Leaper language

Alternate names: Khulls

This language was originally spoken in AlphaLeap. It is the scriptural language of the Ridiam religion, although many scriptures were originally written in earlier forms of the language, going back to a stage where it was united with other neighboring languages as the Gold language.

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/.

2. tʷ dʷ nʷ shifted to tl dl nl.
3. When not occurring after a labialized consonant, the vowel u, in all tones and lengths, changed to o of the same tone and length.
4. The diphthongs əi ai changed to ĕ ē . əu au became ū ō .
5. The plain schwa (which was always low tone) disappeared to Ø and labialized any consonant that preceded it. This was considered an allophone of /u/. Following consonants became syllabic. Where /ə/ 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/ did.
7. The cluster sg shifted to x.
8. After a high tone, the voiced stop d shifted to ṭ.
9. 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.
10. 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 /Ø/ that had replaced earlier schwa, since this was behaving as an allophone of /u/. The result of this was that words could end in unusual clusters; for example, a word could end in the cluster /-tp/, but no word could end in /-t/. The /p/ here still behaved as if it were a syllabic consonant.
11. 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 "p ṗ".
12. The voiced coronal stops d dʲ dʷ became r ž gʷ.
13. In word-initial position, r shifted to l except when facing another /l/ across a vowel.

    This rule might be void .... I only created it to avoid having to call the name of the continent "Lilòla" ... but it would be more odd for Leaper to have /r/ only before /l/ than to have words with three /l/'s.

14. Labialized coronals became velar.
15. 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/.

16. The sequences mmṡ ŋŋṡ shifted to mpṡ ŋkṡ.
17. The sequences gp gṗ shifted to kp ḳṗ.
18. 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.
19. 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.
20. The labialized fricative šʷ became ħʷ . The ħ is a spelling convention to distinguish it from /x./.

    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.

21. ya yo (on all tones) shifted to ye.
22. The velar-palatal sequences ky ḳy ŋy hy xy gy shifted to č č ny š š ž.
23. Nasal consonants followed by /y/ hardened to voiced stops: my ñy became by ǯy . (This includes the reflexes of /ny/ and /ŋy/.)
24. The palatal glide /y/ was deleted when not before a high vowel (it was only /e i u/ by now anyway).
25. sl>q, which is an allophone of /h/. This probably also shifts /lh/.
26. 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".

27. The sequence hy (from /py/) shifted to š again.
28. The clusters ml nl ŋl nd changed to bl dl ġl d, thus restoring voiced stops to a marginal phonemic position. WHAT ABOUT PALATALS?
29. The labialized consonants mʷ ŋʷ changed to bʷ ġʷ .
30. The sound /l/ disappeared after a voiced stop: the clusters bl dl ġl changed to b d ġ .

    The velar is here for symmetry, but it's not clear that the required earlier sequence /ŋl/ would ever have occurred. /ml/ might not have existed either, but /b/ also comes from other sources.

31. Lastly, /l/ also disappeared after any other stop, even over a morpheme boundary.
32. The coarticulated stops kp ḳṗ shifted to p ṗ. (If there ever was a voiced /ġb/, it too would shift.)

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  (ł)  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 ł (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.

During the stage of classical Gold and much of early Leaper, there was a grammatical rule limiting closed syllables to only one per word. When two CVC morphemes were joined to form a compound, the first reverted to a grammatically prescribed CVCV form. As the language evolved, these CVCV forms became CV(C) as well, but the forms they took did not closely resemble the free forms, and the clusters involved were often further simplified.

Also, in most cases, a CVC morpheme would shift to CVCV even if the second part of the compound did not also have a CVC syllable.

There are many sound changes omitted from this list because when I typed it up I figured I would just handle things like /xʷt/ > /kʷ/ on a case-by-case basis. Another example is tanči "wine", which results from my including nxi under the helm of nhi, even though /h/ and /x/ behave differently in most environments.

Also not listed are the surface rules about "consonant fights", where two consonants in a cluster reduce to one. There are three basic rules:

1. A front consonant always dominates a back consonant.
2. A labialized consonant always dominates a plain consonant.
3. An aspirated consonant always dominates a non-aspirated consonant, and an ejective consonant dominates a voiced consonant.

Thus, these rules tend to pull consonants towards the rounded bilabial aspirated voiceless stop pʷ; this explains why /p/ and /pʷ/ are fairly common sounds despite the shift to /h hʷ/. There are other minor rules, however, explaining why, for example, /ŋṅ/ > /ŋ̇/ and why /kʷ/ sometimes appears where /pʷ/ might be expected.

Properly, this list should resemble the one at Tarise in which there are dozens of highly conditional shifts, but I have not done that because I work with this language much more than with Tarise and have so far been able to keep all the highly specific shifts in my head.

The syllable structure is CVC so long as syllabic consonants are treated as vowels and the extrsyllabic /p ṗ b/ are grouped with the syllabic consonants as well. Alternatively, both of these could be padded with a silent vowel [ʉ], the nonlabialized allophone of /u/, which does not otherwise occur in these environments. However, the [ʉ] theory cannot easily explain words such as pḷs "language", where a syllabic consonant is followed by another consonant in the coda; either this word would have to be explained as /pʉlʉs/ or one would have to explain that /ʉ/ is the only vowel that can ever be followed by more than one consonant, and only when it appears in its nonlabialized allophone.

Even word-internal clusters have been largely eliminated, though medial nasal+stop clusters were never simplified. A long word will commonly be such as CVCVCVC, with a consonantal coda only at the end of the word, and only when the final syllable is the stressed syllable. This goes back to Gold, when only one syllable of a word could be closed, no matter the length of the word, and in which closed syllables mostly resulted from grammatical inflections at the end of a word. Leaper now permits words to have more than one closed syllable, but the Gold pattern remains dominant.

Effects on grammar

Because syllabic consonants after vowels in unstressed syllables had shifted to plain consonants, the rule prohibiting more than one closed syllable per word became void, and new transparent compounds were created alongside the older opaque ones. Sometimes these newly coined words had sound changes as well, but they were much simpler and typically resolvable into their constituents. Thus, for example, the newly coined sodos "blanket trap" (from son + los with /nl/ > /d/) drove out the older ħʷolos. The syllable /ħʷo/ corresponded to many possible CVC forms, but since all /d/ in Leaper arose from earlier /nl/, there was no other possible interpretation of the new word.

This also led to an expansion in word-internal coda /s/. In Gold, the clusters /sp st sk sḳ/ were unetymological, since in the early stage of the Gold language they had been pronounced [hp ht hk hḳ] and these clusters shifted to [p t k k] before the remaining coda [h] shifted to /s/. But words appeared even in Gold that had the /s-/ clusters because speakers generalized them from phrases in which the sequence occurred over a word boundary. By the time of the classical Leaper era, almost all new coinages of this type retained the /s/.