Etymology of Ch-m- Tlondor and Related Tongues

Ch-m- Tlondor's Language Family

It is not known whether Ch-m- Tlondor is a language isolate. Almost certainly its unique system of morphological predication is unique, but it is known that this system developed from a more standard system near the end of the Era of the Garden. Attempts to relate the language to other tongues based on lexical reconstruction have so far failed.

Chomiz Talonid Or:Speech of Talonid

Overview. This tongue, originally spoken on each of the Five Islands of Tl-nd-, was essentially agglutinative, with little in the way of inflectional morphology. It appears that in its oldest form it had a strict prohibition against consonant clusters, allowing only (stop)(liquid) combinations, and then only if the two consonants did not match in place (e.g. "pl" was permitted, as in ploz, "bear", but not "dl"). Its inventory of phonemes included a set of fricatives not found in Ch-m- Tlondor: sh, s, z, th, dh, zh.

Salient Features of Syntax. Chomiz Talonid Or was a strict SVO language. Noun compounding was not permitted; adjectives and adpositional modifiers appeared after the head noun. A rich set of auxiliary modifiers could be suffixed to a subject noun to indicate tense, aspect, necessity, possiblity, mood, and voice.

Changes between Chomiz Talonid Or and Ch-m- Tlondor

• Unstressed vowels were dropped. Thus Chomiz Talonid Or became Chomz Tlond Or.
• Fricatives sh, s, z, th, dh, zh were dropped if they violated the syllabic structure of the language. Thus Chomz Tlond Or became Chom Tlond Or.
• Internal vowels of verbs began to agree with the vowels of the auxiliary suffix. For example, the noun gimach, "dog", and the verb ulmso, "run", originally combined with the progressive -sho to create the form gimachsho ulmso. When the internal vowels began to agree, the form became gomochsho ulmso (or gmochsho ulm after the phonological changes noted above).
• The internal vowels of subject nouns came to be seen as part of the marking on the noun, rather than phonological agreement. In other words, the base form of "dog" ceased to be gmach and became gm-ch, with the internal vowel decided by the suffixed auxiliary marker.
• As the base forms of nouns lost their internal vowels, the auxiliary marker vowel was used in other places in the clause. For example, in "he saw the dog", originally gegash ziti gimach zhach, the auxiliary marker -ash (perfective) changed the internal vowel of geg ("he") to a. This a was then spread to other nouns in the clause to serve as the internal vowel, producing gagash it gmach zhach.
• All remaining instances of fricatives sh, s, z, th, dh, zh were lost.
• This phonological change contributed to the loss of the suffixed auxiliary markers, which were, in general, syllables of the form VC, with C a coronal fricative. With this loss, speakers began to treat the verb as a suffix; thus gagash it gmach zhach became gagit gmach ach.
• The use of verbs as suffixes spread to other predicates, including postpositions and adjectives. Thus gagit gmach ach became gagit gmachach, and Ch-m- Tl-nd- Or became Ch-m- Tlondor.

Examples of change: full sentences

Changes to Ch-m- Tlondor: the Era of Union and the Era of Dominion

Development of the verb as feature marking on the subject noun: a grid of nine features of voice + lenition, on the first consonant gives a core verb, on the second consonant gives domain. Adpositional infixes develop into case marking; freer word order.

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