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.

note, deleted much text that doesnt apply anymore. originally i had merely scrubbed it, but the formatting was messing up. literally every single idea that i had been planning to use has now been discarded, so the family i was originally calling "lamu" will simply have to take on another name.

Proto-Lamuan phonology

Vowel shifts

/a e i o u/ > /a ɜ ɨ ɜ ɨ/, probably unconditionally with no effects at all on the surrounding phonemes. This is because /e/ and /u/ were much rarer than /o/ and /i/, and had in many cases arisen in tandem with consonant shifts, so that, for example, /čo/ never existed in Khulls, since /čo/ > /če/ in an earlier shift.

Consonant shifts

Palatalization of non-coronals

The language palatalized most of the non-coronal consonants that were not labialized, and then delabialized the labialized ones. However, there were exceptions:

• /p ṗ b/ changed to /f f v/ instead of becoming palatalized. This shift also occurred in Moonshine and Poswa much later, but was unrelated. However, this shift did not happen when they occurred before another consonant (a situation that came to be seen as analogous to labialization), or after the nasal /m/. Thus Khulls pampĭsi "small baby" becomes proto-Lamu fampisi.
• The nasals /m n ŋ/, which had no labialized counterparts, also did not palatalize.
• /ḳ ḳʷ/ shifted to /q q/, and resisted palatalization.

• note, this last shift MUST be conditional, or else /q/ would be more common than /k/.

• Also there will be a gap of almost no /či/, but there will be plenty of /ki/, which would be unusual. So perhaps /kʷi/ > /ćʷi/ > /ći/, part of a pushchain shift that also causes /qi qʷi/ > /ki kʷi/ and probably the rest of the /q/ > /k/ later on.

The phoneme /gʲ/ quickly merged with /j/ (spelled /y/ in Khulls).

Meanwhile, those coronal consonants that were postalveolar came to behave as if they were palatalized, and those that were alveolar came to behave as if they were labialized. The sole exception was /l/, which behaved as if it were a dorsal consonant, and therefore became palatalized in all environments to /lʲ/. This treatment of /l/ as dorsal is shared with many languages of the area such as Andanese and Khulls itself. /ʕʷ/ came to be seen as the labialized version of /l/, which is true to its Khulls derivation, and its pronunciation shifted roughly to ʀ, which still contrasted with the voiced velar fricative /g/.

The old phoneme /ǯ/ came to behave as if it were /rʲ/. However, it is likely that /r/ and /z/ soon merged, and took /ǯ/ and /ž/ with them, creating a merged phoneme pair of /r rʲ/ which would be [r ž].

Loss of ejectives

The ejectives /ṗ ṭ/ had survived the shift that had removed /ḳ/, but they soon merged in with the corresponding aspirated voiceless stops unconditionally. (Unless they triggered gemination instead.)

Loss of syllabic consonants

All syllabic consonants are lost. If followed by a vowel, they simply become plain. If not, they change according to the formula /ḷ ṁ ṅ ŋ̇ ṡ ṣ̌/ > /il im in iŋ is iš/. However, this shift occurred later than the shift that changed consonants such as /p/ into /f/ when not before another consonant. Also, the fricatives did not harden into affricates because there was never a vowel before them in Khulls, and therefore never an allophonic glottal stop. Thus Khulls ʕʷŏpṡ "sun" became proto-Lamu ʀɜpis, not *ʀɜfis or *ʀɜfit.

Other sound changes

• /hʷ/ might actually be preserved as /f/ rather than the expected /h/ so that the agentive suffix -hʷ would not be such a fragile phoneme. Alternatively, this could simply be a case of lexical subsitution, if the speakers began to use the word (i)f "teacher" as the agentive instead of h "human".

