i'm not sure how your grammar works / worked historically, but would your Þ/L distinction come from some sorta demonstrative, adjective, classifier? something like, distal /la/ and proximal /þa/ affix onto stuff (so like, "haja" "place" -> "lahaja" "that place", "þahaja" "this place"), followed by whatever grammaticalisation into the modern "laja" and "þaja"
with this pathway it would be something applied productively to any stuff that's useful to mark for this (and would be applied retroactively also once you've got it existed), so that amount of consistency would be p realistic
i'm not sure how it would explain forms where it doesn't occur word initially (ýþ, ýl), something something analogy? flexible historic word order?
idk, i'm not tryna suggest things here, just curious about your clong's history :3 <3
Thank you so much for asking!
The real answer is that I unfortunately have no idea how it came to be and just made it up based on vibes and put a big "rework later when i have the history figured out" sticker on it. Sorry
That being said, flexible word order might very well be the culprit here if I try to reconstruct how it may have came to be (based on the limited resources I actually have made up about the language).
I know that historically, adjectives (and other modifiers filling a similar function) went before the noun they modified (word order was still flexible but that was the default). This can be seen at present in compound words which I haven't yet talked about on this blog - which put a historical -u suffix on the modifying noun, and prefix it before the modified noun (so for example, a doghouse would be "orðukyfð" from "örði" meaning dog and "kyfð" meaning house). But at some point, this word order swapped somehow (I don't know the mechanism but I've been told that it's certainly possible), and now adjectives (and words functioning similarly) go after nouns (so while a doghouse is still "orðukyfð," "a dog's house" would be "kyfð örðin").
Why did I bring this up? Honestly I don't really know, it's midnight so my mind isn't the clearest, but it might somehow tie to the demonstratives "this" and "that" having the characteristic phoneme at the end, while the others have it at the beginning. Maybe something along the lines of "ýþ + ha" being "this place," "ýl + ha" beaing "that place," etc etc, and the ý eventually dropping? That at least sounds plausible on the surface level to my midnight brain lol
(obv. it wouldn't be the exact modern form, if i were to spitball without any further historical evidence i'd say it might've been like. yþ and yl, because i know that <y> represents a sound that used to be much more central and in my uninformed view maybe more likely to be dropped? With the standalone versions later undergoing lengthening to compensate for this very fact)
But unfortunately I can't say anything for sure right now because I don't yet have a coherent system of phonological changes outside of some vowel shifts that i made for the i-umlaut. This is unfortunately an area that I haven't really developed much in Kolic yet, and that I also don't have much experience in or knowledge about yet, but I am definitely going to look more into it in the future and try to make things a bit more realistic :D
And thank you so much for asking! I am always hoping for questions on this blog so that I have some extra motivation to develop something that I otherwise might not have even thought about! And thanks for the tips as well, they are very helpful!
