Old Albic
| Old Albic (Elbirin) | |
| Spoken in: | British Isles |
| Timeline/Universe: | League of Lost Languages; UKW World |
| Total speakers: | extinct |
| Genealogical classification: | Albic South Albic |
Old Albic (native name Elbirin 'Elvish') is the oldest Albic language attested in writing. The oldest surviving text fragments date back to the 7th century BCE. Old Albic was the language of the British Elves prior to the Tartessan War and the Celtic takeover in Britain.
Phonology
Consonants
The Old Albic consonant system consists of 18 consonant phonemes. The language has labial, dental and velar stops, voiceless and voiced: p, t, c; b, d, g. These stops have two allophones each: lenis when following a vowel, and fortis everywhere else. If a stop-initial word is phonetically linked to a vowel-final word, the initial stop is lenis. The so-called aspirates transcribed ph, th, ch evidently already were fricatives [f θ x] in Classical times. But while they are phonetically fricatives, they phonemically behave like stops. This indicates that they were stops in an earlier stage of the language. (This is also evidenced by the fact that they correspond to stops in North and West Albic languages; a stop articulation is also described as occuring in some rural dialects of Old Albic.) The aspirate th is dental (like voiceless English th), in contrast to the alveolar s. The two phonemes thus did not fall together; it is certainly due to the heavy functional load of the distinction between th and s (cf. 2nd vs. 3rd person pronouns and endings!) that the merger was avoided. Other fricatives are the sibilant s and the laryngeal h, which are preserved unchanged except in clusters composed of *s and another consonant, wherein s is deleted and the following consonant, if a stop, changed into a homorganic aspirate: *sp > ph, *st > th, *sc > ch. The phoneme h occurs only before a vowel; in all other positions, it deletes and the preceding vowel is lengthened.
Sonorants are the nasals m, n, ñ (the latter being velar as in sing), the liquids l, r (the latter is an alveolar flap), and the semivowels j (like y in English yes) and v (like English w).
The full consonant inventory is thus as follows:
| Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |
| Stops, voiceless | p | t | c | |||
| Stops, voiced | b | d | g | |||
| Fricatives | ph | th | s | ch | h | |
| Nasals | m | n | ñ | |||
| Lateral | l | |||||
| Flap | r | |||||
| Semivowels | v | j |
Sketch of Old Albic
I posted this sketch of Old Albic on June 21, 2004, to the CONLANG mailing list. (This sketch is partly outdated; I have made a few minor changes since then. Stay tuned for updates.)
Selected Conlang mailing list articles on Old Albic
- (2004/06/22) Suffixaufnahme
- (2004/06/23) Some bits on Old Albic culture
- (2004/06/24) Something about Albic religion and demonology
- (2004/07/27) Degrees of volition in Old Albic
- (2005/05/20) Some calendar and mythology stuff
- (2005/08/07) Fluid-S pivot
- (2005/09/04) An autosegmental view of the vowel features
Old Albic texts
- Babel Text
- Am talal am ñgohama ara am henam (from the 10th Conlang Translation Relay)
- A kitchen recipe (from the 11th Conlang Translation Relay)
