets you Romanian, which is innovative in some respects but retained a case system, unlike most other Romance languages.
3) Can expressions such as "please", "hello", etc. hold out for 1000 years (in English the former displaced "pray" [as in "Pray do tell me Mr. Bingley..."])
I don't see why not. It also depends on what "hold out" means for you. "Hello" has antecedents going back further than a thousand years; they just weren't used exactly the same as "hello".
Really, I don't see why any given vocabulary item couldn't last a thousand years. It's more the impression one gets from looking at the vocabulary overall that matters for believability and/or naturalism.
4) Do wars, sprachraum-expansion, migration, and other social phenomena impact the speed of language evolution, and in what way (accelerating or decelerating)?
Possibly, but not all in the same way, and the effect will vary based on the details of the situation.
N.B. I'm not sure whether to create this thread in this forum or the next one (a.k.a General Languages). The discussion would certainly have implications on real-lang linguistics; I guess I shall move the discussion there if it gets too interesting.
The concerns of conlangers and linguists regularly overlap. As one of the conlang forum mods, I find your topic to be a good fit here. If you feel the topic really must be moved, send me a PM.
*okay, I admit that am still stumped on some issues with the phonology. Which brings me to my last question :
5) Is it wise to start off with the lexicon of a conlang even when the phonology remains somewhat unresolved?
Maybe, maybe not. Every part of a language feeds into every other part, so you might as well ask whether it's wise to work on the phonology without having resolved the syntax, or the lexicon without having resolved the morphology. I'd say to work on the language in whatever order makes sense for you.
N'hésite pas à corriger mes erreurs.