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 seven 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.

Vowels

If stress, length, and post-glottalization are considered to be properties of the tones rather than the vowels, the Khulls vowel system is very simple: /a e i o u/, with no diphthongs and no signicant allophonic alternations of vowel quality to be found in any position. Khulls is unusual in that its diachronic history has massive tables of consonant changes, but only a few vowel changes, nearly all unconditional. The parent language vowel system was /a i u ə/. In Khulls the /u/ was lowered to /o/ except after a labialized consonant, and /ə/ was either backed to /u/ or reduced to just a non-syllabic lip rounding, creating another series of labialized consonants on top of those inherited from the parent language. (But note that the sequence /əu/ had changed to /ū/ in an earlier shift, so this did not produce ʷu or ʷo/.)

There are also no diphthongs, as these have all been ironed out into monophthongs. In fact /e/ arises solely from diphthongs and is thus the rarest of the five vowels. /a/ is by far the most common, as it is in nearly every language on the entire continent. /i/ is second most common, and /o/ is third most common, unless /u/ is considered to be present in all labialized consonants, which is generally not done as it would lead to sequences of /uu/, thus making /u/ the only vowel in the language that can be doubled.

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. Moreover these consonants are not pharyngealized.

Khulls has very short words, and there are 20 consonants that can stand alone as words: /p ṗ b m n ŋ l s š z pʷ ṗʷ bʷ kʷ ḳʷ ġʷ xʷ gʷ hʷ ʕʷ/. There are ten each of the plain and labialized consonants, but this is a coincidence because all of them, even the p ṗ b / pʷ ṗʷ bʷ pairings, have different origins.

Note that these same 20 consonants are also the only consonants that can occur at the end of a word, if the few exceptions like word-final /nt/ are read as /np/. The fact that 14 of the 20 consonants are labialized or bilabial or labialized bilabials leads to the language sounding in some ways like Classical Poswa.

Some single consonant words are: p "teacher", ṗ "eye", b "pine tree", ṁ "breast, inedible body part", ṅ "one, singulative", ṡ "sleep", ṣ̌ "bomb", ż "to injure, hurt", pʷ "wet, soaked with water", ḳʷ "God", ġʷ "to believe; to stand up", xʷ "to bite, grasp firmly", hʷ "human, soldier", ʕʷ "fire". These single consonant words can combine with other words readily, even though the single consonant is often difficult to hear despite greatly changing the meaning. However, apart from a few suffix-only forms such as the agentive suffix -hʷ, most of these compounds were created before the missing vowel dropped out. Thus pàpo "student" was /əpàpo/, etc.

Stops

Aspirated Stops

• These are by far the most common series of stops in the language. There are five: /pʷ p t k kʷ/, and they are for the most part inherited directly from the parent language without any changes. Sometimes they have arisen from unaspirated stops coming into contact with an /h/ or other voiceless fricative. They are always strongly aspirated, even when unstressed, and Khulls has no counterpart of Thaoa's Grassman-like shift that deleted aspiration when two aspirated stops occurred in consecutive syllables. Of the five aspirated stops, three can stand alone as words without an additional vowel: /p pʷ kʷ/. /pʷ/ and /kʷ/ generally come from the parent language /pu/ and /ku/, but can have other sources, while the plain non-labialized /p/ arises from the sequence /ək/, which changed as follows: ək > ŭk > ŭkp > ŭp > p. Thus Khulls historically shares with Poswa a preponderance of bilabial consonants, especially the series /p pʷ ṗ ṗʷ/, and propensity for bilabial plosives to persist in paradigms when all others perish.

Ejective Stops

• Ejective stops, also known as glottalized stops, are also inherited from the parent language. There are five: /ṗʷ ṗ ṭ ḳ ḳʷ/, assuming the marginal /ʔ/ is not itself considered glottalized. Sequences of /ʔ/ plus an aspirated stop have never produced a glottalized stop, so there are few diachronic paths besides direct inheritance to produce them, and they are thus somewhat rarer than aspirated stops. They lose their glottalization when unstressed, which gives Khulls the unusual trait of having plain voiceless stops only as an allophone of a somewhat rare series, while strongly aspirated stops predominate even in unstressed syllables. This is a similar system to that of the parent language, Diʕìləs; but Diʕìlas had only one glottalized stop: /ḳ/, which means that /ḳ/ is the most common glottalized stop in Khulls and that for the most part the other four are derived from what were once mere allophones of /ḳ/. There are no paths leading from /ḳ/ to /ṭ/, however, so /ṭ/ is very rare outside of loanwords. Of the five glottalized stops, three can stand alone as words without an additional vowel: /ṗ ṗʷ ḳʷ/. The above sound changes applying to /p/ also appear here with /ṗ/.

