Future Poswa

Future Poswa is a hypothetical projection of the Poswa language about 4000 years into the future, after its speakers had been overwhelmed by immigration from the Moonshine Empire. (I have also worked out sound changes for Future Moonshine, but Moonshine does not have enough vocabulary or grammar worked out yet for me to make any meaningful sentences in it.)

I will most likely never create this language, and if I do, I would probably focus on just one daughter language even though there would most likely be at least a small group of them.

Sound changes

Future Poswa will change very slowly, as the conservatism that characterized Poswa for its entire history as an independent language remains firm even with the pressure of the Moonshine-speaking overclass. On the other hand, the Poswobs will adopt many words from Moonshine.

Labialized consonants are retained, but there is no longer a perfectly symmetrical setup with one labialized consonant for each plain consonant. Instead, all^? labialized consonants in most positions become rounded bilabials, such that, for example, Poswa swi "I slept" becomes Future Poswa fʷi. In word-final position, and in perhaps some other positions, the consonants are delabialized instead of becoming rounded bilabials. Thus Poswa /tʷatʷ/ "lots of water" becomes Future Poswa pʷat.

Clusters are reduced somewhat, by changing them into single consonants in a process similar to what Moonshine had done thousands of years earlier. For example, pr > pf > ṗ > f. (The ṗ is a labiodental stop.)

Transitory new vowels are created from the diphthongs /ae/, /ia/, /ie/, /io/, and /iu/. These are spelled ä ä ë ö ü; that is, Poswa's /ae/ and /ia/ diphthongs merge. /ë/ probably merges with /e/ shortly after the shift. Vowel harmony arises at least temporarily, e.g. classical Poswa potia "to lick candy" becomes Future Poswa pötä. However, vowel harmony may break down and leave behind words like pötä as its only reminders.

NOTE: Another possibility, perhaps more likely, is to shift /ia ie i io iu/ to /ʲa ʲe ʲi ʲo ʲu/ and then shift /y/ to /i/. On the other hand, this shift is so minor that it would not even need to be represented in the orthography, and it would not create any vowel harmony. It could thus be said that there were no vowel shifts at all in Future Poswa, or at least no unconditional ones.

The voiced stop /ġ/ changes to /d/, probably taking /dž/ with it.

Probably /ž/ > /z/; may or may not be accompanied by /š/ > /s/.

It is possible that all "solid" consonants further back than alveolar are shifted to alveolar; that is, /š ž tš dž k ġ/ will all shift to something like /s z t d t d/, or even /s d t d t d/, and palatalization will be allophonic before /ia ie i io iu/ if it occurs at all. /r/ will survive, but its pronunciation will become much like /w/. Labialized consonants like /kʷ ġʷ/ might survive as true velars, but might also become so statistically rare that they disappear from the language without any single diachronic shift that removes them.

There are no vowel deletions at all, and probably no consonant deletions either. Thus every word retains the same superficial syllabic structure as it had had in classical Poswa, and the stark changes in surface forms are due to massive reorganization of the grammar.

If there are consonant deletions, it may be /f v/ > /h Ø/, but this would be conditional.

Long vowels and new diphthongs appear from vocalization of coda liquids:

1. /el il ol ul yl/ > /ē ʲī oi ui ʲī/
2. /ar er or ur/ > /ā ea oa ua/
3. /alʷ elʷ ilʷ olʷ ulʷ ylʷ/ > ??????
4. /arʷ erʷ irʷ orʷ urʷ/ > /au eu ʲiu ō ū/

All gaps on the left side of the list are deliberate; classical Poswa never had /al/, /ir/, etc.

These changes were actually complete in classical Poswa, but were never represented in the orthography because the surface diphthongs here behaved differently from the inherited diphthongs. In classical Poswa, syllables with /ae ia ie io iu/ could have an additional consonant in the coda, but syllables with the other diphthongs could not. In Future Poswa, this situation may still be true or it may have collapsed such that all nuclei behave the same way.

deletion of longs

It is possible that all long vowels in unstressed syllables could shorten and falling diphthongs could shrink to monophthongs. Then, if /v/ > /Ø/, they would reappear again after that shift. Likewise, there could be deletion of geminate consonants overlaying unstressed syllables, and reduction of any other unstressed clusters besides /mp mb nt nd/.

Other possible sound changes

• /mb/ > /m/ when overlaying two unstressed syllables, or perhaps unconditionally. Because in classical Poswa intervocalic /mb/ was much more common than intervocalic /m/.

Possible target phonology

 CONSONANTS

 Rounded labials:    pʷ   bʷ   mʷ   w    hʷ   lʷ
 Plain labials:      p    b    m   (v)  (f)
 Alveolars:          t    d    n    z    s    l
 Dorsals:                                h    r

 VOWELS

  a   e   i   o   u
 ʲa  ʲe  ʲi  ʲo  ʲu
 
  ā   ea  ia  oa  ua
  ae  ē       oi  ui
  au  eu      ō   ū
         ʲī 
         ʲiu

The plain, un-iotated /i/ will be spelled y.

