User:Soap/EPSL

The Eastern Play substratum languages are to the east of the Play substratum languages, and so called for convenience, but Play speakers did not overrun their territory until much later.

See User:Soap/MRCA for notes on the parent language, and User:Soap/SE for a different family spoken near this one.

Sound changes

1. final closed syllables become long
2. final high tones become long (it may be that closed syllables were always high, so this rule is moot)
3. possibly prenasals become nasals in some conditions
4. tʷ ndʷ nʷ > pʷ mbʷ mʷ. (Unless this can somehow create an /s/ phoneme despite mostly occurring before /o/.)
5. o > ʷo (but spelled o).
6. g > Ø. This creates vowel hiatus; as with other languages, the first vowel is probably long at first (e.g. iga > īa), and any exceptions will be due to rare situations such as two /g/'s in sequence.
7. If there are any new sequences of two short vowels, they all become diphthongs, even unpopular ones like /əa/.
8. āə ēə īə ōə ūə > ā ē ī ō ū.
9. If two long vowels occur in a row (e.g. tigan >> tīā), the first becomes short.
10. All short schwas are deleted. Long schwas then become short. There may also have been some syllabic consonants created, perhaps from both short and long schwas. It is also possible that some schwa becomes /e/, and that this family has a greater proportion of /e/ than all of the other MRCA families.
11. mʰ nʰ ŋʰ > mh nh ŋh. These come mostly from the primordials (all nasals aspirated before labials), but also from deleted schwas. This shift unifies the clusters with the original type which were front-loaded.
12. Probably ŋh > h.
13. Possibly ṗ ḳ > pp kk. These were not aspirated, however.
14. nk tk shifted to nt tt. Occured mostly in verb inflections.
15. Possibly Ø became one of e o before nasals, since the syllabic nasals would have been the same as schwa plus nasal.
16. There may be Ø > h before some "ugly" vowel sequences, mostly low+high or low+mid (remember that aī etc still exist). No new phoneme appears here because the environment is highly conditional.
17. Surviving /h/ attracts to the tonic syllable, which probably means that -ʰ- becomes a reflexive verb marker.

    This process has sub-rules which tend to move the aspiration towards stops, but it will never skip across two syllables, so aspirated nasals still exist, and a secondary /ŋʰ/ is created by this rule, meaning that /mʰ nʰ/ are common while /ŋʰ/ is rare but all three are phonemic. Creation of phonemic /lʰ/ may be possible as well, as happened in Andanese, but shifting this to /s/ is unlikely.

A minimal consonant inventory at this time (assuming no aspiration, no voiced stops, and that labialization, prenasalization, and gemination are all non-phonemic) is

Bilabials:       p    m    w
Alveolars:       t    n    l 
Dorsals:         k    ŋ   (Ø)   h

And it is possible that even the /h/ will disappear.

Later sound changes will introduce phonemic /r s/, and possibly /b d/ if the latter had not already arisen from the prenasals. Vowel loss will be slow and sporadic, words mostly retaining their full length, and it may have a rapid speech tempo and a rule that at least one syllable in every content word must be long. Possibly this would lead to stress on that syllable.

The /s/ sound will ideally come from palatalization, as in Andanic, and not from clusters like /lh/ (which also happened in some Andanic).

Other ideas

Restoration of final consonants

Deletion of final schwas might lead to restoration of lost final consonants if a schwa can be attracted to all such words in the meantime. This might rely on analogy. For example, if MRCA ipə "pine tree" is passed into the language as is, its reflex after schwa deletion would be ip. If it is inherited as ipə gək, its reflex would also be ip (ipəgək > ipək > ipə > ip), but it would inflect differently. If a different type of tree, perhaps ŋum (currently assigned to no meaning), gets the same gək suffix, it would lose the schwa and thus inflect as if its stem were /ŋumk-/ (which might change to ŋump).

But this was originally an idea for a different family: Andanese. it could still happen for verbs separately.

The language might lenite consonants after the stress, which is what led to the metathesis in Gold. This change is unusual (one might expect fortition instead), so it might have been present in MRCA and then died out in all the other branches.

