Ghost language: Difference between revisions

From FrathWiki
Jump to navigationJump to search
No edit summary
 
(82 intermediate revisions by the same user not shown)
Line 1: Line 1:
:''This article is about the Lamuan languages descended from [[Khulls]] and spoken on the planet Teppala.  There exists another conlang called Lamu which is not part of this world.''
Ghosts were just one of many groups.  This is a direct sister language of [[Ogili II]], with no more recent non-shared common ancestor on either side, meaning that any other languages in their shared family must be either early-branching forks of Ogili or of Ghost.


[[Lamuan languages|Lámū]] is a name for the southern branch of the Khulls family, including the languages which are spoken inside [[Pusapom|Pabap territory]].  Lamuans are not immigrants; they are an indigenous minority of Khulls speakers who never moved away from their homelands even as they were outgrown by the Pabaps.
==Leaper (~4700 AD) to Ghost (~6000 AD)==


;note, deleted much text that doesnt apply anymore. originally i had merely scrubbed it, but the formatting was messing up.  literally every single idea that i had been planning to use has now been discarded, so the family i was originally calling "lamu" will simply have to take on another name.
The consonant inventory of Leaper was  


==Proto-Lamuan phonology==
Rounded bilabials:      pʷ  ṗʷ  bʷ      hʷ          w
===Vowel shifts===
Spread bilabials:        p  ṗ  b  m 
/a e i o u/ > /a ɜ ɨ ɜ ɨ/, probably unconditionally with no effects at all on the surrounding phonemes. This is because /e/ and /u/ were much rarer than /o/ and /i/, and had in many cases arisen in tandem with consonant shifts, so that, for example, /čo/ never existed in Khulls, since /čo/ > /če/ in an earlier shift.
Alveolars:              t  ṭ  d  n  s  r  l
Postalveolars:          č      ǯ      š  ž  (ł)  y
Velars:                  k  ḳ      ŋ  x  g
  Labiovelars:            kʷ  ḳʷ  ġʷ      xʷ  gʷ
Postvelars:              q              h      ʕ
  Labialized postvelars:  qʷ


===Consonant shifts===
And the vowels /a e i o u/ on six tones: à ă ā á â a͆, where the last two differ in sandhi effects only.
====Palatalization of non-coronals====
The language palatalized most of the non-coronal consonants that were not labialized, and then delabialized the labialized ones.  However, there were exceptions:
:*/p ṗ b/ changed to /f f v/ instead of becoming palatalized.  This shift also occurred in Moonshine and [[Poswa]] much later, but was unrelated.  However, this shift did not happen when they occurred before another consonant (a situation that came to be seen as analogous to labialization).
:*The nasals /m n ŋ/, which had no labialized counterparts, also did not palatalize. 
:*/ḳ ḳʷ/ shifted to /q q/, and resisted palatalization.
::*note, this last shift MUST be conditional, or else /q/ would be more common than /k/.


:*Also there will be a gap of almost no /či/, but there will be plenty of /ki/, which would be unusual.  So perhaps /kʷi/ > /ćʷi/ > /ći/, part of a pushchain shift that also causes /qi qʷi/ > /ki kʷi/ and probably the rest of the /q/ > /k/ later on.
All five vowels are unrounded except when following a labialized consonant.  Because /u/ almost always follows a labialized consonant, its unrounded form is very rare unless analyzed as /Ø/.  This can be spelled /ʉ/.


A rare palatal lateral '''ł''' (IPA /ʎ/) can be added, which occurs only in environments where /y/ can also occur.  Unlike the other five palatal consonants /č ǯ š ž y/, however, it is entirely of secondary origin, arising entirely from the sequence /ly/, and it cannot contrast with the sequence /ly/, even over a morpheme boundary.


