Gold language

The Gold language (also cvalled Diʕì) was spoken around 1900 AD along the south coast of Rilola as well as the homelands of the left-behinds on Fox Island. It is the parent language uniting all Khulls, Thaoa, and Poswa/Pabappa speaking populations.

POhonology

Consonants

There were labialized consonants in Gold, but they are not considered phonemic because unlike in Khulls and Poswa, they can only occur bnefore a vowel. Thus it is better to consider this as simply a /w/ inserted between a syllable onset and its nucleus. THis also means /w/ itself is phonemic rather than being considered, as in Khulls, just an allophone of /ʕʷ/. THus, with labialized consonants ignored, the setup is:

/p b m w t d n s z l č ǯ j k ġ ŋ h g ḳ/

The velar ejective ḳ is the only ejective in the language, although the clusters /pḳ/ and /tḳ/ could occur, even word-initially, leading to marginal phonemes /ṗ/ and /ṭ./ More commonly, however, /ṗ/ and /ṭ/ also appear as allophones of /ḳ/ after the syllabic nasals /ṁ/ and /ṅ/.

Final consonants

The final consonants are /k ḳ l n s ʕ/. Syllabic consonants /ṁ ṅ ŋ̇/ do, however, exist.

Vowels

/a i u ə/

Tones

Tones were not well developed in Gold. Syllables could be high or low, and since there were no long vowels, this is all the possibilities that existed. Note that high tone is Romanized with a grave accent, as in à, to keep in line with its descendants where this tone develops a final glottal stop.

Although there were only two tones, vowel sequences like àa and aà were becoming more common, and this is what led to the long tones of Khulls and its descendants, which are spelled ā and á respectively. Long tones also existed in Thaoa and Poswa but died out. The àa ~ ā type is much more common than aà ~ á. These could also occur with diphthongs, but only on the ā tone. That is, ài was common but aì was entirely absent, even over morpheme boundaries.

Grammar

The grammar of the Gold language was the last to preserve the private verbs of its parent languaege. Private verbs are those whose meaning is dependent on the noun classes of the subject and object precedes it. Noun class in this context includes species and gender. Thus, for example, only humans have special verbs relating to holding objects. Only "fish" had words for swimming. For example, nusan was a type of fish, where nu- is a classifier for fish. The verb for "swim" is bĭ. Other animals have no verbs for swimming; a duck or human would thus need to take a specially modified form of the verb, nubĭ. Thus, all words describing swimming begin with nu-, though this is omitted when describing a fish. Nubĭ could be analyzed as "to move like a fish".

Descendants

ORdered roughky from west to east:

• Tarise
• Khulls (by far the most widely spoken language, having more descendants and more speakers than all the others combined)
• Kava
• Mimalebra
• Babakiam (and its descendants Poswa and Pabappa)
• Thaoa