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'''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.
'''Khulls''' is a name for a language spoken on planet Teppala by the [[Crystals]], their allies, and many of their enemies.  


==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.


==Scratchpad==
===Possessives===
:09:52, 8 May 2022 (PDT)
Leaper's method of forming simple possessives (with one argument, not translatives) is similar to Play's and was inherited from their shared ancestor.  The possessive morpheme is    inserted before the classifier, and then accent is  retracted back to its original position.  Thus ''nòṭiḳa'' "house" becomes '''nòqʷiḳa''' "my house" and '''  nŏrika''' "your house".  Third person is indicated externally, but the base form still inflects  to    '''nŏriḳa''', different from the second person because of the ejective /ḳ/.


The internal consonant gradations resemble those of the '''Lava Bed''' languages, and the presence of this alternation in Leaper may have helped the Leapers better understand the Lava Bed languages.  However they are of secondary origin, as Leaper lost its Lava Bed morphology early on. Instead, they are related to [[babakiam|Play]]'s '''verbal embedding'''.


===Tone===
===Polite forms of nouns and  verbs===
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 tone of their own, although there is a distinction between unstressed syllables that resist [[sandhi]] and unstressed syllables that are affected by sandhi.  A few compound words such as '''xinănopa''' "parrot" consist of a word ending in a consonant plus a word beginning in a vowel. The tone here remains ă, not à.
See [[Play_language#Comparison_with_Leaper_and_Gold]]. Essentially, Leaper will be able to turn any noun into a polite version by adding an infix that means "___ which you have given me", "___ which you have shown me", etc.  It may or may not be possible to also use other person combinations in Leaper.  The system is fully alive in [[babakiam|Play]] but may have decayed in  Leaper down to just the politeness infixes.


Khulls is not a pitch-accent language because unstressed syllables can have tones, even apart from the tones that result from sandhi.  That is to say, there are words like īnčigō "strawberry", which has a tone pattern of H-L-M, where the third syllable is unstressed but nevertheless has a higher tone than the preceding syllable.<ref>I had this word before I knew Japanese ''ichigo'', so even subconscious borrowing is not possible here. </ref>  This pattern can only happen in words that were originally compounds, but this word is no longer perceived as a compound.
The deep structure of the word is  
:NOUN[OBLIQUE] + /ʕ/ + PRIVATE VERB + /k/ + CLASSIFIERS.


Strictly speaking, the pharyngealized "tone" is not really just one tone, because it has the sandhi effects of the tones it grew from.  Newly coined words with poharyngerals are treated as coming from á, even though most in fact come from ā.  This is because á is a long tone, like â, and does not depress surrounding syllables the way ā, the other long tone, does.  So the words that really did arise from ā are pronounced with low tones preceding the pharyngeal.
The private verb always has the pharyngealized tone so long as the SAP's are 2>1.  This corresponds to the Play  sequences /aa ii upu/.  Note also that /ky/ > /s/, respecting a sound change from 3,000 years earlier.  Strictly speaking, what is really happening is that /sg sy/ > /k s/, partly through analogy and partly through true sound change.


Since snadhi even affects compiunds, it matters which of the two identical tones is used in a given word.  For example '''ê''' "fish" and '''ê''' "pink" are almost never used as standalone words, but they have different sandhi effects when they combine to make compounds.  Also, the "downwards" pushing variety of the â tone is the one that occurs on the very common locative form of a word. Thus:
Thus for example ''tăkaye'' "leash" turns into '''takaʕʷâsa''' "leash you showed me", because the stress shifts to the infix, and the classifier suffix -ye is replaced by -sa.


*'''čê''' "pants" (á-type pharyngeal)
It is possible that the infix could come through with the short mid tone '''ă''' instead of the pharyngealized  tone '''â''', since in either case analogy has taken place.  But assuming a primordial high tone  (that later became pharyngealized) is the only way to get /k/ where there once was /h/. 
*'''čê''' "in the pants" (ā-type pharyngeal)


sound the same, but have different sandhi effects on surrounding words.  That said, even this distinction is not particularly robust.  The phrases '''oé čê''' "cat pants" and '''oé čê''' "cat in the pants" are still identical. It is only when a two syllable word is inflected that the distinction appears.  For example '''porê''' "mermaid" has tone pattern M-L, but '''porê''' "in the mermaid" has L-L.  The á-type pharyngeal can be spelled '''a͆''' as an alternative.
An absolute minimal  form of the infix could be  '''-ʕâk- ~ -âk-''' (see the Play page for derivation).  This requires /w/ > /ʕ/ through analogy from the words in which it followed a labial consonant; or else, a dummy verb could be created that was later assumed to have been synonymous with the inherited /wa/ root.  The /k/ must stay.  The medial vowel, however, could perhaps also appear as /i/ and one of /o/ or /u/, meaning that there will be three variant forms of the politeness infix depending on situation; for example /ʕàk/ probably only covers visible objects since it means "that you show me".  This form also cannot distinguish person since the forms for 2>1 and 1>2 would both be /-âk-/.
====Allotones====
Distinct from sandhi, some tones change based on whether they are in an open or a closed syllable, or on their position in a word.  The /à/ tone (high, short, often with a final glottal stop) becomes the [ă] tone (middle, short) when in a closed syllable.  Also, all long tones become short in a closed syllable, which means that /ā/ and /á/ both become [à].  As an example, '''kʷēs''' "spice", '''kʷēmpe''' "spice bottle", '''kʷēkēs''' "spice grinds", '''kʷēko''' "spice sprout" have different tones.  It could be said that this this sandhi after all though because it survives compounds.  e.g. pampis + ĭ --> pampĭsi, not pampìsi as would be etymologically expected.


===Vowels===
Because /ʕ/ is a "transparent" consonant, the vowel of the root would form a unit with the following vowel.  Thus, the number of syllables would be mostly the same as in the oblique.  So ''săhoga'' "fish" would just be '''sahʷâka''', and so on.
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.
====Visibility====
It is possible that the most minimal form of the infix evolves into no more than a polite way to mark an object as visible.  In Moonshine, this would be linked to gender-based speech registers, with men using the polite forms when addressing women, and the plain forms being used otherwise except in the case of emphasis.
====Emphatic possessives====
The forms above could also be used to derive standalone possessives, since if the infix form is used, the 1st and 2nd person will melt together as '''-V̀k-'''  due to the /h/ > /k/ rule.  A possible escape, thoug, it to assume differnt priovate verbs for the differenet person, even though this would break the "living" Play system where they were in fact personless and part of the lexicon rather than grammatically bound morphemes.


The sequences /ye/, /yi/, and /yu/ occur ("y" is IPA /j/, not IPA /y/), but /ye/ has changed to /e/ except after another vowel, making the /y/ purely allophonic, and both /yi/ and /yu/ are quite rare.  /yi/ occurs mostly in noun plurals.  Thus /y/ occurs as a phoneme only before the high vowels /i/ and /u/. In earlier stages of Khulls, /y/ could occur before all five vowels and could also occur after labialized consonants.  In modern Khulls, the labialization has swallowed the /y/.
These would be '''kʷas''' and '''xas''' for 1st and 2nd person genitive respectively, and could function as pseudo-pronouns, though it's not clear that there would be a nominative case to go with them, and instead one might find words like "my body", "my self", etc making the genitives the basic forms.  The -s is not the genitive /s/ but may be mistaken for it as knowledge of the original construction fades.   Nonetheless, if  the /-s/ is reinterpreted as genitive, the Leaper language would lose an important function that languages like Poswa still retained 4,000 years later on.


====Allophony====
Here, the labialization was lost from the 2nd person form to make it more distinct; this was through analogy, and since there was no /kʷ/ > /k/ path to follow, the   analogy could only have proceeded in this way.   Remember that the labialization strongly colors the following vowel.
Khulls vowels are "weak" in that they don't affect the pronunciation of surrounding consonants in any way. Instead, it is the consonants that infect the vowels.  This is still fairly minor, howeever.


