Hesperic

Hesperic
Spoken in:	Europe
Conworld:	League of Lost Languages
Total speakers:	ca. 50,000
Genealogical classification:	see below
Basic word order:	varies
Morphological type:	varies
Morphosyntactic alignment:	varies
Created by:
Jörg Rhiemeier	2000-

Hesperic is a family of diachronic conlangs by Jörg Rhiemeier spoken in the world of the League of Lost Languages. So far, Old Albic is the best-elaborated language of the family.

Sources

The main natlang models of Hesperic are the Indo-European, Uralic and Kartvelian language families. Conlangs of inspirational value are chiefly the Quendian (J. R. R. Tolkien), Eastern (Mark Rosenfelder) and Sunovian (Geoff Eddy) families.

Overview (intrafictional)

The Hesperic languages are spoken in various residual zones in Central and Western Europe, with a total number of speakers not exceeding 50,000 today, though the family once had many more speakers as the extant Hesperic languages are the last remains of a once great language family that was later eclipsed and displaced by Indo-European (Old Albic alone is estimated to have been spoken by about 2 million people during the apogee of the Commonwealth of the Elves around 600 BC).

The Hesperic languages are an attempt at fleshing out the hypothetical Aquan languages. The common ancestor of the Hesperic languages, Proto-Hesperic, may have been the language of the Linear Pottery culture, the first Neolithic farming culture of Central Europe. The common ancestor of the West Hesperic branch (see below) may have been the language of the Beaker culture. However, such identifications of language families with archaeological cultures always have to be taken with a grain of salt, as languages and material cultures often do not match. The Old European hydronymy may be Hesperic in origin, but as the original meanings of those names are unknown, such an identification remains speculative.

Classification

The classification given here is preliminary, and many designations (in italics) provisional, as most of the Hesperic languages are still unexplored.

Hesperic

• West Hesperic

• Albic

• Old Albic

• Continental West Hesperic

• Gallo-Hesperic
• Alpianic

• Proto-Alpianic

• Mediterranean Hesperic

• Ibero-Hesperic
• Italo-Hesperic

• Attidian

• Viddan (incertae sedis)
• East Hesperic

• Balto-Hesperic
• Carpathian Hesperic

Viddan shows a mixture of western and eastern traits, and its affiliation is unclear.

The "Kastenholz scheme"

The Kastenholz scheme (named after a fictional linguist) groups the eight branches of Hesperic in a 3x3 grid (with one empty cell):

	West	Central	East
North	Albic	Viddan	Balto-H.
Central	Gallo-H.	Alpianic	Carpathian H.
South	Ibero-H.	Italo-H.

This chart corresponds to four major isogloss bundles, two running north-south and two running east-west, characterized as below.

Northern zone

• Moderate to large consonant inventories
• Long and short vowels
• Pitch accent with two contrasting intonations (thrusting and slipping tone) on long vowels
• Preservation of all five Proto-Hesperic primary cases
• Richly developed secondary cases
• Complex verb morphology with two sets of personal endings

Central zone

• Moderate consonant inventories
• Long and short vowels
• Stress accent
• Four-case system
• Moderately complex verb morphology

Southern zone

• Small consonant inventories
• No long vowels
• Stress accent
• Topic-prominent noun declension, topic marker from genitive
• Simple verb morphology

Western slice

• Loss of aspiration (only partially in Albic)
• Drummond's Law (velarization of consonants followed by laryngeal with loss of the laryngeal)
• Vowel umlauts
• Initial accent (lost in parts of Albic)

Central slice

• Spirantization of aspirates (also in parts of Albic)
• Drummond's Law (uvularization in Viddan)
• Monophtongization of diphthongs (also in parts of Albic)
• Initial accent

Eastern slice

• Loss of aspiration
• Gemination of consonants followed by laryngeals
• Palatalizations
• Penultimate accent

Influence of Standard Average European

The Hesperic languages have been influenced to various degrees by the Standard Average European linguistic area. The influence of this Sprachbund is strongest in Alpianic and weakest in Albic.

External relationships

Hesperic shows all the hallmarks of a Mitian language family. Typologically the Hesperic languages show affinity to the Indo-European, Uralic and Kartvelian languages. The phonology is most similar to Indo-European, the morphology to Uralic and the syntax to Kartvelian.

The most likely closest kin of Hesperic is Indo-European, with which Hesperic shares more than 100 lexical cognates. Also, internal reconstruction in Proto-Indo-European leads to a stage that shows a substantial affinity to Hesperic. The morphological affinity to Uralic is best explained as a shared retention from Indo-Uralic, while Indo-European has innovated. The similarities to Karvelian, which seem also to hold for an earlier stage of Proto-Indo-European, are probably due to contact.