Khulls

Khulls is a name for a language spoken on planet Teppala to the west of the ancestor of Pabappa and Poswa. It is the ancestor of Moonshine and many other languages. By number, most of the languages in the world are descended from Khulls, but many of the languages are very small. Khulls is the only branch of the family that preserves tones, but all in all, it has changed more rapidly than the other branches. Since the other branches are very conservative by Earth's standards, Khulls may actually seem the most normal by comparison to Earth.

Phonology

Khulls has a very large, unstable "house of cards" phonology that in many respects resembles PIE mixed with modern Chinese. A phonologically maximal analysis would give five vowels, 35 consonants, 7 tones, two distinctions of vowel length, a stress accent, a distinction between pharyngealized and clear vowels, ample consonant clusters, and nine syllabic consonants. However, although the phonology is indeed very large, many of the consonants are marginal, and the tones are interlinked with the stress and length of vowels and therefore all cannot be considered simultaneously phonemic.

Tone

Generally there are considered to be five phonemic tones, with the other tonal realizations being allophones of these. The full range of tones appears only in stressed syllables. It could be said that unstressed syllables have no stress of their own, although there is a distinction between unstressed syllables that resist sandhi and unstressed syllables that are affected by sandhi. However, Khulls is not properly a pitch-accent language because words can have more than one "stressed" syllable tone, with the lack of stress being just a consequence of having stress earlier in the word. That is to say, there are words like īnčigō "strawberry", which has a stress pattern of H-L-M, where the third syllable is unstressed but uses a tone which would cause that syllable to have stress after all were it not for the first syllable also being stressed. This pattern can only happen in words that were originally compounds, but this word is no longer perceived as a compound.

Consonants

Khulls has many labialized consonants in its bilabial and velar columns. Since there is no true /w/ in the language, they could be analyzed as clusters, but this is not done because then the /w/ would only exist after certain other consonants. However, the very common /ʕʷ/ sound is pronounced [w] in unstressed syllables because pharyngealization always disappears in unstressed syllables. Thus an analysis of, for example, ḳʷ being /k/ + /ʕʷ/ could work, but would still be unusual in being the only type of cluster permitted in certain positions such as before other consonants.