Phonemic Contrast in Prelanguage Roots^
My current conlang project is to build a language for a mesolithic people living in an uneven stretch between two mountain ranges in the far northwest of the world at the start of an interglacial that begins to open up the northern plains.
With à priori languages, I usually break the project down into three stages:
prelanguage |
Language used to work out core concepts, phonology, and roots. All lexical entries appear with an asterisk. |
|---|---|
protolanguage |
Language used to formalize rules of grammar and the initial pass of sound changes. Also, serves as a base line for any branches that occur before the main language. All lexical entries appear with an asterisk. |
main language |
Language used to muddy the formal language into a form viable and naturalistic for use in the published text. |
Documentation for each stage will develop on this site, but only main languages will lead to the subsequent production of a published grammar and lexicon and feature in published work(s) of fiction.
In the case of the current project, the prelanguage represents the people who first migrated into the region. The protolanguage covers the established people who have begun an early social division into three groups: the vale culture, the cave culture, and the forest culture.
Of these, the forest culture is the one that produces the main language as they are at the northeastern end of the division and have access to the northern plains as they open up and again become habitable.
The vale culture and the cave culture will continue to develop as relative isolates, each producing a new protolanguage, which will in turn influence descendants of the main language.
I’m currently working in the early stages of the prelanguage, attempting to work out the rules of phonemic contrast within nominal roots.
Roots^
The prelanguage roots will start as CV or V roots. Each CV syllable will have modified forms: VS, CVS, OSV, and OSVS. This gives us six base forms, which can be further expanded through bisyllabic forms with the addition of subsequent CV and V syllables.
So, we’re looking at something like: tɑ as a base that means
something like earth with
tɑn for wet-earth, trɑ for burrow, and trɑn for
mud-hole as extended bases and maybe ˈtɑn.fi as a modified
base meaning swamp.
Allophonic Stress Mutation^
In the prelanguage, all obstruents are voiceless. So, if you
look at an IPA table, you get [p] but not [b], [t]
but not [d], et cetera.
Voiced obstruents are introduced to the protolanguage through allophonic stress mutation. That is, the primary stress lands on the first syllable of the word. When that syllable has an obstruent as an onset, the obstruent shifts from voiceless to voiced.
So, ˈtɑ.fi becomes ˈdɑ.fi, but tɑ remains tɑ
since monosyllables don’t carry stress.
Thematic Vowels^
The nominal thematic vowel will further muddy the waters. What I
imagine is that there is an i-stem series of nouns and an
ɑ-stem series of nouns. These nouns are characterized by a
prefixing vowel that appears in the absolutive case. In the
ergative, [i] becomes [ε], but [ɑ] becomes a ∅
(it has no counterpart).
So, for example, the prelanguage noun *ˈtɑ.ni might have the following
forms in the protolanguage:
Case |
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|---|---|---|
erg. |
|
|
abs. |
|
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This could bleed into other anomalies around related words looking very different by the time they reach the main language.