Tone shifts

The high tone "crystallized" into low tone plus /ʔ/, as in Thaoa. This caused gemination of the following cosnonant except before a fricative, in which case it formed an affricate. This allophonic gemination/affrication was already part of standard Khulls, such that, .e.g. in Khulls /àx/ was always pronounced [àk], but in Lamu it became truly phonemic because the tone contrast disappeared.

ā and á merged as ā, which lost its tonal contrast but retained its length contrast.

Pharyngealization survived, but was no longer considered a tone. Instead, it was considered to be /g/ in the syllable coda. This was an orthographic choice, although there were still a few words in the language where /g/ and the pharyngeal vowel marker /ʕ/ appeared to derive from each other.

NOTE, this doesnt work because a literal /g/ can also occur in the syllable coda and the two are unlikely to merge. /R/ would not work either.

Thus, all tones had been eliminated.

Summary of phonology

Thus the phonology of proto-Lamu was:

CONSONANTS

p b m f v t n s r č š ž ʀ l ć ǵ ś j k ġ ŋ x g q ʔ h

VOWELS

a ɜ ɨ

There are no diphthongs.

The consonants that could occur word-finally were /p m n ŋ s l ʔ ʕ/, plus those that had resulted from delabialization. Thus, all except some of the palatals.

Consonant that cannot occur wordfinally: /t r č ž ć ǵ ś/, but note that word-final /s/ was allophonically [ʔs] all along and might change to a simple [t].

/q/ might be a mirage, if it shifts to /k/. Likewise, /h/ could merge with /x/ since it is so rare.

Khulls to Proto-Lamu wordlist

This list uses the /a i u/ orthography for the vowels and assumes /q/ > /k/ but that /h/ and /x/ remain distinct.

• ʕʷŏpṡ > rupis "sun"
• tēnta > tūnta "pepper"
• Kʷoxʷudas > Kuxirat (placename; possibly corrupt kʷ to ḳʷ on purpose for folk etymology)
• kʷō > kū "bed"
• pā > fā "school"
• îl > il "lemon" (assumes loss of /ʕ/ in a closed syllable, which may not be correct)

Descendant languages

Some shift the vowels to /a i u/, since there was no palatalization or labialization to pull the vowels to the edges of the vowel space. This shift essentially restores the original system that the Gold language had had more than 4000 years earlier, which makes these languages look especially conservative, but this is false. It is reminiscent of the situation where Moonshine appears to be the only Khulls daughter language that preserves the Khulls á tone, when in fact it lost that tone and then redeveloped it from sequences of other tones.

For consistency, if this shift happens in *all* daughter languages (Lamuan languages share many areal traits), or even most of them, the vowels of the parent language could also be written as /a i u/ with the explanation that the parent language /u/ was very close to schwa.

• ʀ > /w/ before a vowel, and perhaps in other positions as well. This, too, generally corresponds to its original form in the Gold language, and therefore appears falsely to be very conservative.

• Development of allophones for vowels, either related to length, or to being in a closed syllable, or both. However, the basic /a i u/ setup generally remains intact at the phonemic level.

• If allophones are based on vowel length, there are two choices. The simple method would be to do /a i u/ > /a i u/ (i.e. no change), and /ā ī ū/ > /a e o/. This would be in keeping with changes in Palli, although the Lamuan languages are unlikely to have been in contact with Palli. The complex method would be to have a bunch of conditional changes, possibly including vowel harmony, as was the case with Poswa and Pabappa, languages that Lamuans were in intimate contact with. However, Poswa's and Pabappa's changes happened about 2000 years too early to have affected Lamu directly, so the new vowels would need to come from imitation of their speech rather than being actual shared changes.

• Loss of vowel length in a closed syllable.

Culture

Interaction with Repilians and allied peoples

Lamuans were more masculine than the Poswobs and Pabaps they lived among. This was a long-standing cultural trait, but was backed by distinct physical characteristics as well. The Lamuans were originally racially diverse, because they were continuations of previously existing tribes of various origins who had all adopted the Khulls language and (mostly) the Crystal religion. But their diversity was drawn mostly from tribes who shared in common a robust body type and a tendency for men to be much taller than women.

