Qaar
| Qaar (†) | |
| Alternate names: | Proto-Qaar, Elder Tongue, Proto-Qanic |
| Native name: | Qaäraqa (Meat tongue) |
| Spoken in: | Elder Plains |
| Total speakers: | -- |
| Extinction date: | ~1700-984 OA (?) |
| Genealogical classification: | Old Tongue (?)
|
| Created by: | |
| Johannes Drucker | 2011- |
Qaar is the commonly cited ancestor tongue of all Qanic tongues. It is one of the Elder Tongues supposed, but not proven, to be descenants of a hypothetical Old Tongue.
Even though commonly agreed by the Nakuran linguistical community in Lower Ktaria, and to a lesser extent Kti itself, to be the youngest ancestor of all the Qanic tongues, it is dubious if it has relative languages or if it is a language isolate.
The only thing certain about its relatives is that it is completely unrelated to proto-Ktaric, spoken around that period. The earliest documentations of the language date to around 1100 Old Age, at least 16 225 years before present (1373 years of the Ktarh age, 13752 years of the Golden age and at least 1100 years of the Old age, the last going in reverse). By this time, the language was moribund; it died out 116 years later.
By that time, the language was said to be "over six hundred years old".
Phonology
The phonology is divided into consonants, vowels and rules.
Vowels
There is a near-horizontal vowel system, wider than it is high. Vowels can be both short and long.
| Front | Center | Back | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| High | /ɯ/ (u) | |||||
| Mid | /ɛ/ (e) | /ɜ / (ä) | /ɵ/ (ö) | /ɔ/ (o) | ||
| Low | /ɒ/ (a) | |||||
Consonants
The consonant system of Qaar is an unusual one indeed. They can be geminate, taking up two "C" slots.
| Consonants | ||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bilabial | Labiod. | Dental | Alveolar | Retroflex | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Pharyngeal | Glottal | |||||||||||
| Nasal | m̥ | ɳ̊ | ||||||||||||||||||
| Plosive | t | tʰ | ʈ | ʈʰ | c | k | kʰ | q | qʰ | ʔ | ||||||||||
| Fortis Plosive | t' | t'ʰ | ʈ' | ʈ'ʰ | c' | k' | k'ʰ | q' | q'ʰ | (h') | ||||||||||
| Fricative | ɸ | s | sʰ | ʂ | x | xʰ | χ | ħ | h | |||||||||||
| Fortis Fricative | s' | x' | χ' | ħ' | h' | |||||||||||||||
| Lateral Frricative | ɬ | ɬʰ (ɮ) |
ʎ̥˔ | |||||||||||||||||
| Rhotic | r | ʀ̟ | ||||||||||||||||||
Rules
Syllables have a following maximum structure:
| Syllable Structure | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (C) | (C) | V | (C) | (O) | (C) |
One "C" stands for a consonant, two "C" stand for a geminate, "V" stands for any vowel of any length and "O" stands for any single-length fricative or plosive. Note that "C"+"O"/"O"+"C" cannot make a geminate
