2min chapter

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Conlangery #51: Language History

Conlangery Podcast

CHAPTER

Playing With Semantic Drift in Your Vocabulary

semantic drift gives you a way to have dialect differences that are natural and make sense. The next thing you can do with this sort of polysemy historically is. So let's say we've got this word for see. And we have a word derived from it that means sight. Then your language undergoes the shift where the verb see now only means understand, but you still have the meaning site associated with one of its derivations. Okay. Now you've got a natural sort of weirdness in your vocabulary. You have a word that means sight that is clearly related to the verb understand in the current state of your language. But then in a related language, it might still have both

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