The phoneme /gʲ/ quickly merged with /j/ (spelled /y/ in Khulls).
#The high vowels ''i u'', ambivalent to tone, shift to '''ʲɨ ɨ'''. Meanwhile pharyngealized ''î û'' merge as '''ɨ̄''', and this is almost the only /ɨ/ in the language that was not preceded by a labialized consonant.
#:And as such, it is possible that /ʷɨ/ is actually /ʷʉ/ from the beginning.
#The mid vowels ''e o'', ambivalent to tone, shift to  '''ʲʉ ʉ'''.  Meanwhile pharyngealized ''ê      ô'' merge as '''ʉ̄'''.
#:The longs and phars may actually target to '''ā''', and cause vowel harmony shifts with unstressed /o/ also moving to /a/ when this happens.
#Palatalization is lost after ejectives and if the vowel is pharyngealized.  It is important that palatalization is minimized in every way possible, perhaps even being restricted to tonic syllables, because it mostly contrasts with labialization instead of with plain articulation.
#The sequence ''ʷɨ'' (on all tones) shifted to '''ɨ'''.
#The velar ejectives ''ḳ ḳʷ'' shift to uvulars '''q qʷ'''. 
#:There needs to be at least one environment in which they remain velar, and this spreads analogically to most unstressed syllables.  Alternatively, the ejectives could shift to plain voiceless stops in unstressed positions, though it would be traditional for the language to allow at least some unstressed uvulars, so the reverse type of analogy would need to then take place.
#All voiceless stops lost their aspiration.
#The pharyngeal approximant ''ʕʷ'' shifted to ''' ʀ'''.
#:Possibly shift /g/ > /Ø/ here, and while ʀ still remains ʀ, it fills the fricative column rather than the approximant column.  Instead, /h/ could drop.
#The ejectives ''ṗʷ ṗ ṭ'' shifted to '''pʷ p t'''.
#The voiceless fricative  ''hʷ'' shifted  to '''f'''.
#All syllabic consonants gained a prosthetic '''ɨ'''    unless before a vowel. 
#All unstressed ''ɨ'' was lost; alternatively, this rule can be united with the above and all resulting clusters declared syllabic.     
#The long high tones ''ā á'' merged as '''ā'''.
#The short high tone ''à'' shifted to '''aʔ'''.
#Final glottal stops were lost.
#''d'' > '''r'''.  Note that this was a merger, since they were not in complementary distribution.
#Labialization was lost in the coda.
#Likely the voiced stops ''ġ ġʷ'' merge with '''g gʷ''' (meaning that primordial /g gʷ/ do not delete after all), with the distinction between stop and fricative being allophonic.
#Palatalized labials, if they ever existed, likely shift to plain ones.


Meanwhile, those coronal consonants that were postalveolar came to behave as if they were palatalized, and those that were alveolar came to behave as if they were labialized.  The sole exception was /l/, which behaved as if it were a dorsal consonant, and therefore became palatalized in all environments to /lʲ/.  This treatment of /l/ as dorsal is shared with many languages of the area such as [[Andanese]] and Khulls itself.  /ʕʷ/ came to be seen as the labialized version of /l/, which is true to its Khulls derivation, and its pronunciation shifted roughly to [[wikipedia:Voiced uvular fricative|ʀ]], which still contrasted with the voiced velar fricative /g/.
Possibly long vowels shorten in closed syllables, but superheavy syllables were common in neighboring languages as well.


The old phoneme /ǯ/ came to behave as if it were /rʲ/.  However, it is likely that /r/ and /z/ soon merged, and took /ǯ/ and /ž/ with them, creating a merged phoneme pair of /r rʲ/ which would be [r ž].
In one daughter language, palatalization of all velars occurs, with an early shift of  ''kʷi'' > '''ćʷi''', and then uvulars turn into velars. This    language  then shifts the mid vowel to /u/.  It probably also does /r/ > /d/.
===Culture===
:''See edit history for more information about the Lamu subgroup of the Ghosts.''
At least some Ghost languages border Moonshine territory, but the capital and center of population of the Ghost Empire is well within the tropics.


====Loss of ejectives====
Though the Ghosts were racially diverse at the time of the founding, the decline of transportation led to the concentration of power in the tropics, and thus the Ghosts by 6000 AD were a dark-skinned tribe similar in appearance to the [[Crystals]] with some traits of the aboriginals of [[Kxesh]].
The ejectives /ṗ ṭ/ had survived the shift that had removed /ḳ/, but they soon merged in with the corresponding aspirated voiceless stops unconditionally.  (Unless they triggered gemination instead.)