The Lamuans saw that all around them lived people who tended to be physically frail, with men scarcely any stronger than their wives, and seemingly acceptive^??? of women holding power at the highest levels of society.

The Lamuans did not allow the "effeminate" tribes they lived among to marry into their culture, and Lamuan men who married Poswob or Pabap women were expelled from Lamuan settlements and forced to live the remainder of their lives as members of the culture from which they had taken their wife.

The Lamuans referred to all of the people believed to be too effeminate as Repilians, since Repilia was near the geographical center of the effeminate peoples' homelands and because they saw the Repilians as the most effeminate people of all. This was true in the sense that nearly all of the effeminate peoples had acquired some Repilian blood due to genetic drift, but the Repilians remained as a distinct culture and considered themselves to be just one of many tribal groups in their part of the world. Nevertheless, the term Repilian, when used by Lamuans, soon came to refer to all of the tribes of people whom the Lamuans considered too effeminate.

The Lamuans understood basic genetics and they worried that if Lamuan men were allowed to indulge in their temptations to mate with the often more visually appealing Repilian women, those women would then give birth to sons that would be less masculine than their fathers. The Lamuans went so far as to imprint on their children that a female body type was unattractive, and that their women should be embarrassed if they developed secondary sex characteristics such as large breasts and wide hips as they matured into teenagers. For Lamuans, the ideal female body type was one that mixed masculine and feminine characteristics, such that they were not seen merely as "failed males", and thus retained a distinct identity of their own, but at the same time were distinct from the much more feminine women of the Repilians they lived among.

Treatment of crimes against Repilians

Although they considered Repilians to be unwelcome, they did not consider them morally inferior or subhuman. Lamuan men who wandered into Repilian settlements to have fun beating up Repilians were considered criminals by the Lamuans, and could be punished with expulsion, which would force them to live among the Repilians they had abused. However, Lamuan criminals deported into Repilian territory often found that the Repilians would refuse to punish them for their crimes, as the Repilians were worried that if they tried, they would get beat up even more badly than before.

Intertribal rape was considered a more severe crime than assault. Lamuan men who entered Repilian settlements and raped their women would be arrested when they attempted to return to their homes, since the Lamuans assumed that a Repilian woman would have no reason to lie about being raped. This was considered a crime both against the victim and against the Lamuan people's honor, since they believed that only morally depraved men would even be tempted by the more visually appealing body types of the Repilian women. Thus, such a rapist would not be imprisoned in Repilian territory, where the soft, timid Repilian people would be afraid of being subject to even more rapes, but among the Lamuans themselves, where they would be considered among the least of all prisoners and given the most painful labor to perform in prison.

Abortion was generally legal among the Repilian tribes, although many women who were rape victims chose to carry the baby to term and then raise the child as their own.

Homosexual rape was much less common, but was treated similarly. Repilian men were remarkable for their lack of embarrassment in reporting having been raped by a Lamuan man; this was due to the common cultural trait among Repilians of both sexes to see themselves as weak, and therefore equally rapable by an aggressive intruder.

However, despite the Lamuans' seeming invincibility, they were not as powerful as they often pretended. The Repilians, despite being effeminate and pacifistic, were not as physically small as the Andanese people who had been the majority thousands of years earlier; this was because the Andanese had blended with other tribes. Thus a Lamuan man wandering around a Repilian village beating people up was able to do so primarily because the Repilians were afraid of violence and typically focused on protecting themselves rather than fighting back. On the rare occasions when the Repilian victims did fight back, they often took the Lamuan intruder by surprise and often "won" in the sense that the Lamuan man chose to run away rather than risk injury. It was particularly humiliating for Lamuans to lose a fight in this manner against a Repilian woman. Such a fight was generally assumed to be attempted rape, and was punished as though it had been an actual rape.