Voiced Stops

• The voiced stops are also five: /bʷ b d ġ ġʷ/. The labialized voiced stops /bʷ and ġʷ/ are common because they arose from labialized nasal consonants. The plain voiced stops are rare, occuring mostly after nasals, and could very nearly be also considered allophones of the nasals were it not for a few words with geminate nasals. Alternatively, they could be considered allophones respectively of /ʕʷ r g/ (note that /g/ is a fricative) after nasals, even though there are also a small number of words with clusters of nasals plus these consonants, because such clusters only occur across morpheme boundaries. Nevertheless, voiced stops do occasionally occur in places other than after a nasal, even though this is mostly in loans. E.g. Lobexon, a placename . B is also the accusative of the word for pine tree.

The Glottal Stop

• The glottal stop /ʔ/ is not normally considered phonemic, because it occurs only after high-tone vowels when not before certain consonants. It occasionally arises from /ʕ/ or even the cluster /ʕʕ/, because in the parent language an /ʕ/ after a vowel only occurred when that vowel's tone was high, and because /ʕ/ is deleted in unstressed syllables (which includes anything immediately after a stressed syllable) these /ʕ/'s would be deleted, leaving a hiatus, allowing the allophonic /ʔ/ that accompanies high vowels to reappear. As said, though, there is no letter for /ʔ/ in the Khulls alphabet because it is considered to be part of the preceding vowel; /ài/ implies [àʔi].

Affricates

• The only affricates in the language are /č ǯ/, and they are fairly rare, occurring primarily in place of velars before the vowel /e/. However, it was not the /e/ that caused this shift; generally it is the /e/ itself that results from the environment, having come from a sequence such as /kia/. These would normally be grouped with the aspirated and voiced stops, respectively, if not for their many shared characteristics.

Fricatives

The system of fricatives closely parallels that of the stops, but there are two series (voiced and voiceless) instead of three; there are no labial fricatives, and there is a glottal series corresponding to no stop series. It is tempting to align the glottal fricatives with the labial stops, since each covers a gap in the other, but there is no special relationship involved between these two groups of consonants.

Voiceless fricatives

• The full list of voiceless fricatives is /s š x xʷ h hʷ/. /h hʷ/ are much rarer than /x xʷ/, but are definitely not marginal phonemes as there exist many minimal pairs in many different environments between the velars and glottals. /s/ and /š/ can explicitly be syllabic, and even stand alone: s means "sleep", and š means "bomb". /xʷ/ and /hʷ/ often occur in syllabic-like positions, but when joined by vowels in compounds they do not remain syllabic, so this is not considered a phonemic contrast. There are no significant allophones of any of these fricatives, either in voicing or point-of-articulation assimilation. However, when preceded by high tone vowels, /s/ and /š/ become /ts/ and /tš/, although this is properly a property of the preceding vowel rather than the fricative, because this is the glottal stop.

Voiced fricatives

• The full list of voiced fricatives is /z ž g gʷ ʕ ʕʷ/. The voiced alveolar fricative /z/ occurs in only one word, z "to injure, hurt" and its derivatives, but there are a few unrelated words which developed a /z/ and were reanalyzed as compounds containing the morpheme z. Although this was originally a syllabic /z/, the lack of contrast with any other /z/ led to a loss of syllabicity. As for /ž/, there was never a syllabic /ž/ to begin with. Thus, there are no voiced counterparts of the syllabic voiceless fricatives /s/ and /š/. Because pharyngealization is pronounced only in stressed syllables, /ʕʷ/ becomes [w] in unstressed syllables and is Khulls' first choice for spelling any foreign word with /w/. /ʕ/ simply becomes silent in unstressed syllables. The other fricatives have no significant allophones, and do not even assimilate in voicing to neighboring voiceless sounds.

Nasals

Nasals are very common, but there are only three of them: /m n ŋ/. Labialized nasals became voiced stops unconditionally and those are no longer perceived by the speakers as simple allophones of the nasals. Indeed nasals have no significant allophones and can occur in any position within a word, and even be syllabic. If a syllabic nasal touches an open vowel than an epenthetic simple nasal is added: e.g. lŏṁ "womb, uterus" is pronounced /lŏmṁ/.

Liquids

There are only two liquids in Khulls, /l/ and /r/. The /r/ in this case is a flap, not a trill, and cannot be doubled because it arises only from an earlier /d/ which itself could not be doubled. /l/ comes from both the original inherited /l/ and from /d/ in certain positions. /l/ can be syllabic and is much more common than /r/. In descendants of Khulls, /r/ is often eliminated entirely and the sound spelled "r" is usually a uvular approximant deriving from Khulls /ʕʷ/.

The sound /j/, usually spelled /y/, is arguably phonemic in Khulls, although it has traditionally been grouped with the vowels, since unlike all other consonants, it can only occur before /e/, /i/, and /u/, and all but /e/ is rare.

Grammar

Nouns

Khulls preserves the original vowel alternations in noun cases fairly well, though some meanings are changed. Also, occasionally they lead to disruptive consonant sequences where the vowel /ə/ is lost instead of changing to /u/:

pàpo "student"

• pàpo (nominative)
• păp (accusative)
• papol (genitive)
• papos (possessive)
• papon ("around, because of, affected by")
• papô (locative: "in the student", etc)
• papū (instrumental)
• păpʷ (essive/partitive: "made of", but also used as a possessive)