Ogili II

Ogili II is a proposed reworking of Ogili to have a shorter list of sound changes that produce nearly the same result, thus enabling the language to more believably be moved further back in time so that its speakers can have intimate contact with Poswobs and Moonshines when those empires were still young.

The language will here below be referred to simply as Ogili.

Leaper (4700) to Ogili II (6843)

It may be that the language diverged from an earlier state, especially if this is spoken in the tropics. However, the sound changes below assume that the language is still spoken on the northwest coast, near Dreamer territory. It may have also shared sound changes with Ghost, but is all in all very different from Ghost.

1. The ejectives ṗ ṭ ḳ shifted to voiced b r ġ. Note that /ġ/ was a true voiced stop, even though the coronal and possibly the labial were approximants.
2. The voiced sounds r d merged as r.
3. The vowels e i, on all tones, shifted to ʲa ʲi. This effectively created a vertical vowel system, since the inventory was /a ʲa o ʲi i/, but the old spellings were still used for the meantime.

   It is possible that /ʷu/ survives intact, not shifting to /ʷi/, since it would only shift to a plain /i/ in the end.

4. The inherited vowel o came to be spelled ɜ.
5. Labialization defeated palatalization.
6. In initial position or after a high tone, the fricatives s š ž x g xʷ gʷ shifted to c č ǯ k ġ kʷ ġʷ. The glottal consonants did not shift, and the shift quickly reversed itself in final position (and did so nearly losslessly, because the target sounds rarely occurred in that position after high tones).
7. The voiced fricatives ž g gʷ ʕ ʕʷ shifted to Ø Ø w Ø w. (the "oo wow" shift.)
8. The velar fricatives x xʷ shifted to h hʷ.
9. All labialized consonants shifted to pure bilabials. Thus pʷ bʷ kʷ ġʷ hʷ shifted to p b p b f.

   THIS MIGHT BE BETTER HANDLED BELOW.

10. Consonants before (or after?) a syllabic nasal were deleted.
11. Tone shifts took place in tandem:
    1. The long high tones á ā merged as the high tone á, except before a coda of either of /l s/ (H BW), in which case they rose further to the extra-high tone a̋.
    2. The short, post-glottalized high tone à shifted to á unconditionally. Note that this is only the orthographic high tone, and not the allophone of the long tones that sounded identical to it.
    3. Short mid tones ă before a voiceless coda rose to the high tone á.
    4. Short mid tones ă before a plain /w/ coda shifted to the low-toned ʷà. Note that the coda /l/ had not yet shifted, so this change does not affect syllables that had ended in /l/.
    5. Any remaining short mid tones ă shifted to ā. Here, the macron denotes pitch, not length. Also note that this covers all primordially closed syllables except those with historically long vowels. That is, /tan/ had a surface-level low tone, even though it was underlyingly high in Gold.
    6. The long, low, pharyngealized tone â shifted to the extra-low tone ȁ, except before coda /-s/ (H), where it appeared as the ordinary low tone à.
    7. All unstressed vowels became either ā or à, depending on sandhi.
12. Syllable-final p b l shifted to pʷ bʷ w. The new /w/ can be spelled as /lʷ/ temporarily for precision.
13. Coda labialization skipped across a preceding vowel to labialize the consonant in the onset. The syllables could also be analyzed with structures like /twa/, since the inherited labialization had disappeared. Note that in some clusters, the following consonant was also labialized.
14. The voiced velar stop ġ became a voiced fricative g. Note that the labialized version had become /b/ by this time.
15. The long high tone á: merged with the extra-high tone a̋.
16. Before a coda that was any of /m n ŋ lʷ bʷ/, the mid vowel sequences ɜ ʷɜ shifted to o ʷe.

    These were originally written in the opposite order, under the assumption that both were inherently rounded at least to start with. The new idea is that /ʷɜ/ > /ʷe/ arose from dissimilation while /ɜ/ > /o/ was of little consequence at the time. Another possibility is that both shift to /o/, and that /ʷe/ simply is somewhat less common than /ʷa ʷi/.

