Ghost language

This article is about the Lamuan languages descended from Khulls and spoken on the planet Teppala. There exists another conlang called Lamu which is not part of this world.

Lámū is a name for the southern branch of the Khulls family, including the languages which are spoken inside Pabap territory. Lamuans are not immigrants; they are an indigenous minority of Khulls speakers who never moved away from their homelands even as they were outgrown by the Pabaps.

Shared features are few because of the early date of divergence. A properly designed family tree of Khulls and its descendants would show the Lamuan languages as several different families, each as diverse from the others as whole families are from other families in the West. Nevertheless all Lamuan languages share:

• The early unrounding of all vowels, so that /a e i o u/ turned into /a e i ɤ ɨ/, which can be spelled as {a e i ə y} or {a e i ø y}. All languages later grew new rounded vowels, generally arising in part from vowels next to labialized consonants.

• Loss of distinctive labialization except before a vowel.

• The devoicing of all voiced stops, unconditionally.

• Change to a vertical vowel inventory consisting of /a ə ɨ/.

• The change of all non-aspirated stops into ejectives (in stressed syllables) and later often into geminates, thus eliminating the "three series" system of the parent language with its latent instabiliity due to the rarity of the voiced and voiceless non-aspirate series.
• The simplification of the tone system, such that although proto-Lamu did still have three tones, the distinctions were weak and the whole system was quick to decay into a length/stress distinction.

• With regards to labialized consonants, Lamuan languages fall into the "K" group, meaning that they neither palatalized the plain velars (as did "C" languages such as Moonshine) nor changed the labiovelars into labials (as did "P" languages such as Ogili). Some languages did lose distinctive labialization, but did so at a late stage of development and generally in a way that did not add any new phonemes to the language. e.g. kʷ pʷ > k p, not p p.

Note, the above may be repurposed for a different language family. It could be said that I'm not abandoning the idea so much as I am changing the name "Lamu" to refer to a new language family with completely different sound changes.