Cupbearer Coast

The Cupbearer Coast is an area which in the 4100s came under the control of the speakers of the Play language, as several waves of mutually hostile invaders all spoke this language. Thus even when power changed hands several times in one century, the language of the population did not change. However, the Play speakers never fully drove out the languages of the indigenous inhabitants, such as Oyster, Middlesex, and North Dreamlandic.

The native population of Mipatatatai, also known as Tata, spoke the Baywatch language. But as the Dreamers, the Players, the Crystals, the Matrix, the Zenith, the Soap, the Tinkers, the Slopes, the Cold Men, the Mirror, the Phoenixes, the Dolls, the Cupbearers, and the Storms sent their armies into Tata to fight for control of the territory and adjacent Baeba Swamp, more languages appeared.

If both labialized consonants and prenasalized consonants are analyzed as clusters, the phonology would be

Bilabials:       p   m           b   
Alveolars:       t   n   s   l   r     

And the vowels /a e i o u/ in both short and long forms. The geminates /pp ss tt/ still remained, and there were sound gaps of */te so bo lo ro/, except in a few rare words where contraction of long vowels before geminates had created new short vowels there.

The coronal stop /t/ was allophonically [k] before any /o u/. Unlike the neighboring Dolphin Rider language, however, it remained [t] before /a/, and therefore [t] is considered the primary allophone. It was not palatalized before /e i/.

Cosmopolitan Play languages

This is likely within the Baeban Play dialect continuum, despite the sharp political boundary between Baeba and Tata.

Wineapple (3958) to Wineapple-A

The consonant inventory was

Labials:         p   b   m   f   v   w
Alveolars:       t   d   n   s   z   l   r
Postalveolars:   č   ǯ   ň   š   ž   y
Velars:          k   ġ   ŋ    

It may be that all consonants were palatalized before /i/, and that the postalveolar row can be reanalyzed as palatalized alveolars.

Baywatch (3370) to Tata-A (4800)

This is cladistically part of the Minor Lenian languages and was even in contact with some of them.

This should probably begin around 4100 AD instead of 3370.

Note that the substratum language had likely already lost its /f/. see Oyster_language#Proto-Oyster (~2050) to Birch (~3310). Note also that the four-vowel inventory /a i u ə/ was not found in this area at the time, so there is no great pressure on this language to follow its shift of /o/ > /a/ with a shift of /e/ > /ə/.

Birch (which is probably intelligible with Plume) had lost its inherited freestanding /š č/, and although new palatals had been created from consonant + /j/, these were fairly rare, so there is no great pressure on Tata's Dreamer dialects to develop palatalization either.

It is also possible that the mainline Baywatch dialects influence this one.

1. The alveolar stop t shifted to k before any /o u/.
2. The vowel o shifted to a.
3. In word-initial position, the sequences pp mp tt nt shifted to p b t d.
4. The sequences s ss shifted to h s. It is likely that /hu/ was pronounced much like [ɸu], and perhaps other allophones existed before the other vowels; because these allophones arose after the shift of /t/ > [k], though, there was no contrast before historical /a/ vs /o/.
5. The sequences mp nt ns shifted to mb nd z.
6. The mid front vowels e ē shifted to ya yā. It is possible that the shift was just to /a/, but note that Middlesex was spoken nearby and did a conditional shift without its /e/ previously being iotated.
7. The sequences ia ua (from pre-Baywatch deletion of /w/) came to be pronounced ya wa. There may also have been a iu, which could shift to yu. Also, it may be that these new sounds were pronounced much like IPA [je wo], as they had come almost entirely from similar sequences.

At this point, the Play army invades Tata and drives out the competing adstrates, meaning that influences from Crystal and Oyster cease to be significant.

1. The long vowel ō shifted to ū. This was with Play influence. It is possible that it broke to /au/ instead, as Play was shifting /əu/ rather than /au/.
2. Labialization was defeated. This left a new true /o/ vowel.
3. All vowels became palatalized before /i/. This may have created a new phonemic /e/. However, Play's dialect continuum terminated in a three-vowel language, so it is possible that even these new vowels soon disappear.