Normally, all five vowels are close to their cardinal IPA values.  However, the front vowels /e/ and /i/ are pronounced slightly further back when following an ejective consonant or when pharyngealized.  When both conditions are true, the vowel is still pronounced the same as if only one were true; it is not doubly-backed (this does happen in some descendants of Khulls however).  Likewise, the vowels /o/ and /u/ do not labialize the consonants they surround; there is still a distinction between, for example, '''xū''' "doll" and '''xʷū''' "seed".  It is the vowel that changes, being somewhat more rounded after a labialized consonant.  Vowels do not change due to consonants that follow, however.  The very rare minimal pairs such as '''làpʷ''' "carrot" and '''làp''' "dentist, teacher of mouths" have identical vowel allophones.  It is not generally considered that Khulls has ten vowels instead of five because there is only a limited set of labialized consonants, rather than a Poswa-like setup with one labialized consonant for every plain consonant, plus a pure /w/ to match silence.  Thus, the post-labialized allophones of vowels cannot occur in vowel-initial syllables.  Moreover, labialized consonants can occur with no following vowel.
===Play-Leaper relations===
:04:34, 26 January 2022 (PST)
Remember that AlphaLeap governed the Play speakers' territory for more than a thousand years, at a time when both languages were confined to single small nations, and that they therefeore had a close relationship, even if asymmetrical.  Leaper may have been greatly influenced by Play while Play would have taken very little influence from Leaper.  Only later did both languages blossom throughout the world as wide-ranging language families.


Consonants are never palatalized, even allophonically, by a following /i/.  The sequence /ji/ (spelled ''yi'') does palatalize a preceding consonant, but in Khulls the /y/ behaves as a consonant rather than a vowel.  This occurs mostly with the plural suffix ''-yi''.  There was a historical process of palatalization, but it was defeated by any labialization and also undone in certain other environments, so most plurals of nouns that end in consonants do not change the final consonant of the stem.  However, there are many nouns which today end in vowels, but in the past ended with ''-k'' or ''-ḳ''; these all have plurals in ''-či''.  Note that unlike many neighboring languages, palatalization of the ejective ''ḳ'' was allowed.  (Most other languages, including Khulls itself in an earlier stage, shielded all ejectives from palatalization.)
===Culture and sociolinguistics===
::08:29, 24 January 2022 (PST)
It is possible  that the Matrixes taught themselves to speak Leaper and not Dreamlandic.  Their association with Dreamlandic would come from the fact that not all Matrixes were able to learn Leaper, "let alone Play", and therefore they were stuck with Dreamlandic, the easiest language in the region, even though it was not the native language of most Matrixes.  Note, though, that many of the Matrixes were in fact of Play ancestry originally, so this does not make perfect sense.


===Consonants===
Leaper was typically considered a difficult language to learn, both because of its phonology and its grammar.  Play's phonology was much simpler, but its grammar was even more complex than Leaper's.  Play in many ways seemed to be "just simple enough to be complicated" whereas Leaper was less extreme than Play but more consistent in its complexity.
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; ʕʷ is simply used because its voiceless counterpart, hʷ, would be inappropriate for non-aspirated stops.


Another reason for not analyzing /kʷ/ etc as /k/ + /w/ is that in older stages of the language, it was possible for labialized consonants to precede /j/ (spelled "y").  e.g. '''kʷyâ''' "on the sea ice", '''hʷyas''' "war" etc.  (These words have become '''kʷê''' and '''hʷes''' in classical Khulls, but *''kʷê'' is no longer widely used.)  This does not happen anymore, because most /j/ was deleted in a late sound change and what remained was deleted after all labialized consonants.  However, these sound changes did not happen in the proto-Moonshine dialect, and therefore Moonshine began its history allowing such clusters after all.  However, except for /hʷj/ they were rare because of the dilution of vocabulary with Bābākiam loans.  Note that kwya is from kwī
==Diachronics==
{{:Leaper language}}


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. 
==Phonology==
 
:''See [[Khulls phonology]] for older notes on phonology.''
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.  However, the so-called "syllabic" /p ṗ b/ are rare because they only occur as the reflex of sequences like /ŭk/, meaning that they can only come from vowel-initial syllables.  (The sequence was uk > ukp> up > ʷp > p.)
   
 
See above for inventory.
Some single consonant words are: '''p''' "teacher", '''ṗ''' "eye", '''b''' "pine tree", '''ṁ''' "breast, inedible body part", '''ṅ''' "one, singulative", '''ŋ̇''' "clam", '''ṡ''' "sleep", '''ṣ̌''' "bomb", '''ż''' "to injure, hurt", '''pʷ''' "wet, soaked with water", '''ḳʷ''' "God", '''kʷ''' "insect", '''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 /həpàpo/, etc.
===Consonant-based gender system===
 
:''See [[Khulls nouns#Gender]].''
Because these single-consonant words were originally stressed syllables, one might expect them to lower the tones of the rest of the word; however, the schwa never carried stress in early Khulls in any word in which a non-schwa vowel was present.  Likewise, since labialized consonants can also arise from primordial /u/, one might expect tone sandhi here, but this also did not happen because the only /u/ that collapsed into consonant labialization was that which was unstressed.
 
 
====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/. 
 
The voiceless aspirated labialized velar stop /kʷ/ is also very common, far more so than Khulls' parent language (see [[Gold language]]), because of the many sound changes that lead to it.  Some seem impossible, such as /səkū/ > '''kʷō''' "bed", but are explained by the fact that labialization always dominates in a disharmonious cluster.  The sequence was sək > sʷk > sʷkʷ > hʷkʷ > kʷ.  Note that this happened too late for the labialization to rescue the /ū/ from slipping down to /ō/.
 
'''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. 
 
* The commonest native source of /ṭ/ is from sequences of /ʔd/ in [[Gold language|Gold]]; that is, /d/ after a high tone.  However, most words in which one would expect to see /ṭ/ from this particular sound change have since been analogized and thus have /r/ or /l/, the otherwise expected reflex of /d/.
;NOTE, BUT WHAT ABOUT MONOMORPHEMIC WORDS SUCH AS màra (AN ETHNIC NAME?)  SHOULD THEY BE CHANGED TO màṭa ETC?
 
*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, mostly /b/, do occasionally occur in places other than after a nasal.  E.g. Lobexon, a placename, where the /b/ arose from an earlier /mj/.  The earlier name for the territory was Lomyoxon.  A late sound change affecting only central Khulls also dropped the /l/ in the clusters /ml nl ŋl/, which had for a long time been allophonically [bl dl ġl], leading to a few more voiced stops.  These clusters were rare, so the new voiced stops were rare, but nevertheless occurred in some common words, such as the name of the country Kʷoxʷudas ("land given up to God"; cognate to [[Babakiam]] ''Ketufumuas'').  This sound change did not apply to syllabic nasals, however, so the cluster /ŋl/ still occurred almost entirely in loanwords, and /ġ/ was thus still the most marginal of all of the marginal consonants even in late central Khulls. 
 
'''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.  However, the coronal fricatives /s z š ž/ are pronounced as affricates by most speakers when occuring after an allophonic glottal stop; and /s š/ are affricates in this environment for all speakers.
 
====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.  Note that the glottals, even labialized ones , do not cause preceding final /n/ to become /m/.
 
'''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. 
 
*Note that in the [[Gold language]], the affricate pronunciation extended to closed syllables such as those found in the very common genitive/possessive form of a word, but that in Khulls, these syllables have changed to mid-tones, and therefore now pronounce the /s/ as a true [s] rather than the Gold language's [ts]. 
 
'''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 voiced fricatives /g gʷ/ are pronounced as [ġ ġʷ] (that is, they become stops) after a high tone, which means that almost all [ġ] in Khulls is actually /g/ rather than the marginal independent /ġ/ phoneme.  The other fricatives have no significant allophones, and do not even assimilate in voicing to neighboring voiceless sounds.
 
*Note that for most of Khulls' history, /ġʷ/ was rare, and it is only the recent change of /ŋʷ/ to /ġʷ/ that made it become common.  Thus, for most of Khulls' history, the fact that the fairly common fricative /gʷ/ had [ġʷ] as an allophone did not cause any ambiguity; it is only in the last few hundred years that the two phonemes came to partially merge.  Also, this shift did not happen in the [[Moonshine]] dialect.
 
