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.
The voiced stop /ġ/ changes to /d/, probably taking /dž/ with it.
Probably /ž/ > /z/; may or may not be accompanied by /š/ > /s/.
- NOTE, search "book2015" folder for "Standard East Camian" to find an old list of sound changes.
- No, better to just start from scratch.
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-.
- 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/.
