Jason Monti wrote:
>> I suppose it all depends on two things: how much like PIE you want it to
>> be, and how much work you want to put in on the background.  If I were
>> making "a creole from the ancient past" that had changed "giving rise to
>> this e/o/0 gradation", I would just make the creole, then put it through
>> sound changes to get the gradation.  It'll look a lot more realistic
>> that way!
>>     
>
> The problem is that while I know more about historical linguistics than your
> average layman, I'm by no means a linguist. I would have NO clue how to give
> rise to such a gradiation system as precise as the one I have here from an
> almost completely isolating creole (of the ancient past ;-) ).
>   
----- Here's one way you could make a gradation system through 
historical sound change.  It's not your language, as I don't know much 
of it, but it might give you some ideas as to how to do this with your 
own.  Let's start with some vocabulary for the proto-language.

met = eat
sen = sing
ba = will (future tense auxiliary)
a = what, that (relative clauses)
uz = done, completed (perfect)
du = they
ga = it
av = I

----- It's all isolating, VSO, nothing too odd.

original:
   met av ga  "I eat it"
   a met du  "what they eat"
   a met uz av  "what I have eaten"
   ba met uz du  "they will have eaten"
   sen av  "I sing"
   a sen du  "what they sing"
   sen av a sen du  "I sing what they sing"

----- Simple enough, right?  Let's look at what happens when we apply 
some changes:

changed:
   meta ga  "I eat it"
   mot  "what they eat"
   tuza  "what I have eaten"
   bamtu  "they will have eaten"
   sena  "I sing"
   son  "what they sing"
   sena son "I sing what they sing"

----- The verb roots show clear alteration in different environments: 
met/mot/(m)t, sen/son.  (Though in retrospect, those might not be the 
most interesting environments for vowel gradation...)  With a little 
reanalysis of meanings, we have:

reanalyzed:
   met  "eat"
   mot  "food"
   bamt-  "eat (fut.)"
   sen  "sing"
   son  "song"
   basn-  "sing (fut.)"

----- Here are the sound changes I'm using:

Historical Changes:
   little grammatical words become affixes
   e > o / _Cu
   o > 0 / VC_CV
   V > 0 / #_C or C_# (except in single-syllable words)
   C > 0 / #_C or C_#
   voiced fricative > 0 / _#

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