====Loss of syllabic consonants====
It is not clear whether the Ghosts retained any significant following in the areas of the northwest that came to represent one of the three strips of [[Cosmopolitan Play languages]].  The Ghosts had in fact been founded in this region, but the dominant powers were [[Baeba Swamp]] to the west, and the [[Moonshine culture|Moonshine]] Empire to the east.
All syllabic consonants are lost.  If followed by a vowel, they simply become plain.  If not, they change according to the formula /ḷ ṁ ṅ ŋ̇ ṡ ṣ̌/ > /il im in iŋ is iš/.  However, this shift occurred later than the shift that changed consonants such as /p/ into /f/ when not before another consonant. Also, the fricatives did not harden into affricates because there was never a vowel before them in Khulls, and therefore never an allophonic glottal stop.  Thus Khulls ''ʕʷŏpṡ'' "sun" became proto-Lamu '''ʀɜpis''', not ''*ʀɜfis'' or ''*ʀɜfit''.
 
===Tone shifts===
The high tone "crystallized" into low tone plus /ʔ/, as in [[Thaoa]].  This caused gemination of the following cosnonant except before a fricative, in which case it formed an affricate.  This allophonic gemination/affrication was already part of standard Khulls, such that, .e.g. in Khulls /àx/ was always pronounced [àk], but in Lamu it became truly phonemic because the tone contrast disappeared.
 
ā and á merged as ā, which lost its tonal contrast but retained its length contrast.
 
Pharyngealization survived, but was no longer considered a tone.  Instead, it was considered to be /g/ in the syllable coda.  This was an orthographic choice, although there were still a few words in the language where /g/ and the pharyngeal vowel marker /ʕ/ appeared to derive from each other.
:NOTE, this doesnt work because a literal /g/ can also occur in the syllable coda and the two are unlikely to merge.  /R/ would not work either.
 
Thus, all tones had been eliminated.
 
===Summary of phonology===
Thus the phonology of proto-Lamu was:
 
;CONSONANTS
p b m f v t n s r č š ž ʀ l ć ǵ ś j k ġ ŋ x g q ʔ h
 
;VOWELS
a ɜ ɨ
 
There are no diphthongs.
 
The consonants that could occur word-finally were /p m n ŋ s l ʔ ʕ/, plus those that had resulted from delabialization.  Thus, all except some of the palatals. 
 
Consonant that cannot occur wordfinally: /t r č ž ć ǵ ś/, but note that word-final /s/ was allophonically [ʔs] all along and might change to a simple [t].
 
/q/ might be a mirage, if it shifts to /k/.  Likewise, /h/ could merge with /x/ since it is so rare.
 
===Khulls to Proto-Lamu wordlist===
This list uses the /a i u/ orthography for the vowels and assumes /q/ > /k/ but that /h/ and /x/ remain distinct.
 
*ʕʷŏpṡ > '''rupis''' "sun"
*tēnta > '''tūnta''' "pepper"
*Kʷoxʷudas > '''Kuxirat''' (placename; possibly corrupt kʷ to ḳʷ on purpose for folk etymology)
 
 
 
===Descendant languages===
Some shift the vowels to /a i u/, since there was no palatalization or labialization to pull the vowels to the edges of the vowel space.  This shift essentially restores the original system that the [[Gold language]] had had more than 4000 years earlier, which makes these languages look especially conservative, but this is false.  It is reminiscent of the situation where Moonshine appears to be the only Khulls daughter language that preserves the Khulls á tone, when in fact it lost that tone and then redeveloped it from sequences of other tones.
 
For consistency, if this shift happens in *all* daughter languages (Lamuan languages share many areal traits), or even most of them, the vowels of the parent language could also be written as /a i u/ with the explanation that the parent language /u/ was very close to schwa.
 
*ʀ > /w/ before a vowel, and perhaps in other positions as well.  This, too, generally corresponds to its original form in the Gold language, and therefore appears falsely to be very conservative.
 
*Development of allophones for vowels, either related to length, or to being in a closed syllable, or both.  However, the basic /a i u/ setup generally remains intact at the phonemic level.


==Notes==
==Notes==

Latest revision as of 17:42, 31 July 2021

Ghosts were just one of many groups. This is a direct sister language of Ogili II, with no more recent non-shared common ancestor on either side, meaning that any other languages in their shared family must be either early-branching forks of Ogili or of Ghost.

Leaper (~4700 AD) to Ghost (~6000 AD)

The consonant inventory of Leaper was 

Rounded bilabials:       pʷ  ṗʷ  bʷ      hʷ          w
Spread bilabials:        p   ṗ   b   m   
Alveolars:               t   ṭ   d   n   s   r   l
Postalveolars:           č       ǯ       š   ž  (ł)  y
Velars:                  k   ḳ       ŋ   x   g
Labiovelars:             kʷ  ḳʷ  ġʷ      xʷ  gʷ
Postvelars:              q               h       ʕ
Labialized postvelars:   qʷ

And the vowels /a e i o u/ on six tones: à ă ā á â a͆, where the last two differ in sandhi effects only.

