Primordial scratchpad

this is the ancestor of almost ALL Languages of Teppala. Despite its name, it still is not the ancestor of literally all languages, because there are scattered aboriginal groups who settled the mainland ~50000BC and kept their languages as other groups took away their land. But by 4000 AD, even these surviving groups had come to be politically dominated by the descendants of the migrants who spoke languages derived from Primordial.

Scope

This language was spoken sometime between 14000 BC and 11000 BC. The "pre-primordial" language is only present to give the sound changes needed to make the asymmetrical inventory of Primordial.

SCRATCHPAD

All unorganized ideas go here. Possibly rename this page to a lowercase acronym like with ppot. /ɜ/ and /ə/ are used interchangeably here.

Apr 25, 2020

• Note that Mumba is ultimately cognate to Saffaslujje and that the city could legitimately just be called Mumba or something like Omumba.

• IF the 2P pronoun in Silatibarra is /hət/, it could have begun with any of /s š ś h/ in Primordial, and possibly also /x/. Likewise the final consonant could have been /č/ instead, which probably functions as /tʲ/.

• The prefixes may correspond at least in part to Repilian_languages/Owl#Slot_B, which could have come from prefixes attached to the second noun in a phrase. Thus, at least some of the prefixes in Primordial might be gender markers, which would be not far off from the noun classifiers that arose in Tapilula. One possibility for a male prefix is təl-, with təlʲ- being a lower probability.

• Its possible that the original vowel inventory was overloaded, and that many original vowels could collapse into schwa. for example, the male prefix might have originally been tə̄l.

• The /-i-/ infix that marks the accusative case in Tapilula may have been already an infix in Primordial, but it is more likely that such a long-lasting phenomenon arose from a more robust form.

Phonology

The consonant inventory is unclear; it depends on what stage of the language is being reconstructed. The Languages of Teppala page as of Apr 25 2020 lists the vowel inventory as just /a ɜ ɨ/, but it should probably be something like /a ɜ ɨ ā ē ī ō ū/ or at least /a ai au ɜ ɜi ɜu ɨ ī ū/.

Another possible vowel inventory is

SHORT VOWELS

a   ɜ   ɨ

LONG VOWELS AND FALLING DIPHTHONGS

ā  ai  au
ɜ̄  ɜi  ɜu
ɨ̄   ī   ū

There may have been an unlisted shift like /ɨ/ > /Ø/ in prehistory, which led to syllables ending in stops. Another possible idea is that pre-Primordial ("Mapi") may have had /a ɜ i u/.

Some consonants in the inventory could be arbitrarily duplicated, since this is only the minimal inventory needed to get to Tapilula and many mergers could have takne place.

By the time of Silatibarra (8000 BC), coda /i/ had probably disappeared except in bare form, so the inventory would have been something like /ā au ɜ̄ ɜu ī ū/. this suggests that perhaps ɜ̄ should shift to /əi/.

Grammar

There were no classifiers.

There were infixes, which survived in both Repilian languages and Tapilula for >10000 years of changes (though evolving into greatly different final forms in the two branches). There may have been prefixes, which disappeared in Tapilula because Tapilula needed the prefix slot for its classifiers. Thus, a whole slew of prefixes could be made for Primordial with absolutely no need to synchronize them with Tapilula.

THe pronouns na "I" and ge "you", whatever their original forms, may well go back all the way to Primordial. In Mumba ~8000 BC their forms would probably have been /na/ and /hə/, though perhaps there were final consonants that disappeared. e.g. the words could have been /nam/ and /hət/.

If the accusative marker is cognate to Tapilula's, it is likely to have been /ī/ (that is, /ɨj/) around 11,000 BC. /ɜi/ would also work.

It is not clear whether Tapilula's genitive infix /-əh-/ could have arisen from a standalone CV or CVC form in Primordial; at some point Tapilula evolved the practice of deriving infixes from CV prefixes spelled backwards, and therefore the original form may have been a standalone morpheme that would have evolved into /hə/ had it survived. (Although its possible Andanese did preserve the standalone morpheme, I have been assuming backwards analogy.) If the genitive derives from a CV standalone form, it can only have been /čɜ/ or that plus a consonant. It could perhaps be /čɜr/, or /čɜu/ if an analogy of /o/ > /ə/ in Tapilula is assumed. This may have been a verb in 11,000 BC, and the genitive could have been marked in an entirely different way in Primordial, but it is still a direct cognate.

Culture

Four different racial types all derive their languages from Primordial, and all four of them are the aboriginals of the land they inherit. Yet this language was spoken only around 14000~11000 BC, so it must have been a trade language of some sort; three of the four races were well-formed by this date.

Racially, the Zeniths may be a branch of the paleo-Andanese, and the Repilians a branch of the Zenith. The dark-skinned Pejo people would have remained on the islands, and it is possible that they did not speak Primordial and only inherited its descendant, Tapilula. The same could also be true of the Lenian/Mumba people.