Posibly final prenasals (from schwa loss) generate high tone, and then tone becomes phonemic elsewhere too. THis would entail ignoring some of the soun changes on the list above.

All aspiration could disappear, leading to high tones on the following syllable. Less likely, it could lead to low tones instead, because this would be the marked form.

Ideas for culture

These ideas are not mutually compatible.

Switch places

It is possible that PSL and EPSL will switch places on the map. Since even the original PSL was in eastern Play territory, the name EPSL could stay with this family, and the original PSL would take on a geographic name unrelated to its relation with Play.

Pro-Andanese alignment

This language may have cultural ties to Andanic languages that keep them friendly, even though EPSL are much more culturally and genetically related to PSL than to Andanic, and even though EPSL and Andanic share little if any territory whereas PSL and Andanic overlap greatly. This is essentially a political alliance where the Andanese see the EPSL's as friendly allies and repay them by NOT settling in their territory, allowing the struggling EPSL's to focus on settling the coast. One thing in common between the Andanese and the EPSL's was that they were both settling in many nations at once rather than trying to build a single nation of their own; thus they were both minorities in their own territories. But the EPSL's were settling in aboriginal communities while the Andanese were settling in PSL territories that had already defeated or assimilated their aboriginals.

PSL tribes saw this as proof that the Andanese knew they were unwelcome in PSL territory. Most likely the Andanese would have explained their lack of interest in moving to EPSL by saying that EPSL was already part of a shared EPSL-Andanic cultural sphere, and thus was already Andanese, and did not need to be "re-settled". It is unclear how long this cultural alliance would survive, as the rise of Play led to more territorial and less tribal conflicts, meaning that the Andanese living in PSL territory would think of themselves as PSL's instead of looking outside their nation to identify foreign tribes as "theirs".

If this scenario is true, they may have shared the Andanese dislike of politics. The Andanese said that money was the politics of peace, as they shunned even internal tribal elections and had no political parties of their own. The Andanese handled disputes typically by having the richer party buy out the lesser, and claimed this is why they never had any internal wars. Many Andanese were very poor, as the richer Andanese saw no need to give them money, but because the Andanese lived only in other tribes' nations, the poorer Andanese led raids on non-Andanese households instead of attacking the rich Andanese living mostly in cities. The EPSL's are less likely to develop a class structure such as this because they didn't have military security and thus had no spare time to accumulate and create wealth, but assuming a shared internal currency they could have followed the same philosophy and said that large numbers of people would buy out smaller dissenting groups, even if they all had about the same wealth individually.

Pushed inland

The EPSL's may have been pushed inland by the PSL's and by others, leading them to become very poor. They may have built "web nations" in the mountains, as did the Galà tribe, where their territory overlapped with other tribes, but the EPSL's built towns only at certain altitudes whereas the other tribes built towns only at others. This was peaceful because they needed to pass through each other's territory; they did this because they held to different lifestyles which were climate-dependent.

Bé

This could be Bé if Thaoa remains part of the PSL territory. Bé was a single language, but it could be that only one of the EPSL languages borders Thaoa. Bé and Thaoa must be in the same family, as otherwise their relationship wouldnt make sense, but the depth of the family could be thousands of years. Even so, it is probably better to keep Bé within the Play substratum languages clade.

Early wars

Wherever they settled (most likely to the east), the EPSL's had to join the war between the two groups of aboriginals, and would have been fighting for the losing side, that being the Repilian tribes mostly living further north, who were losing out to the so-called Suxaŋ tribes who controlled much of the coast. The EPSL colonists assumed that if they tried to support the Suxaŋ side, the Suxaŋs would make so many demands of EPSL that EPSL's would never have freedom, and might even be sent to the front lines against the Repilians. Thus they chose the more difficult route of siding with Repilia, which was huge but soft, and knowing that if the Repilians kept losing they could just keep fleeing north and had no reason to let the EPSL's move with them.

One advantage the EPSL's had was that both the Repilians and the Suxaŋ in the far east were poor and tended to self-identify instead of siding with their wider tribal coalition. (This was the so-called chaos of Nama that people from Thaoa later invaded, many honestly believing they were doing the right thing by attacking all tribes indiscriminately because their victims would be better off conquered than independent.)