====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.  Palatalized nasals also become stops in all dialects but Moonshine, and this palatalization itself was usually discarded.  Hence '''mī''' "bottle" becomes '''bê''' "in a bottle; bottled" (but proto-Moonshine ''myâ'').  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 the high vowels /i/ and /u/ (but note the persistence of [j] allophonically in sequences like /ae/, /oe/, etc).
 
===NOTES on phonology===
Some consonants are far rarer than others historically, but they have gained at the expense of the "major" consonants due to the extremely short average wordlength of Khulls and its love of extreme compounding. For example '''ṗĕhʷ''' "writer, author", composed of two rare consonants and one fairly rare vowel, with each phoneme being an independent morpheme. The etymology is '''ṗ''' "eye, front" + '''ĕ''' "to lick" + '''hʷ''' "soldier".  Someone who licks things frequently makes a lot of marks, and someone who makes a lot of marks is a writer or artist; meanwhile the word that originally meant soldier came to signify an adult male and then just an adult, hence becoming a career marker.
 
It is rare for vowel-initial words to begin with the à or ā tones, since both of those would normally have changed into â due to the automatic insertion of ʕ several thousand years earlier.  Exceptions, like '''àpo''', are generally due to restoration of nouns from previous verb-only stems.
 
====The scarcity of /j/====
The palatal approximant /j/ (always spelled ''y'') became increasingly rare as Khulls evolved.  By the year 4700, in the standard dialect of Khulls, /y/ could only occur after /p/, /ṗ/, /l/, or a hiatus (or in word-initial position).  This came about due to a sound change affecting all Khulls dialects in which /y/ after any non-labial consonant created a new palatal consonant, and these soon became postalveolar.  Thus, for example, /hy xy sy šy/ all became /š/.  Later, in all dialects other than Moonshine, /my by ñ/ became /b b ǯ/.  Then, in all dialects other than Moonshine, /y/ was deleted after a labialized consonant: that is, '''kʷyê''' became '''kʷê'''. Yet a further change also affecting all non-Moonshine dialects then eliminated /y/ before all non-high vowels. Thus, in standard Khulls, /y/ can only occur after /p ṗ l 0/ and before /i/ or /u/.  These are generally not considered to be palatalized consonants because of the vowel dependency and because historically, it was possible for /y/ to occur after a labialized consonant (and still was possible in contemporary Moonshine) and speakers perceived the labialization as being a property of the consonant but the /y/ as occurring after that consonant.
 
Since early /i/ collapsed to /y/ before another vowel, some pseudo-prefixes exist such as (again using the standard dialect) '''b''' which can mean either "coast, beach, shore" or "human hair".  But these can only appear before words beginning with vowels, which are not very common in standard Khulls.  Still, examples of such compounds abound, such as '''čê''' "pants", a compound of '''tì''' "foot" and '''ê''' "tunnel, tube".  (Since this word originally contained two accented vowels in a row, the first was "suppressed" and therefore it became possible later on for it to collapse into a /y/.)
 
====Sound rules====
Consonant clusters are resolved by a series of rules.
#Aspirates dominate ejectives: thus '''p''' "teacher" + '''ḳā''' "building" combine into '''pā''' "school". On the other hand, '''ṗ'''  "eye" + '''kī''' "rainfall, runoff" combine into '''pī''' "tears, overflow" which also begins with /p/, not /ṗ/.  Thus ejectives, a lready rare, have become rarer as time has passed; any word beginning in /k/ or /ḳ/ will change it to /p/, not /ṗ/. 
#Labials dominate dorsals, and in general, consonants dominate any consonants further back than them.  So labials dominate coronals, coronals dominate velars, and velars dominate glottals. There are many exceptions to this rule, such as kʷt > kʷ, but these are due to subsequent shifts.  In this case, tʷ > kʷ.
#:Words beginning with any of /k ḳ kʷ ḳʷ ġʷ gʷ g ŋ x xʷ h hʷ ʕʷ ∅/ have spawned variants beginning with /p/.  Since this /p/ means "teacher", it is commonly found that the new words have a more specific meaning relating to education, but semantic shift has made this not always so.
#:Labials and coronals that meet up go with the consonant on the right.  e.g. '''ṗ''' + '''tăni''' = '''tăni''' "nose".  That is, the ṗ completely disappears.  However this is actually related to a shift that happened when the ṗ was still a morpheme ending in ḳ, thus the rule goes back to an earlier coronal vs dorsal fight.  Similarly, '''b''' + '''nô''' = '''dô''' "pine bottom".  However this rule does not apply in words like '''yṅṭ''' "camel's eye" or '''ŋ̇k''' "teacher of clams"; i.e. it doesnt apply after syllabic nasals.
#Labialization dominates nonlabialization.
 
===Sandhi===
A fex examples of sandhi on consonants do exist.    For examp,e, the syllabic labials assimilate to the PoA of a precedding nasal.  e.g. '''lṅ''' "wing" (nominative) becomes '''lṅṭ''' in the accusative, not *''lṅṗ''.  However, in the [[Khulls script]], it is still spelled with a ''ṗ'', because the sequence /ṅṗ/ cannot exist.  Note that this /ṗ/ originally was /ḳ/, but disappeared after vowels, thus being pronounced in the present day language only after consonants.  The reason Khulls picks /ṗ/ and not /ṭ/ or /ḳ/ as its true form is because before it disappeared, it had changed to /ṗ/ after /u/, and that was retained as a bare form in words such as '''ṗ''' "eye" and its derivatives, whereas no bare forms with /ṭ/ or /ḳ/ survive.
 
====Aspiration spreading====
Not true sandhi, but a few very old sound changes are still respected.  For example, '''ḳēs''' "mud" + '''ḳî''' "spill, puddle, accident" becomes '''ḳēki''' "mud puddle", with the ''s'' and ''ḳ'' combining into just a simple ''k''.  The sound change that caused this happened several thousand years ago, when the ''s'' was [h], but is still respected even though [h] is no longer an allophone of /s/ even before a dorsal consonant.  The resulting aspirated /k/ is not palatalized to /š/ because that particular sound change happened before the sound change that created the new /k/.
 
Likewise '''tēs''' "spice, fire" + '''nă''' "red pepper" = '''tēnta''', from an ancient change of [hn] > [nh] > [ntʰ].  (The /t/ is still aspirated today in Khulls, like all other unmarked voiceless stops.)  Note that in ''ḳēki'', the accented vowel is long, but despite being spelled ''ē'', it is short in ''tēnta'' because it is in a closed syllable.
 
Likewise, previously existing final consonants sometimes reappear in compounds.  '''ḳò''' "knife" + '''gî''' "hole" becomes '''ḳòḳi''' "knife hole, stab wound" because the word for knife previously ended in a ḳ and there was a historical sound change of ḳg > ḳ.  (kg became ḳ also, not k.)  However, this process has not spread by analogy to words ending in this tone that did not originally end in ḳ.
 
====Spelling====
Khulls adopts few loans, but it faces a lot of languages, so among the loans that it does take are a very diverse set of words.  Khulls natively uses an alphabet, not a syllabary.  It uses its letters for /h/, /ʔ/, and /ʕ/ to spell syllabic consonants in other languages.  /h/ spells aspirates and fricatives (that is, /hs/ implies /ṡ/, /hp/ implies syllabic /p/), /ʔ/ spells ejectives (that is, /ʔṭ/ implies syllabic ejective /ṭ), and /ʕ/ spells voiced sounds (that is, /ʕr/ implies syllabic /r/).
 