All five vowels are unrounded except when following a labialized consonant. Because /u/ almost always follows a labialized consonant, its unrounded form is very rare unless analyzed as /Ø/. This can be spelled /ʉ/.

A rare palatal lateral ł (IPA /ʎ/) can be added, which occurs only in environments where /y/ can also occur. Unlike the other five palatal consonants /č ǯ š ž y/, however, it is entirely of secondary origin, arising entirely from the sequence /ly/, and it cannot contrast with the sequence /ly/, even over a morpheme boundary.

  1. The high vowels i u, ambivalent to tone, shift to ʲɨ ɨ. Meanwhile pharyngealized î û merge as ɨ̄, and this is almost the only /ɨ/ in the language that was not preceded by a labialized consonant.
    And as such, it is possible that /ʷɨ/ is actually /ʷʉ/ from the beginning.
  2. The mid vowels e o, ambivalent to tone, shift to ʲʉ ʉ. Meanwhile pharyngealized ê ô merge as ʉ̄.
    The longs and phars may actually target to ā, and cause vowel harmony shifts with unstressed /o/ also moving to /a/ when this happens.
  3. Palatalization is lost after ejectives and if the vowel is pharyngealized. It is important that palatalization is minimized in every way possible, perhaps even being restricted to tonic syllables, because it mostly contrasts with labialization instead of with plain articulation.
  4. The sequence ʷɨ (on all tones) shifted to ɨ.
  5. The velar ejectives ḳ ḳʷ shift to uvulars q qʷ.
    There needs to be at least one environment in which they remain velar, and this spreads analogically to most unstressed syllables. Alternatively, the ejectives could shift to plain voiceless stops in unstressed positions, though it would be traditional for the language to allow at least some unstressed uvulars, so the reverse type of analogy would need to then take place.
  6. All voiceless stops lost their aspiration.
  7. The pharyngeal approximant ʕʷ shifted to ʀ.
    Possibly shift /g/ > /Ø/ here, and while ʀ still remains ʀ, it fills the fricative column rather than the approximant column. Instead, /h/ could drop.
  8. The ejectives ṗʷ ṗ ṭ shifted to pʷ p t.
  9. The voiceless fricative hʷ shifted to f.
  10. All syllabic consonants gained a prosthetic ɨ unless before a vowel.
  11. All unstressed ɨ was lost; alternatively, this rule can be united with the above and all resulting clusters declared syllabic.
  12. The long high tones ā á merged as ā.
  13. The short high tone à shifted to aʔ.
  14. Final glottal stops were lost.
  15. d > r. Note that this was a merger, since they were not in complementary distribution.
  16. Labialization was lost in the coda.
  17. Likely the voiced stops ġ ġʷ merge with g gʷ (meaning that primordial /g gʷ/ do not delete after all), with the distinction between stop and fricative being allophonic.
  18. Palatalized labials, if they ever existed, likely shift to plain ones.

Possibly long vowels shorten in closed syllables, but superheavy syllables were common in neighboring languages as well.

In one daughter language, palatalization of all velars occurs, with an early shift of kʷi > ćʷi, and then uvulars turn into velars. This language then shifts the mid vowel to /u/. It probably also does /r/ > /d/.

Culture

See edit history for more information about the Lamu subgroup of the Ghosts.

At least some Ghost languages border Moonshine territory, but the capital and center of population of the Ghost Empire is well within the tropics.

Though the Ghosts were racially diverse at the time of the founding, the decline of transportation led to the concentration of power in the tropics, and thus the Ghosts by 6000 AD were a dark-skinned tribe similar in appearance to the Crystals with some traits of the aboriginals of Kxesh.

It is not clear whether the Ghosts retained any significant following in the areas of the northwest that came to represent one of the three strips of Cosmopolitan Play languages. The Ghosts had in fact been founded in this region, but the dominant powers were Baeba Swamp to the west, and the Moonshine Empire to the east.

Notes

Retrieved from "http://www.frathwiki.com/index.php?title=Ghost_language&oldid=140709"