Sakhi

Sakhi is a language spoken by feminists who had formerly been part of Thaoa. They had previously been a very aggressive military empire, at times the most aggressive on the planet, but when the Thaoan women realized that the tribes their soldiers were attacking were ruled entirely by women, they blocked their army and forced the soldiers back home. The women then signed a peace treaty called the Feminist Compact with their enemies, and abolished their own military.

Phonology

Diachronics

Sakhi was a northern dialect of Thaoa which early on gained vowel length and lost distinctive aspiration. Most long vowels arose from vowels that had previously been followed by a glottal stop. Thus, the glottal stop was eliminated.

Sakhi's sound changes were complex and often polyconditional, unlike those of Palli, where the general trend was strongly in favor of a smaller phonology and more open syllables.

early changes

The phonology of classical Thaoa had been (consonants only)

l  j  h  k  kʰ ŋ  p  pʰ m  t  tʰ  n  s  x  š  b  ž  č  ň  ʔ

Unlike Palli, the dialect that became Sakhi reflected Thaoa's early /v/ phoneme as b, and it therefore was not included in the later sound change that devoiced all fricatives. Thus proto-Sakhi /b/ usually corresponded to proto-Palli /f/ (later /h/).

Next, all stops became voiced after long vowels, even if aspirated.

Then, Sakhi soon gained a new /f/ phoneme, because it changed all of its aspirated stops to fricatives. The postalveolar affricate č behaved as aspirated in this shift, and therefore merged with š.

Next another wave of voicing happened, as all unaspirated stops became voiced, except if following an aspirated stop or a fricative, or syllable-initially with an /h/ located across a vowel. Thus, voiceless stops had almost disappeared from the language. However, the voiced stops were on their way out as well, because the next sound change was to weaken the voiced stops into fricatives and approximants. /d/ became /r/, however, not /z/. Some of the above changes excluded clusters; e.g. /nd/ did not become /nr/, and what remained came to be spelled /nt/.

At this point the language had very few words beginning with stops, and stops were not particularly common elsewhere either.

creation of hiatus

However, some balance was regained when all /h/ disappeared from the language. /x/, the reflex of /kʰ/, soon became /h/.

The deletion of /h/ made this already rapidly changing language even more unstable, because for the first time in thousands of years vowels were allowed to touch each other. These new vowel sequences were spelled with the old letter for /h/, since the letter for /x/ was used for the proper /h/ sound. However, to prevent confusion, the hiatus separator is Romanized instead with /ʕ/. The Sakhis needed this letter because these vowel sequences still contrasted with diphthongs, which was unusual for their area.

Distribution of stops

The loss of /h/ had made the stops more prominent in the language while at the same time increasing the role of vowels. However, for reasons going back thousands of years before even its parent language of Thaoa, the stops /p/ and /k/ were much rarer than /t/. By contrast, languages such as Lamu, which had evolved from Khulls, coronals were less common than labials and velars because Khulls had had a stop system of /pʷ p t k ḳ kʷ ḳʷ/ with a few marginal phonemes like /č/ at low distributions. Thus, even though the phonology of Sakhi was fairly similar to nearby languages, it had a distinctly different flavor to its speech.