====Labialization====
There is no regular process of labialization active in the language lately, but it occurs in derivatives of some words.  For example, the instrumental case of '''hìni'''<ref>sic; not *xìni</ref> is '''hĭġʷ'''.  In the [[Gold language]] from which Khulls developed, it was possible to form plurals of nouns by making the initial consonant voiced and then labializing it.  In Gold, there was less confusion because labialized consonants such as /lʷ nʷ ŋʷ/ etc still existed.  This process is not really active in Khulls, and the suppletive plurals that have survived have mostly taken on the sense of collective nouns such as '''ġʷan''' "vineyard; a place where grapes grow" from ''tan'' "grape".<ref>This is cognate to [[Poswa]] ''pam'' "wine", with semantic shift from a word describing where grapes are found to what becomes of them afterwards.</ref>  Note that words beginning in /k/ or /ḳ/ will change to /gʷ/, not /ġʷ/, because the voicing took place before the labialization and Khulls has a sound change /ġ/ > /g/.  Thus '''kăḳo''' "young tree" becomes '''gʷăḳo''' "tree nursery".
 
p  ṗ  m  b  t  n  d  l  r  s  š  z  ž  č  ǯ  y  k  ḳ  ŋ  ġ  x  g  h  ʕ 
pʷ ṗʷ bʷ bʷ kʷ ġʷ ġʷ ʕʷ ġʷ hʷ hʷ ʕʷ ʕʷ kʷ ġʷ ʕʷ kʷ ḳʷ ġʷ ġʷ xʷ gʷ hʷ ʕʷ
 
====Dialects====
Some northern outlying dialects of Khulls changed the coarticulated labial-velar consonants /k͡p ḳ͡ṗ gb/ into plain velars /k ḳ ġ/ instead of the normal Khulls result of /p ṗ b/.  For these speakers, the alphabet thus begins with /k/ rather than /p/.  Standard Khulls has borrowed words from these dialects, but these loans do not include the single-consonant morphemes /k ḳ ġ/, which would have the same meanings as the native /p ṗ b/ since the dialects have not been separate long enough to evolve much of a gap in semantics.  Since this shift is the source of almost all /ṗ/, these dialects have no /ṗ/ except for loans from mainstream Khulls and as an "allophone" of ḳ after /m/.  Although almost all words with /ṗ/, and most with /b/, in mainstream Khulls in fact have that one morpheme '''ṗ''' or '''b''' in the word, it is not always seen as a compound, and novel coinages like '''ġī''' "beaver" do exist.
 
====The Sound Change Champions====
*'''šôn''' "bathroom", from ''siʕiʕaʕun''
*'''p''' "teacher", from ''hək''
 
===Sound changes' influence on vocabulary===
Because of the sound changes, and the fact that many words even in the parent language were very short, many homophones exist.  Many words for basic concepts are thus compounds.  Nearly all speakers retain knowledge of the meanings of the components of the compounds, however, so the pieces can still be combined with other morphemes to form other compounds.  For example, in the standard dialect, the commonest word for water in general is '''pē''', a compound of '''pĭ''' "lake, pond" and '''ō''' "water".  Thus a word for "lake water, fresh water" came to mean water in general.  But although '''ō''' is not normally used by itself, it still appears in other compounds such as '''ṗō''' "eye water, tears, crying".  Note that in the Moonshine dialect, the sound change /jo/ > /e/ did not happen, so early Moonshine still preserved the more transparent original form *'''pyō'''. 
 
Because many basic words are compounds, and there are many possible formulations to choose from, some words for basic concepts have more than one standard form.  Although all speakers understand '''pē''', in some dialects, particularly further north, the commonest word for water in general came to be '''pʷū''' instead, a compound of '''pṡ''' "water" and '''ō''' "water"; in other words, it was originally an emphatic form meaning "water water" or "true water". 
 
However, even here there is a difference in meaning between the two components; although both '''pṡ''' and '''ō''' mean "water", '''pṡ''' is primarily used for the sense of water in motion, particularly a running stream or an artificial water slide, whereas '''ō''' was used primarily for still water, particularly captured water in an artificial container such as a cup or bowl.
 
====Collapse of initial consonant clusters====
Although Khulls allows clusters in initial position, many clusters that arose in the parent language were smoothed out into single consonants (often labialized).  The history is often complex; for example, [[Gold language|Gold]] ''səs dŭdi'' "sleep flower" (similar to the opium poppy) becomes Khulls '''kʷŏri''', as the initial syllable of the parent language form changed using the path ''səsd > sədh > sət > sʷt > hʷt > tʷ > kʷ''.  A disappearing schwa nearly always leads to a labialized consonant; the only exceptions are the small number of words in which it instead created a syllabic consonant. Note that in this word, metathesis occurs twice, first with /h/ (which causes the ''-d-'' to become ''-t-''), and later with /hʷ/ (which causes the ''-t-'' to become ''kʷ-'').  These sound changes were separated by several thousand years, but are considered to be part of the same process.  The reason that the word did not immediately change to ''kʷŏri'' in the first stage of the shift is that at the time, the second step of the sound change was being blocked by the intervening schwa.
 
''Kʷŏri''  is cognate to [[Babakiam]] ''sevi'', since Babakiam kept the schwa vowel intact but lost all three internal consonants.  Note that the labiovelar stop ''kʷ'' in this word arose much later than the shift of /u/ > /o/ that occurred after all nonlabialized consonants; most sequences of a labialized consonant followed by a short /o/ are due to sound changes like this.
 
The word for a flower in general is '''lŏri'''; thus, Khulls speakers think of ''kʷŏri'' as an English speaker might think of learning that a "pable" is a kind of table.
 
====Consonant-based gender system====
Khulls inherited the consonant-based gender system of the Gold language.  The genders are:
Khulls inherited the consonant-based gender system of the Gold language.  The genders are:


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   ʕ Neuter (nonliving things)
   ʕ Neuter (nonliving things)


The gender of a compound noun is determined by the rightmost member of the compound that has a non-neuter gender.  Thus, inanimate objects can be promoted to animate simply by being joined in a compound by an animate noun, even if the animate noun is not the head noun. 
====Masculine genders====
Note that unlike its contemporary neighbors [[Andanese]] and [[Babakiam]] (and their descendants [[Pabappa]] and [[Poswa]]), Khulls usually distinguishes between men and boys.  In the other languages, men and boys are grouped into the same gender as if there were no important difference between them, whereas women and girls are always carefully distinguished.  Khulls has also revived the distinct gender for babies, which is unisex, despite having merged it early in history with the /p/ gender for pregnant women and couples.
Note that unlike its contemporary neighbors [[Andanese]] and [[Babakiam]] (and their descendants [[Pabappa]] and [[Poswa]]), Khulls usually distinguishes between men and boys.  In the other languages, men and boys are grouped into the same gender as if there were no important difference between them, whereas women and girls are always carefully distinguished.  Khulls has also revived the distinct gender for babies, which is unisex, despite having merged it early in history with the /p/ gender for pregnant women and couples.


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==Grammar==
==Grammar==
Khulls is approaching becoming a monosyllabic language.  It is the "Pfalz" to the neighboring languages' "Palatinate".  In fact, Khulls even goes further than simple monosyllabicity, since it also has suppletive forms for many noun plurals (e.g. "eye" and "eyes" are unrelated words), and subsyllabic morphemes clamped on to the root syllable such as the single-consonant words listed above.  However, a lot of the resultant consonant clusters reduce to single consonants: ʕʷ + lŏpʷṡ = '''ʕʷŏpʷṡ''' "sun, sunshine"; p + ḳā = '''pā''' "school", meaning that not many new words can be built this way.  Also, Khulls does not go nearly as far as its daughter language [[Moonshine]] in compressing unstressed vowels: the only actual sound change that reduced syllable count in Khulls affected only /u/ (from the schwa /ə/), which had been the rarest vowel anyway.  Thus Khulls stands out from its neighbors, but not from its descendants.   
Khulls is approaching becoming a monosyllabic language.  It is the "Pfalz" to the neighboring languages' "Palatinate".  In fact, Khulls even goes further than simple monosyllabicity, since it also has suppletive forms for many noun plurals (e.g. "eye" and "eyes" are unrelated words), and subsyllabic morphemes clamped on to the root syllable such as the single-consonant words listed above.  However, a lot of the resultant consonant clusters reduce to single consonants: ʕʷ + lŏpṡ = '''ʕʷŏpṡ''' "sun, sunshine"; p + ḳā = '''pā''' "school", meaning that not many new words can be built this way.  Also, Khulls does not go nearly as far as its daughter language [[Moonshine]] in compressing unstressed vowels: the only actual sound change that reduced syllable count in Khulls affected only /u/ (from the schwa /ə/), which had been the rarest vowel anyway.  Thus Khulls stands out from its neighbors, but not from its descendants.   
 