Because /ʷ/ and /ʲ/ cannot occur in the same syllable, even through vowel collision, it is possible that they can be analyzed as the same feature. And since there are no labialized alveolars, it could be said that both features belong to the consonants and that the vowel system is just /a e i o u/ with a range of permissible sequences.

Grammatical changes

The grammar of nouns and verbs becomes extremely difficult, because despite the general trend towards the reduction of complexity in the grammar, the simplifications lead to a vast increase in exceptions to the rules. For example, even if Poswa had 400 noun declensions, the speakers learned them all because they all followed patterns predictable from the phonemes towards the end of the word. Whereas Future Poswa may have only 15 declensions, but they are based on what the word used to look like rather than what it looks like in Future Poswa.

Likewise, the classical Poswa verb system with its many infixes was very complicated, but speakers only had to learn three stems for each verb (normal, conjugated, and oblique) whereas in Future Poswa the infixes become fusional and some verbs may have more than a dozen different mutated stems.

• pop "two; twins; a natural pair" and popu "some of, part of" could merge, likely in favor of the latter, and take on a merged meaning similar to English "couple (of)".

Other grammatical change ideas

• Full or partial loss of A- and B-stems, with their functions being taken over by suffixed forms of D-stems. Thus the D-stem comes to be the most basic form of the word, and sound changes look mysteriously haphazard, such as tepe "thorn" showing up as teppez-. Most speakers were not troubled by this because the A-stems appeared only in fossilized compounds if at all, but when these compounds did appear, their meanings were more difficult to comprehend than they had been in classical Poswa. Many stems would be completely unrecognizable, such as wutu "champion, winner" appearing as wubb-, and plamba "rain cloud" appearing as plannob-.

• Defective stems like pappipe "sunflower", which had no D-stems, might be exempt from this change, or might form new D-stems analogically which then would be used to create the new forms that replace the A- and B-stems. For example, the word for sunflower could be reanalyzed as a verb with the stem pappip-, and then a new form such as /pappipa/ or /pappipana/ would be coined to replace the noun.
• While it might seem more efficient to have the B-stems be the new base forms instead of D-stems, this could not happen because there was never a stage in Poswa in which the B-stems could occur without an immediately following consonant suffix. This in fact goes back thousands of years before Poswa. Pabappa sometimes captured B-stems and made them the basic form of words, but only because Pabappa lost final /-s/ and therefore created doublets of many words. Future Poswa loses none of its final consonants and so cannot do this.

• Since D-stems in classical Poswa always ended in consonants or consonant + /i/, any suffixes attached to them would have begun with vowels. The vowel /u/ could become a Future Poswa suffix denoting a noun formed from a D-stem, but the general sound of the language would be better preserved if this vowel was /a/ even though an /a/ would be ambiguous with the third person present form of the D-stem verb. In some cases, a suffix might need to be added to this suffix, so that nouns would become obligate compounds, and, for example, the word for rain cloud might be /plannobapa/, using the inherited suffix -pa "in the sky", with no shorter form of the word available except as a verb. Other available noun-forming suffixes, each of which would attach to the /-a/ suffix, would be -na "residue, result(ative)", -ta "agent", and -p "verbal noun (archaic)". This /-p/ was already archaic even in classical Poswa but could reappear by extension of use from other homophonous suffixes such as the subjunctive /-p/ and the reflexive /-p/.

• Use of bare /-a/ as the minimal suffix would be helped by the fact that many such words already existed in classical Poswa, such as pižupa ~ pižup- "school", meaning that the ambiguity was already present in the language and any potential problems had been worked around already. Whereas there were few such words where the A-stem ended in /-u/.

• Preexisting sound changes would carry over, but syncretism may set in, again making the sound changes look haphazard. For example, the suffixes /-ta -pa -p/ might all share the same /-f/ alternant while /-na/ gets /-v/. This would obey a longstanding Poswa grammatical operation, but in fact the classical Poswa suffix /-pa/ "in the sky" evolved from a form with an initial cluster and did not participate in the /p/ > /f/ sound change. This could cause /-ta/ to be reinterpreted as an animate noun marker and /-pa/ as an inanimate, or at least non-human, one.

• It is quite possible that a new rule that all nouns must end in vowels would appear, since they would all derive from D-stems with a vocalic suffix, and because the inherited case endings would at least include /-p -m -s/, all of which would require a stem ending in a vowel. This assumes B-stems disappear entirely, as B-stems were the means that classical Poswa used to attach /-p -m -s/ to stems whose surface forms ended in consonants. If A-stems disappear entirely, B-stems must disappear entirely as well, and it is also possible that B-stems disappear entirely even if some A-stems remain.

• Grammatical gender could evolve, likely from interpretation of words for man and woman (or perhaps girl and boy, or perhaps all four) as variants of the generic agent marker -ta.

Plurals

The inherited plural marker -bum cannot stand, as it will expand to -bumba unconditionally, and thus add two syllables to any word to which it attaches.

Evolution of verb endings

The most interesting change is that many of the formulaic verb endings freeze out, so that Future Poswa has, e.g. /-epo/ "I control you", no longer analyzable as /e/ + /p/ + /o/. Many things will need to be reordered, however, to make things like this work properly, since it is almost certain that Future Poswa will retain the simple three-person /o e a/ conjugation pattern.