Languages of Teppala
Humans on the planet Teppala are confined to a single continent, Rilola, and its offshore islands. Thus all human languages can be traced back to a single starting point, and have many traits in common.
Historical distribution of Teppalan languages
Human civilization on planet Teppala peaked twice: first around 1700-2600AD, and then again around 3500-4200AD. After the second peak, human civilization entered a long decline, the population decreased, and languages with small populations went extinct.
During the peaks of human civilization, it was common for every religion to have its own language. Since religions were tied to political parties, almost every political party also had its own language. This is why many Teppalan languages have unusual names, such as the Gold language and the Moonshine language; these were named after political parties rather than ethnic groups.
Since political parties (and religions) coexisted with rival parties within the same ethnic group's nation, the boundaries of a given language often hinged on tiny differences such as speech registers or a set of unique vocabulary words used only members of a particular political party. When languages such as this coexisted, they tended to evolve in parallel directions, so that mutual intelligibility might persist among a pair of languages for hundreds of years.
Traits common to all Teppalan languages
Traits common to all of the languages on the entire planet throughout all of recorded history are confined to negatives.
- For example, no Teppalan language has or has ever had a definite or indefinite article.
Traits common to most Teppalan languages
Phonology
- Very few Teppalan languages have at any time in history ever gone beyond six vowels, and when there are six vowels, it is always /a e i o u ə/, where the /ə/ vowel may have considerable allophony.
- Dense consonant clusters do not appear, except in some languages where a certain vowel, usually /a/ or /ə/, is not distinguished at the phonemic level from silence. That is, some languages may always pronounce /tk/ as [tək], without the schwa actually being present as a phoneme.
- Open syllables are preferred, and syllables are commonly front-loaded, such that a sequence like /papsa/ is more likely to be pronounced [pa.psa] rather than *[pap.sa].
- On the continent of Rilola, the voiced velar stop /ġ/ (IPA /g/) is rarely used even in languages with a robust series of voiced stops. This is a long-standing trait and crosses language family boundaries. On the islands of Laba, however, /ġ/ is common.
- There are no minimal pairs between a diphthong and a sequence of the same two vowels. Thus diphthongs can be analyzed as allophones of vowel sequences.
- Voiceless obstruents occur more frequently than voiced ones. In some languages, /b/ is the only voiced stop.
- There are often marginal consonant phonemes. These mostly arise from previously existing consonant clusters that were worn down. However, some marginal phonemes arise from sound changes affecting consonants that previously were more common, which survived in only a few phonemic environments. For example, in Khulls voiced stops survived a lenition shift only after a nasal. Later, the nasal sometimes disappeared, meaning that the voiced stops could no longer be analyzed as allophones of voiced fricatives. But they remained rare.
- It is common to have restrictions forbidding certain consonants to appear in certain parts of a word; for example, in Khulls /r/ cannot begin a word. Most languages allow only a small subset of their consonants to appear at the end of a word
Grammar
- Polysynthesis is common, and it is nearly always fusional. It is common to find words with more morphemes than phonemes due to the prevalence of single-phoneme grammatical suffixes that represent two individual morphemes that at an earlier stage of the language were pronounced individually but combined into a new single sound after a sound change.
Gender
- If there is any grammatical gender, feminine words in most semantic fields outnumber masculine ones.
- Grammatical gender, if present, classifies people based on age and sex rather than just sex. The age categories are not firmly defined and can be used metaphorically. There are often several age categories for children, but all adults share just a single age category.
- Many languages have a consonant-based gender system; if not grammaticalized, associated more weakly due to persistence of previously grammaticalized morphemes and contact with nearby languages.
- Mixed gender categories are often present; a man and a woman, referred to as a unit, will take an epicene gender rather than having one gender overrule the other. If there is no epicene, a group containing both males and females will be described with words in one of the feminine genders.
- Gender and animacy, if present, can be inherited by nouns describing syntactically inanimate objects, by borrowing from a parent object. That is, a man's arm will be animate (and masculine), and so will his books or any other possessions.
Structure of words
- Most languages have a fixed word order, with SOV word order by far the most common. Anomalous constructions within SOV languages may require additional marking on certain words, usually those found near the beginning of the sentence.
- Suffixes are nearly universal; infixes are common; prefixes are rare and usually confined to a single part of speech (for example, in Andanese, the only prefixes are the noun classifiers).
- Verbs are generally the longest words in a sentence. Verbs are heavily inflected even in languages where noun inflection is absent or relatively skimpy.
Parts of speech
- There are no adjectives or adverbs. Verbs are used instead of these. In some languages, even the nouns can be analyzed as a subset of the verbs.
- Pronouns play only a minor role in the language, and some languages lack pronouns altogether, instead using nouns and verbs with person markers.
- Person markers on nouns, denoting their possessor, are common. Languages that lose this system often redevelop it from grammatically unrelated words later on.