Much of the character of Khulls is due to the presence of the three labial stops that can stand alone as weords, and their use to make new words from others.  This means Khulls has a lot of  hypothetical compounds like '''pŋ̇ḳ''' "salt water clam's eye", '''yṅt''' "teacher of sleep camels", and more that are rarely  used.  The syllabic nasals also appear in many words like this, such as '''hṅ''' "sleeping chair" (ṡ "sleep" + ṅ "chair").


Much of the character of Khulls is due to the presence of the three labial stops that can stand alone as weords, and their use to make new words from others.  This means Khulls has a lot of useless constructions like '''pʷŋ̇ḳ''' "salt water clam's eye" or '''bżġʷ''' "cold spring apple" that are rarely if ever used.  The syllabic nasals also appear in many words like this, such as '''hʷṅ''' "sleeping chair" (ṡ "sleep" + ʕʷṅ "chair").
===Noun compounds===
===Noun compounds===
:''See [[Khulls nouns]].''
:''See [[Khulls nouns]].''
Noun compounsd behave in unusual ways.  '''xî''' "wine" + '''bê''' "in a bottle" gives '''xîbe''' "wine in a bottle", but this is also used to mean "bottle of wine", i.e., the bottle itself.  Khulls' other relatives would all use something cognate to '''xîmī''', which uses two nominatives.  Xîmī is not incorrrect, but it is less commonly used except when emphasis is needed. The reason why '''xîbe''' is preferred over '''xîmī''' is because despite being ambiguous, it fits the preferred stress pattern of Khulls nouns: first syllable accented, second unaccented.
Noun compounds behave in unusual ways.  '''xî''' "wine" + '''bê''' "in a bottle" gives '''xîbe''' "wine in a bottle", but this is also used to mean "bottle of wine", i.e., the bottle itself.  Khulls' other relatives would all use something cognate to '''xîmī''', which uses two nominatives.  Xîmī is not incorrrect, but it is less commonly used except when emphasis is needed. The reason why '''xîbe''' is preferred over '''xîmī''' is because despite being ambiguous, it fits the preferred stress pattern of Khulls nouns: first syllable accented, second unaccented.


===Sentence structure===
===Sentence structure===
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====Permittence of nonsyllabic words====
====Permittence of nonsyllabic words====
Note that, although syllables within words have moderately tight restrictions on consonant clusters, it is common to find extrasyllabic morphemes across word boundaries.  For example, the nonsyllabic word '''hʷ''' "man, human being" is very often the subject of a sentence, and is pronounced very quickly, with no epenthetic vowel, as if it were merely a grammatical particle rather than the subject of the sentence.
Note that, although syllables within words have moderately tight restrictions on consonant clusters, it is common to find extrasyllabic morphemes across word boundaries.  For example, the nonsyllabic word '''hʷ''' "man, human being" is very often the subject of a sentence, and is pronounced very quickly, with no epenthetic vowel, as if it were merely a grammatical particle rather than the subject of the sentence.  


The same is true of the less common noun '''p''' "teacher".  In some positions, ''p'' can even be considered to be silent, although in proper speech it must be pronounced, at the very least, as a lengthening of the first consonant of the next word, which is often the object of the sentence.  Note that this word is not confused with '''ṗ''' "eye" or '''b''' "pine tree" because neither of these words are animate.
===Tones===
 
====Tones====
Khulls is unusual in that it has preserved and greatly strengthened its tone system while also retaining noun and verb inflections that involve change and collision of tones.  The parent language, [[Gold language|Diʕì]] (also called "Gold"), also had a complex noun case system, but its tones had a much milder functional load and could even be analyzed as a two-tone setup where the other two tones are simply sequences of the first two.  Because of a fairly recent sound change that caused final /ḳ/ and /k/ to disappear, changing the tone of the vowel that preceded, many homophones appeared in the language, and many of these were in monosyllabic words, because final consonants were more common in monosyllabic words all along.  For example, '''lì''' "thorn" comes from Gold ''dì'', but '''lì''' "dust" comes from Gold ''diḳ''.  In Gold, the accusatives of these two words were ''diḳ'' and ''diḳiḳ''.  In Khulls, one would expect the accusatives to be respectively ''lì'' (thus merging with the nominative) and ''liḳì'', but because of analogy, both are now '''liḳì'''.  Thus, even though the accusatives of these homophones are also homophones, they are at least distinct from the nominative form and this still useful and intelligible.
Khulls is unusual in that it has preserved and greatly strengthened its tone system while also retaining noun and verb inflections that involve change and collision of tones.  The parent language, [[Gold language|Diʕì]] (also called "Gold"), also had a complex noun case system, but its tones had a much milder functional load and could even be analyzed as a two-tone setup where the other two tones are simply sequences of the first two.  Because of a fairly recent sound change that caused final /ḳ/ and /k/ to disappear, changing the tone of the vowel that preceded, many homophones appeared in the language, and many of these were in monosyllabic words, because final consonants were more common in monosyllabic words all along.  For example, '''lì''' "thorn" comes from Gold ''dì'', but '''lì''' "dust" comes from Gold ''diḳ''.  In Gold, the accusatives of these two words were ''diḳ'' and ''diḳiḳ''.  In Khulls, one would expect the accusatives to be respectively ''lì'' (thus merging with the nominative) and ''liḳì'', but because of analogy, both are now '''liḳì'''.  Thus, even though the accusatives of these homophones are also homophones, they are at least distinct from the nominative form and this still useful and intelligible.


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Note that final -k (the aspirated form) changed a preceding tone to á instead of à, but is not used as a bare noun case, and so is much less common.
Note that final -k (the aspirated form) changed a preceding tone to á instead of à, but is not used as a bare noun case, and so is much less common.
====Question intonation====
A rising tone contour is added to the accented syllable in the last word in any interrogative sentence.


====Nouns====
====Nouns====
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pʷŋ pʷn pm
pʷŋ pʷn pm
Note that, unlike verbs, the stress shifts to the final syllable when inflected for case.


===Verbs===
===Verbs===
:''See [[Khulls verbs]].''
Although Khulls is a relatively compact language, its verbs are generally much longer than its nouns.  This is due to the very large number of inflections that are placed on them, by comparison to the nouns.  Khulls verb inflections are very similar to those of the [[Gold language]] and therefore include many infixes and suffixes.  These are less fusional than the noun inflections, but are still highly fusional when taken together, and therefore learning verb inflection is very difficult.
Although Khulls is a relatively compact language, its verbs are generally much longer than its nouns.  This is due to the very large number of inflections that are placed on them, by comparison to the nouns.  Khulls verb inflections are very similar to those of the [[Gold language]] and therefore include many infixes and suffixes.  These are less fusional than the noun inflections, but are still highly fusional when taken together, and therefore learning verb inflection is very difficult.




====ASking permission====
====ASking permission====
One unusual trait of verbs in Khulls is that "please" is translated by using a second form of the imperative mood, and that this is formed by actually removing a fusional element from the imperative rather than adding one.  That is to say, the original form of the imperative was the polite form, and the less polite form was formed from it.  This seemingly unnatural trait has remained in the language for thousands of years.  However, the difference between the two forms is very small, and the "softer" feeling of the polite form is helped by the fact that the element it lacks is a voiceless ejective stop, '''ṭ''', which is otherwise a very rare sound in Khulls.
One trait of verbs in Khulls is that "please" is translated by using a second form of the imperative mood, and that this is formed by actually removing a fusional element from the imperative rather than adding one.  That is to say, the original form of the imperative was the polite form, and the less polite form was formed from it.  This seemingly unnatural trait has remained in the language for thousands of years.  However, the difference between the two forms is very small, and the "softer" feeling of the polite form is helped by the fact that the element it lacks is a voiceless ejective stop, '''ṭ''', which is otherwise a very rare sound in Khulls.
 
