Category:Trout languages

The Trout languages belong to the stem group of Gold; unlike Gold, they kept the classifier prefixes even as they evolved new classifier suffixes. Thus words are quite long and often overly specific.

In some branches, these classifier combinations evolved into circumfixes, and one or both sides of the pair was usually worn down, so that although words were still long, they were not so characteristically redundant as they had been in proto-Trout. In others, such as Thaoa, the full morphology remained, and because words were much longer than their translations in other languages, the rate of speech was slow, and linguistic evolution focused primarily around simplification of the phonology. Thus, for example, Palli has a much smaller syllable inventory than Thaoa, but the number of syllables per word is often the same.