Gold language

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

Phonology

The phonology was similar to its parent language, Tapilula, but unlike Tapilula, the Gold language has evolved closed syllables. Nevertheless, many syllables are CV and it is rare to have more than one closed syllable in a word.

The sound of the language is fairly guttural, like that of Tapilula. It would never be mistaken for any relative of the Babakiam branch when spoken aloud, nor would it be mistaken for Thaoa, which lost its tones early on.

Consonants

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

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

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

The only voiced stop that occurs with a frequency on par with the voiceless stops is /d/. The stops /b ġ/ and the voiced affricate /ǯ/ are rare, occurring only in positions where a recent sound change caused the voicing of their respective voiceless counterparts.

Final consonants

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

Phonemicity of /w/ and clusters

The phoneme /w/ can be analyzed as /ʕw/, in line with Khulls where [ʕʷ] and [w] are merely allophones of each other, and with similar situations in the early histories of the branches to the east and west of Khulls. If this is done, /w/ becomes a glide which can only occur after another consonant, and therefore can be considered a modification of that consonant. This creates symmetry between the plain /w/ and the very common sequence /hw/, whereas all of the other consonants take a following /w/ much more rarely.,

Vowels

/a i u ə/

Tones

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

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

Grammar

Nouns

Nouns were often preceded with classifier prefixes, a trait that existed in Andanese at the same time, but soon died out in the Gold side of the family.

Noun classifiers

Many noun morphemes were very short, often consisting of just a single CV syllable. Many of the shortest roots were highly polysemic. However, Gold still retained the classifier prefixes of its parent language, a trait it shared with its close relative Andanese but which died out fairly early on in all of the descendants of the Gold language. Thus, the Gold language had prefixes, whereas its descendant languages such as Poswa, Khulls, and Pabappa formed their words with suffixes and infixes.

Noun classifiers could not carry stress. Thus, very few nouns were stressed on their first syllable: there was a zero-morpheme classifier which was used for certain very commonly used nouns, but even these nouns were not always stressed on their first syllable.

Because of the classifier prefixes, nouns were often three or more syllables long, although monosyllabic roots were not uncommon either because the many possible readings of a single-syllable noun root could be easily resolved by those same classifier prefixes.

Different noun classifiers could attach to the same roots. For example, katăda meant "tree", and kadăči meant "pear tree". By contrast, by changing the prefix, one can say gităda "fruit" and gidăči "pear". Similarly, kaŋŭta meant "tree trunk" and liŋŭta meant "bone".

Descendants

All of the descendants of the Gold language lost the noun prefixes early on. They hung on, irregularly, in a few words, often in cases where the speakers did not know they were originally noun classifiers. Because of the deletion of the classifiers, all five main branches of the family faced severe problems with homophony early on, and many word roots simply disappeared from the language. Khulls preserved the greatest number of these, as it was the only branch to retain tones, and preserved more distinctions among the consonants than the other branches.

Verbs

Private verbs

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

Orthography

The orthography of the language was an alphabet derived from the Tapilula syllabary. The letterforms were of the angular, less-ornate western branch, but the letter order was derived from the eastern (Andanese) branch.

Vowels and consonants were considered to belong to two different alphabets and either of the two could be placed first. Gradually, however, the tradition of placing the consonants first came into practice.

The letter order for consonants was:

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

And for vowels:

a i u ə

Descendants

ORdered roughky from west to east:

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