Having a polite imperative shorter than the plain imperative is a common trait of related languages as well.


===Script===
===Script===
''I swear I made a page for this.  I write on this wiki only now.  [[Khulls script]].  I even remember stressing out what to call it since it is the alphabet for the whole world and not just Khulls.''
''I swear I made a page for this.  I write on this wiki only now.  [[Khulls script]].  I even remember stressing out what to call it since it is the alphabet for the whole world and not just Khulls.''
===CUlture===
Khulls languages are spoekn everywhere.  See [[Moonshine]], [[Taryte]], [[Ogili]], [[Amade]], [[Šima]], [[Nama]] for major descendants.  Also [[Gold Empire]], an early fork of the Khulls people which evolved into most of these descendants.


===Descendants===
===Descendants===
''See [[Khul languages]].
''See [[Khul languages]].
==Nptes==
==Nptes==
[[Category:Teppala]]
[[Category:Teppala]]

Latest revision as of 02:51, 1 January 2024

Khulls is a name for a language spoken on planet Teppala by the Crystals, their allies, and many of their enemies.


Scratchpad

Possessives

09:52, 8 May 2022 (PDT)

Leaper's method of forming simple possessives (with one argument, not translatives) is similar to Play's and was inherited from their shared ancestor. The possessive morpheme is inserted before the classifier, and then accent is retracted back to its original position. Thus nòṭiḳa "house" becomes nòqʷiḳa "my house" and nŏrika "your house". Third person is indicated externally, but the base form still inflects to nŏriḳa, different from the second person because of the ejective /ḳ/.

The internal consonant gradations resemble those of the Lava Bed languages, and the presence of this alternation in Leaper may have helped the Leapers better understand the Lava Bed languages. However they are of secondary origin, as Leaper lost its Lava Bed morphology early on. Instead, they are related to Play's verbal embedding.

Polite forms of nouns and verbs

See Play_language#Comparison_with_Leaper_and_Gold. Essentially, Leaper will be able to turn any noun into a polite version by adding an infix that means "___ which you have given me", "___ which you have shown me", etc. It may or may not be possible to also use other person combinations in Leaper. The system is fully alive in Play but may have decayed in Leaper down to just the politeness infixes.

The deep structure of the word is

NOUN[OBLIQUE] + /ʕ/ + PRIVATE VERB + /k/ + CLASSIFIERS.

The private verb always has the pharyngealized tone so long as the SAP's are 2>1. This corresponds to the Play sequences /aa ii upu/. Note also that /ky/ > /s/, respecting a sound change from 3,000 years earlier. Strictly speaking, what is really happening is that /sg sy/ > /k s/, partly through analogy and partly through true sound change.

Thus for example tăkaye "leash" turns into takaʕʷâsa "leash you showed me", because the stress shifts to the infix, and the classifier suffix -ye is replaced by -sa.

It is possible that the infix could come through with the short mid tone ă instead of the pharyngealized tone â, since in either case analogy has taken place. But assuming a primordial high tone (that later became pharyngealized) is the only way to get /k/ where there once was /h/.

An absolute minimal form of the infix could be -ʕâk- ~ -âk- (see the Play page for derivation). This requires /w/ > /ʕ/ through analogy from the words in which it followed a labial consonant; or else, a dummy verb could be created that was later assumed to have been synonymous with the inherited /wa/ root. The /k/ must stay. The medial vowel, however, could perhaps also appear as /i/ and one of /o/ or /u/, meaning that there will be three variant forms of the politeness infix depending on situation; for example /ʕàk/ probably only covers visible objects since it means "that you show me". This form also cannot distinguish person since the forms for 2>1 and 1>2 would both be /-âk-/.

Because /ʕ/ is a "transparent" consonant, the vowel of the root would form a unit with the following vowel. Thus, the number of syllables would be mostly the same as in the oblique. So săhoga "fish" would just be sahʷâka, and so on.

Visibility

It is possible that the most minimal form of the infix evolves into no more than a polite way to mark an object as visible. In Moonshine, this would be linked to gender-based speech registers, with men using the polite forms when addressing women, and the plain forms being used otherwise except in the case of emphasis.

Emphatic possessives

The forms above could also be used to derive standalone possessives, since if the infix form is used, the 1st and 2nd person will melt together as -V̀k- due to the /h/ > /k/ rule. A possible escape, thoug, it to assume differnt priovate verbs for the differenet person, even though this would break the "living" Play system where they were in fact personless and part of the lexicon rather than grammatically bound morphemes.

These would be kʷas and xas for 1st and 2nd person genitive respectively, and could function as pseudo-pronouns, though it's not clear that there would be a nominative case to go with them, and instead one might find words like "my body", "my self", etc making the genitives the basic forms. The -s is not the genitive /s/ but may be mistaken for it as knowledge of the original construction fades. Nonetheless, if the /-s/ is reinterpreted as genitive, the Leaper language would lose an important function that languages like Poswa still retained 4,000 years later on.

Here, the labialization was lost from the 2nd person form to make it more distinct; this was through analogy, and since there was no /kʷ/ > /k/ path to follow, the analogy could only have proceeded in this way. Remember that the labialization strongly colors the following vowel.

Play-Leaper relations

04:34, 26 January 2022 (PST)

Remember that AlphaLeap governed the Play speakers' territory for more than a thousand years, at a time when both languages were confined to single small nations, and that they therefeore had a close relationship, even if asymmetrical. Leaper may have been greatly influenced by Play while Play would have taken very little influence from Leaper. Only later did both languages blossom throughout the world as wide-ranging language families.

Culture and sociolinguistics

08:29, 24 January 2022 (PST)

It is possible that the Matrixes taught themselves to speak Leaper and not Dreamlandic. Their association with Dreamlandic would come from the fact that not all Matrixes were able to learn Leaper, "let alone Play", and therefore they were stuck with Dreamlandic, the easiest language in the region, even though it was not the native language of most Matrixes. Note, though, that many of the Matrixes were in fact of Play ancestry originally, so this does not make perfect sense.

Leaper was typically considered a difficult language to learn, both because of its phonology and its grammar. Play's phonology was much simpler, but its grammar was even more complex than Leaper's. Play in many ways seemed to be "just simple enough to be complicated" whereas Leaper was less extreme than Play but more consistent in its complexity.

Diachronics

Alternate names: Khulls

(Dummy edit link)

This language was originally spoken in AlphaLeap.

