Pejo language

Pejo is a language spoken on the islands of Laba. It is descended from Tapilula.

See Tropical Rim, as the sound changes listed here are nearly identical.

The one difference is likely something I came up with after I abandoned this project.

geography

This can be repurposed for 15N/0W empire, amade, as the ancestral language of all Tarpabap people who lived on their own. It is actually more closely related to Andanese than to Gold.

Laba will simply use Dreamlandic.

Tapilula (0) to proto-Pejo

See page history for script order.

1. The accent pattern involved in certain infixes with accented schwa switched to favor the following vowel. e.g. ăpo "field", apə̀ho "field (possessive) became /ăpo apəhò/.
2. The "labial" vowel ə disappeared, syllabified nearby consonants or turned to i if the nearby consonants were not possible to become syllabic. Note that it never occurred after labialized consonants. Sequences such as /pəh/ collapsed to form aspirated consonants, though these behaved as clusters.
3. Tautosyllabic vowel sequences òi ài èi converged to ē. This did not affect syllable-straddling words like /tùya/. Likewise, èu àu òu in the same environment converged to ō.
4. Duplicate vowel sequences àa èe ìi òo ùu shifted to long vowels ā ē ī ō ū. But the same sequences with the opposite tone pattern did not shift.
5. The sequences ṁg ṅg ŋ̇g shifted to ṁb ṅd ŋ̇ġ.
6. The velar fricatives g gʷ shifted to Ø w.
7. The labialized consonants tʷ dʷ nʷ shifted to kʷ gʷ ŋʷ.
8. The labial fricative f shifted to h.
9. The velar ejective ḳ shifted to g.

   This should probably be conditional, and it might shift /p t/ > /b d/ as well.

Daughter languages

STARTUP PHONOLOGY:

Labials:     p  b  m  w
Coronals:    t  d  n  l
Palatals:             y
Velars:      k  ġ  ŋ  h  
Labiovelars: kʷ ġʷ ŋʷ hʷ

Notes

While one might expect a pushchain sound shift of /b d ġ/ > /p t k/ > /f s x/, this never happened in any of the descendants because the parent language's voiceless stops were more common than the voiced stops, which would mean a language undergoing this shift unconditionally would then have more fricatives in its words than stops. However, this shift did not even occur conditionally, either. Instead, some languages changed the voiced stops /b d ġ/ into voiced fricatives /v z g/, which then in most branches became voiceless /f s x/.

UPDATEL: perhspa /d t/ > /tt s/ after a high tone? but this would mean all frics are intervocalic.

Daughter language 1

No fricatives evolve.

1. High tones ---> /ʔ/ at end of syllable.
2. /ʔ/ + stop ---> geminate stop.
3. voiced geminate ---> voiceless geminate.
4. /ʔh/ > /kʰ/. (Probably not contrastive with /k/.)
5. Syllabic nasals deleted: ṁ ṅ ŋ̇ ----> /məm/, /nən/, /ŋəŋ/ if a vowel follows, and just /mə nə ŋə/ if not. If surrounded by consos on both sides, all ---> ə.

"Try to find a path to /s/, but if none appears, head on down the path that leads to /r/ instead."

This sound change list is much too short to encompass the ~3500 years needed to get to "Laban", but if it were taken as complete, the name of the military leader Demofos would appear here as Dehòko.

Daughter language 2

P   b  ?  mb ?
B   b  ?  mb ?
T   t  s  nt ?
D   d  t  nd ?
K   k  ?  ŋk ?
G   ġ  ?  ŋġ ?
Kʷ  p  ?  mp ?
Gʷ  b  ?  mb ?

Labiovelars take all other labialized consos with them. ə > 0. No geminates, probably no tones.

Daughter language 3

Here the language splits into daughters, but even so, there is one branch that is politically powerful and is the language called "Laban" by outsiders. (For comparison, imagine if Swahili or perhaps Arabic was called "African".) However, it will be referred to as Pejo here, the name of the tribe that spoke it.

• possibly /b d ġ/ > /v z g/ > /0 z 0/ > /0 s 0/. This creates an /s/, and gets rid of the "unwanted" consonants that would be rare for the geographical area Pejo is in. /v/ might cause labialization of the preceding vowel before it disappears, as happened in the parent language of Tapilula. Thus this is a repeating sound shift. If /v/ disappears, it probably takes /w/ with it. /s/ is probably [c] after a high tone.

0  p  m  w  t  n  s  l  y  k  ŋ  h   
ʔ  pp mm pw tt nn c  tl ć  kk ŋŋ kʰ  

actually this is unlikely since there is no final nasal.

Voiced stops might also obey this rule, changing into voiceless stops instead of /0/ and then /ʔ/.