17. The vowel sequences ɜ ʷa ʷɜ shifted to e o u. The /u/ was always rounded and had no unrounded counterpart because the rare inherited bare [u] had become /i/.
18. In a few clusters like /lʷg/, the coda consonant may have become the onset of the following syllable. (But remember that they were mostly labialized.)
19. All remaining codas were deleted.

Thus the vowel inventory was /a e i o u wa we wi/. It is possible to analyze /o u/ as a fourth pair, /u wu/, arriving at a four-vowel inventory with room for a /w/ glide before all four vowels. Unlike the parent language, this /w/ glide is not considered part of the preceding consonant.

new idea for tones etc

a reworking of the above would envision the possible syllable codas at the end of the three-vowel stage as consising of three binary elements [b] [h] [w]. That is, e.g. coda /b/ is +b -h -w, coda /pʷ/ is +b +h +w, coda /hʷ/ is -b +h +w, and so on. Then three shifts would apply:

LOSS OF FINAL CONSDONANTS

First, all vowels before [w] become rounded. Thus /a ɜ ɨ/ > /ɔ o y/ (sic). There are no diphthongs because a three vowel system with diphthongs and a mostly CV syllable setup is unstable.

Then, all vowels *not* before [h] become long. (This could be problematic, since long vowels would outnumber short vowels, but vowel length can be reduced in a secondary shift, probably by shifting long vowels to the tones with gaps in their distribution.)

Next, all vowels *not* before [b] undergo a secondary shift such that /a ɜ ɨ ɔ o y/ > /a e i o u y/. (That is, some vowels are unaffected.) Possibly allow /æ/, but this language family has a strong tradition of resisting any sound changes removing [a].

Then, /ɜ/ > /ø/ unconditionally to round out the vowel space, leacing the language with a total vowel inventory of /a e i ɨ ɔ ø y o u/.

Note that in this setup, the vowels /ɨ ɔ ø/ are restricted to syllables that had previously ended in [b], and of these, /ɔ ø/ are restricted to syllables that had previously ended in [b]-[w] (that is, /b/ without /w/). This is problematic because there is no voiceless version of this coda other than primordial final /p/, which was rare.

tomne shift history

this is the same as the above chart, but from the opposite direction. "primordial" means Khulls or even pre0Khulls sandhi is responsible for the shift, not what the syllable looked like later. i.e. the distinction was not phonemic in Khulls but rather part of sandhi, but became phonemic shortly after the split.

Khulls á & ā > Ogili [á:] in primordial open syllables, but Ogili [á] in primordial closed syllables.

Khulls à > Ogili [á] in primordial open syllables, but Ogili [ă] in primordial closed syllables.

Khulls ă > Ogili [ă] in all environments.

Khulls a > Ogili [ă] or [à] depending on sandhi. (This is the Khulls neutral tone.)

Khulls â > Ogili [à:] in all environments.

Later, [á:] > [a̋], and [à:] > [ȁ], but for ease of typing both transcriptions remain valid.

Scrub area

Make aw>wa,etc... labialization skips backward to preserve CV.

Primordial open syllables can actually end in a coda /w/ due to the desyllabification of short /u/. Thus syllables ending in /w/ have a wider variety of tones than those that do not. This problem must be solved.

0bhw has eight forms:

b__, _h_, __w, bh_, b_w, _hw, bhw
b    h    w    p    bʷ   f    pʷ
d    h    w    t    b    f    p

Note that the above shifts do NOT lead to a clean and balanced five-tone setup because primordial closed syllables prohibited the later presence of the rounding coda element [w], which means that the topmost tone will only ever occur with unrounded vowels unless it is fed by a secondary later shift. Additionally, the [à] tone will only occur in polysyllabic words since it arose solely from unstressed neutral tones. This, too, must be fed by a later shift.

Another minor problem is that coda [b] almost always co-occurs with coda [w], so this system is not as clean as it appears. Since coda [b] is nearly in complementary distribution with the primordial closed syllables, perhaps they could cover each other: that is, primordial closed syllables all come to end in [b]. Final /n/ could be [b] since it lacks a labialized counterpart. Final /s/ must remain as /h/ however.

The language at this time was entirely CV, unless the syllabic nasals hang on and become nonsyllabic. this changes only in the daughter languages.