  1. The velar fricatives h hʷ came to be spelled x xʷ.
    As /tanči/ "wine" demonstrates, a preceding coda /n/ did *not* assimilate to the /x/. This also implies nx shifted to nt in Leaper but not in Play; it is possible that the shift was pre-Gold, but was then undone in Play due to its close attention to morphology, but it would make more sense to have the shift appear after the separation.
  2. tʷ dʷ nʷ shifted to tl dl nl.
  3. When not occurring after a labialized consonant, the vowels ŭ ù ū shifted to ɜ̆ ɜ̀ ɜ̄. (This is spelled differently from schwa to ease confusion.) This was a low back vowel comparable to IPA [ɤ].
  4. The sequences ə əi əu (all syllables with inherited /ə/ were toneless) shifted to ʉ ɜi ɜu.
  5. In a closed syllable, the new ʉ vowel disappeared and created a syllabic consonant. In an open syllable, ʉ changed to ʷ, thus labializing the preceding consonant and then disappearing. Where /ʉ/ collapsed, stress shifted syllables to the nearest adjacent one. This tone was mid-tone (ă), which was sometimes called the low tone since it behaved as such when joined to any other morpheme that carried stress. Thus all morphemes that had once contained a schwa came to be pronounced entirely with low tones.
    Note that any syllabic ṅ formed here always assimilated to a following consonant because they arose from a non-syllabic nasal, which had already been assimilated to a following consonant. By contrast, the primordial syllabic nasals /ṁ ṅ ŋ̇/ still did not assimilate, and thus words like /mṅpà/ "to ask" still existed.
  6. Sequences like aʕa became pharyngealized vowels; these could still have tones, but later all pharyngealized tones merged with each other except for sandhi effects. Pharyngealized vowels are spelled â ; though there is only one pharyngealized surface tone, pharyngealized vowels exhibited different sandhi effects depending on their origin, and this is not reflected in the Romanization. Note that /iʕV/ did not create pharyngealization, but /uʕV əʕV/ did, and both caused labialization.
  7. The cluster sg shifted to x. This is actually a tone shift, since it had been [x] all along but was previously abound to a high tone.
  8. The clusters pʷn kʷn shifted to pʷt kʷt.
    Note that this shift, needed to process the placename Gatupəna, is unsatisfactory, and would not help explain what would happen to the ejective cluster /ḳʷn/. Syllabic nasals are a possible answer, since the only clusters considered unwieldy are stop+nasal (so /pʷl/ etc were fine). This would produce the forbidden clusters /pṁ tṅ kŋ̇/ and these would probably lose the stop and become high tones.
  9. After a high tone, the voiced stop d shifted to ṭ. This includes a shift of dl to ṭl after a high tone as well.
  10. The clusters mh nh ŋh dh became mp nt ŋk t, except that nč replaces /nt/ before any /i/. These clusters were often morphologically /s/ + a voiced consonant, but the [h] pronunciation is actually the more archaic one.
  11. After the vowel [u] (any tone, any length), k ḳ in a syllable coda became coarticulated labial-velar stops kp ḳṗ . This change also took place after the /ʷ/ that had replaced earlier schwa, since this was behaving as an allophone of /u/. Likewise, it took place after /au/, but not /ɜ̄/, even though both ended up as /ō/ later on.
  12. After a syllabic nasal, the final stops k ḳ (which was the only ones that did occur) changed to match the position of the nasal. However, these were written with the letters for "kp ḳṗ".
  13. The voiced coronal stops d dʲ dʷ became r ž gʷ. The sequence rl (always from Gold /dʷ/) became ll, which in word-initial position then changed to a simple l.
  14. In word-initial position, r shifted to l.
  15. Labialized coronals became velar.
  16. Labialization disappeared before any syllabic consonant.
    This shift makes it possible to interpret the syllabic consonants as sequences of short low-tone /u/ + C. Previously, this would have failed because there was a contrast between /ʷC/ and /ʷuC/.
  17. The sequences mmṡ ŋŋṡ shifted to mpṡ ŋkṡ.
  18. The sequences gp gṗ shifted to kp ḳṗ.
  19. In unstressed position after a vowel, the syllabic consonants ṁ ṅ ŋ̇ ḷ ṡ shifted to plain consonants m n ŋ l s. Thus unstressed closed syllables were created.
  20. Final ḳ raised the preceding vowel to a high tone à (á if it was long) and then disappeared, though it left an allophonic glottal stop in some positions. Then, final k disappeared and changed the preceding vowel to the long high tone á. The surface tone change did not apply to pharyngealized vowels, but the sandhi effects did. Thus there were two pharyngealized tones .... both pronounced the same, but with different effects on surrounding unstressed syllables.
  21. The labialized fricative šʷ became ħʷ . The ħ is a spelling convention to distinguish it from /x/. The cluster gʷš (which had always been [gʷšʷ] because of syllable metrics) most likely became ħʷ as well, not /xʷ/. The /sg/ > /x/ shift above is different from this because /sg/ had never been phonetically realized as such.
    NOTE ON POLITICS: The Proto-Moonshine language breaks off here. (Year 3958) The tropical survivor language must have also broken off shortly afterward; what remains is for the language of the ruling class of Baeba Swamp.

Post-Moonshine changes

All of these changes take place in just 800 years, despite the list being nearly as long as that for the preceding 2,000 years.

  1. The diphthongs ai au shifted to ē ō unconditionally. Then aiʕ auʕ became ê ô. Note that the sequence /uʕ/ was distinct from a coda /ʕʷ/.
  2. The diphthongs ɜi ɜu shifted to ĕ ū unconditionally. If pharyngealized forms existed, they followed the rule above.
  3. The sequences ya yɜ (on all tones) shifted to ye of the same tone. Later, all /ye/ became /e/, but this was not phonemic because of intervening consonant changes. Note that this does NOT include /yau yɜu/, which had escaped the change by shifting to /yō yū/. This /ō/ is distinct from the one that forms below.
  4. The mid vowels ɜ̆ ɜ̀ ɜ̄ shifted to ŏ ò ō unconditionally. Likewise, any remaining unstressed ɜ became o.
  5. The velar-palatal sequences ky ḳy ŋy hy xy gy shifted to č č n̆ š š ž.
  6. Nasal consonants followed by /y/ hardened to prenasals: my n̆y became mby n̆ǯy . (This includes the reflexes of /ny/ and /ŋy/.) These later became stops.
  7. After a high tone, the fricatives x xʷ ħ ħʷ shifted to k kʷ q qʷ.
  8. sl>q, which is an allophone of /h/. This shift is essentially a restating of a consequence of the above, since there never was an /sl/, but only a coarticulated /lh/ cluster. Likewise, posttonic ħ ħʷ (spelling here used for emphasis) shifted to q qʷ.
  9. The voiceless bilabial stops p pʷ shifted to h hʷ except after a high tone. The plain /p/ had a brief intermediate of /ɸ/ but this stage lasted mere years before shifting to /h/. The labialized stop shifted directly. This shift excludes /kp/ and any other context in which the stops were part of a cluster; note that since the high tone always ended in a glottal stop, this environment can be considered to be a cluster as well.
    NOTE THAT THE SPELLING OF /h/ as ħ is for clarity only, because in many names, /x/ is spelled with the plain "h".
  10. The sequences ly hy (the latter only from /py/) shifted to λ š.
  11. The clusters ml nl changed to mbl ndl, thus restoring voiced stops to a marginal phonemic position.
  12. The labialized consonants mʷ ŋʷ changed to mbʷ ŋġʷ .
  13. The remaining clusters tl ṭl shifted to `l . This is a plain /l/ but makes the preceding vowel high-toned.
  14. The sound /l/ disappeared after any stop, even over a morpheme boundary.
  15. The voiced prenasals mbʷ mb nd nǯ ŋġʷ shifted to plain voiced stops bʷ b d ǯ ġʷ. There may have been an extremely rare plain voiced velar stop, arising only from the sequence /ŋ̇l/, which would have changed to /ŋġl/, then to /ŋġ/, and finally to /ġ/. Note that the original velar nasal must be syllabic for it to occur before another consonant.
  16. The coarticulated stops kp ḳṗ shifted to p ṗ. (If there ever was a voiced /ġb/, it too would shift.)
  17. The voiced velar fricative g came to be pronounced as a voiced stop ġ asfter a high tone. This was allophonic, and occurred at least a thousand years after the shift of /d/ > /ṭ/. Thus the two are not connected and this newer shift is not represented in the script.
  18. Probably the sequences ăʕʷ ĕʕʷ ĭʕʷ ŏʕʷ ŭʕʷ shifted to ô ô û ô û, thus finally eliminating diphthongs from the language, even those that had arisen from VCV sequences. But it is possible (remember the ʕʕ>ʔ rule) that pharyngealization was not pronounced in this position even in a closed syllable (it had been eliminated for sure in an open syllable). It is also possible that the diphthongs simply remained and that /ʕʷ/ was seen as a consonant.

Note that the only /y/ is before /i/ and unlabialized /u/, the latter of which was rare. The only other clusters in the language had initial elements unmarked for place of articulation, possibly aside from a few marginal holdovers across morpheme boundaries involving inherited syllabic nasals.

Thus the final consonant inventory was 

Rounded bilabials:       pʷ  ṗʷ  bʷ      hʷ          w
Spread bilabials:        p   ṗ   b   m   
Alveolars:               t   ṭ   d   n   s   r   l
Postalveolars:           č       ǯ       š   ž  (λ)  y
Velars:                  k   ḳ       ŋ   x   g
Labiovelars:             kʷ  ḳʷ  ġʷ      xʷ  gʷ
Postvelars:              q               h       ʕ
Labialized postvelars:   qʷ

And the vowels /a e i o u/ on six tones: à ă ā á â a͆, where the last two differ in sandhi effects only.

All five vowels are unrounded except when following a labialized consonant. Because /u/ almost always follows a labialized consonant, its unrounded form is very rare unless analyzed as /Ø/. This can be spelled /ʉ/.

A rare palatal lateral λ (IPA /ʎ/) can be added, which occurs only in environments where /y/ can also occur. Unlike the other five palatal consonants /č ǯ š ž y/, however, it is entirely of secondary origin, arising entirely from the sequence /ly/, and it cannot contrast with the sequence /ly/, even over a morpheme boundary.

The w is always phrayngealized as the onset of a stressed syllable.

The sounds q̇ q̇ʷ z are not part of Leaper's phonology, but have distinct letters in the script because they occur in loans from Qaš and different speakers replace them with different Leaper phonemes. Specifically, q̇ q̇ʷ can be replaced either with /ḳ ḳʷ/ or with /q qʷ/, and some speakers even pronounce the original phonemes after all; likewise z can be replaced either with /ž/ or with /s/, and some speakers pronounce the /z/ as in Qaš as well.

Late dialectal changes

One late change might be the deletions of all word-initial g, thus creating many vowel-initial words. Then, old word-initial e- deletes, but the new e- is unaffected. This change is difficult to explain, even assuming the two /e/'s had different sounds (because the old one was always preceded by /j/ and the new one never was).

Phonology

See Khulls phonology for older notes on phonology.

See above for inventory.

Consonant-based gender system

See Khulls nouns#Gender.

Khulls inherited the consonant-based gender system of the Gold language. The genders are: 

Conso	Applies to
-----	----
 p	Pregnant women; couples
 ʕʷ	Babies
 t	Adult men and sometimes boys
 r	Boys
 l	Young children 
 n	Girls and young women
 m	Adult women
 s	Epicene (groups of humans of all genders and ages)
 ʕ	Neuter (nonliving things)

The gender of a compound noun is determined by the rightmost member of the compound that has a non-neuter gender. Thus, inanimate objects can be promoted to animate simply by being joined in a compound by an animate noun, even if the animate noun is not the head noun.


Masculine genders

Note that unlike its contemporary neighbors Andanese and Babakiam (and their descendants Pabappa and Poswa), Khulls usually distinguishes between men and boys. In the other languages, men and boys are grouped into the same gender as if there were no important difference between them, whereas women and girls are always carefully distinguished. Khulls has also revived the distinct gender for babies, which is unisex, despite having merged it early in history with the /p/ gender for pregnant women and couples.

Additionally, it is not common in Khulls to casually refer to an adult male with one of the pronouns for young boys, even in a friendly manner. Instead, it is more common to hear boys referred to as men, particularly in terms of praise. Khulls speakers historically believed that this showed that their culture appreciated men's natural masculine powers whereas the peoples around them seemed to be ashamed of their male population and wished to keep them forever as boys.

Grammar

Khulls is approaching becoming a monosyllabic language. It is the "Pfalz" to the neighboring languages' "Palatinate". In fact, Khulls even goes further than simple monosyllabicity, since it also has suppletive forms for many noun plurals (e.g. "eye" and "eyes" are unrelated words), and subsyllabic morphemes clamped on to the root syllable such as the single-consonant words listed above. However, a lot of the resultant consonant clusters reduce to single consonants: ʕʷ + lŏpṡ = ʕʷŏpṡ "sun, sunshine"; p + ḳā = pā "school", meaning that not many new words can be built this way. Also, Khulls does not go nearly as far as its daughter language Moonshine in compressing unstressed vowels: the only actual sound change that reduced syllable count in Khulls affected only /u/ (from the schwa /ə/), which had been the rarest vowel anyway. Thus Khulls stands out from its neighbors, but not from its descendants.

Much of the character of Khulls is due to the presence of the three labial stops that can stand alone as weords, and their use to make new words from others. This means Khulls has a lot of hypothetical compounds like pŋ̇ḳ "salt water clam's eye", yṅt "teacher of sleep camels", and more that are rarely used. The syllabic nasals also appear in many words like this, such as hṅ "sleeping chair" (ṡ "sleep" + ṅ "chair").

Noun compounds

See Khulls nouns.

Noun compounds behave in unusual ways. xî "wine" + bê "in a bottle" gives xîbe "wine in a bottle", but this is also used to mean "bottle of wine", i.e., the bottle itself. Khulls' other relatives would all use something cognate to xîmī, which uses two nominatives. Xîmī is not incorrrect, but it is less commonly used except when emphasis is needed. The reason why xîbe is preferred over xîmī is because despite being ambiguous, it fits the preferred stress pattern of Khulls nouns: first syllable accented, second unaccented.

Sentence structure

Like its neighbors, Khulls is predominantly an SOV language.

Permittence of nonsyllabic words

Note that, although syllables within words have moderately tight restrictions on consonant clusters, it is common to find extrasyllabic morphemes across word boundaries. For example, the nonsyllabic word hʷ "man, human being" is very often the subject of a sentence, and is pronounced very quickly, with no epenthetic vowel, as if it were merely a grammatical particle rather than the subject of the sentence.

Tones

Khulls is unusual in that it has preserved and greatly strengthened its tone system while also retaining noun and verb inflections that involve change and collision of tones. The parent language, Diʕì (also called "Gold"), also had a complex noun case system, but its tones had a much milder functional load and could even be analyzed as a two-tone setup where the other two tones are simply sequences of the first two. Because of a fairly recent sound change that caused final /ḳ/ and /k/ to disappear, changing the tone of the vowel that preceded, many homophones appeared in the language, and many of these were in monosyllabic words, because final consonants were more common in monosyllabic words all along. For example, lì "thorn" comes from Gold dì, but lì "dust" comes from Gold diḳ. In Gold, the accusatives of these two words were diḳ and diḳiḳ. In Khulls, one would expect the accusatives to be respectively lì (thus merging with the nominative) and liḳì, but because of analogy, both are now liḳì. Thus, even though the accusatives of these homophones are also homophones, they are at least distinct from the nominative form and this still useful and intelligible.

From the accusative, one could believe that Khulls resolves the aḳ --> à problem by always assuming a following ḳ, but this is not so. The locative case, for example, simply split into two cases depending on whether the ḳ was assumed previously present or not. This is why one can say mô "in the lake" instead of *moḳô. However, apart from compounds and some very common words such as mô, the longer locative form is indeed preferred, because the short form conflicts with the locatives of three other tones (all except the á tone).

Note that final -k (the aspirated form) changed a preceding tone to á instead of à, but is not used as a bare noun case, and so is much less common.

Question intonation

A rising tone contour is added to the accented syllable in the last word in any interrogative sentence.

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; pəḳ > pəḳṗ > pəṗ > p)
  • 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)

A fwe other forms exist ,like papʷṅ (īn / î )


pʷŋ pʷn pm

Note that, unlike verbs, the stress shifts to the final syllable when inflected for case.


Verbs

See Khulls verbs.

Although Khulls is a relatively compact language, its verbs are generally much longer than its nouns. This is due to the very large number of inflections that are placed on them, by comparison to the nouns. Khulls verb inflections are very similar to those of the Gold language and therefore include many infixes and suffixes. These are less fusional than the noun inflections, but are still highly fusional when taken together, and therefore learning verb inflection is very difficult.


ASking permission

One trait of verbs in Khulls is that "please" is translated by using a second form of the imperative mood, and that this is formed by actually removing a fusional element from the imperative rather than adding one. That is to say, the original form of the imperative was the polite form, and the less polite form was formed from it. This seemingly unnatural trait has remained in the language for thousands of years. However, the difference between the two forms is very small, and the "softer" feeling of the polite form is helped by the fact that the element it lacks is a voiceless ejective stop, ṭ, which is otherwise a very rare sound in Khulls.

Having a polite imperative shorter than the plain imperative is a common trait of related languages as well.

Script

I swear I made a page for this. I write on this wiki only now. Khulls script. I even remember stressing out what to call it since it is the alphabet for the whole world and not just Khulls.

Descendants

See Khul languages.

Nptes

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