Subumpamese languages

The Subumpamese languages are the languages spoken in the eleven states of Subumpam. They split off from the parent language, called Tapilula, around 600 AD and continued to be spoken until the defeat of Subumpam in the Vegetable War of 2668 AD.

NEW IDEA. THERE WAS NO WESTERN SUBUMPAMESE AT ALL; THIS WAS ACTUALLY PART OF ANDANESE TERRITORY. THIS MEANS, HOWVVEER, THAT THERE IS NO SPREACHBUMND THERE. BUT THAT IS IN KEEPING WITH THE IDEA THAT THE "KALPTA" TERRITORY WAS IN FACT ANDANESE.

Tapilula (0) to Proto-Subumpamese (???)

The consonant inventory of Tapilula was

Rounded bilabials:                     hʷ  w
Spread bilabials:      p       m   b   f  (Ø)
Alveolars:             t       n   d       l
Rounded alveolars:     tʷ      nʷ  dʷ         
Velars:                k   ḳ   ŋ   ġ   h   g

1. The aspirated velar stop k became č before the vowel /i/. If another vowel followed, the /i/ disappeared. This happened even if the /i/ was accented.
2. When a "velaroid" consonant (/k ḳ ŋ h g l/) followed an accented high tone vowel, the vowel metathesized, leaving a closed syllable. Thus, for example, /àli/ > /ail/. These closed syllables were all high-toned, and are thus written without tone marks. Thus, for example, aa implies àa. Later, daughter languages introduced tone contrasts and independent sequences.
3. A schwa before another vowel in any syllable disappeared. Thus əa əe əi əo əu əə shifted to a e i o u ə. This happened in both open and closed syllables.
4. The sequences iu and ui shifted to ə̄.
5. The double-vowel sequences aa ee ii oo uu əə shifted to the single vowels a e i o u ə in closed syllables only.
6. The sequences ii uu əə (which now occurred only in open syllables) shifted to əi əu ə.
7. The remaining double-vowel sequences aa ee oo, which occurred only in open syllables, shifted to the long vowels ā ē ō.
8. The sequences ai ei oi merged as ei; the sequences au eu ou merged as ou.
9. The vowels /u i e/ caused adjacent consonants, in both directions, to become labialized, palatalized, and prepalatalized. The last shift applied only to velars. Labialization and palatalization could stack.
10. The sequences ìa ìo ìə shifted to ī.
11. The sequences ùa ùo ùə shifted to ū. ə̄ also shifted to ū.
12. The sequences ei ou shifted to ē ō.

    is this opern\\n or closed?

13. Use paper to determine outcome of /uo/, /ie/, etc.
14. Syllable-final h shifted to x.
15. The three syllabic nasals ṁ ṅ ŋ̇ all merged to ən.
16. The velar ejective ḳ became q. Then kq qk shifted to qq.
17. The cluster xhʷ became xʷ.
18. The fricative śʷ s̀ʷ shifted to s. Then ś s̀ became š.
19. The nasals ń ǹ shifted to ň. Then mʷ nʷ ňʷ ŋʷ all merged as m.
20. Voiced palatal stops and fricatives all merged as y.
21. Labialized palataloids shifted to velar. lʷ łʷ > w.
22. The labialized alveolar stops tʷ dʷ shifted to pʷ bʷ.

Thus the proto-Subumpamese language had the consonants

Rounded bilabials:    pʷ  bʷ          w 
Bilabials:            p   b   m   f               
Alveolars:            t   d   n   s   l             
Postalveolars:        č   ǯ   ň   š   ł           
Palatals:             ć               y
Prevelars:            c̀        
Velars:               k   ġ   ŋ   x   g
Labiovelars:          kʷ  ġʷ      xʷ  gʷ
Uvulars:              q           h              
Rounded uvulars:      qʷ          hʷ 

Proto-Subumpamese (~1700) to Kava (3138)

1. The schwas ə ə̄ shifted to u ū.
2. The mid vowels e o rotated to i ə.
3. The high vowel i shifted to ə if touching a /q/ in either direction.
4. Primordial f shifted to p .
5. Primordial hʷ w shifted to f v.
6. All labialized consonants shift to bilabials.
7. The postalveolar affricates č ǯ ň š ł became c ʒ n s l unconditionally.
8. The palatals ć c̀ became č .
9. The voiceless uvular stop q changed to k when syllable-final.
10. Word-final č became s. čk čq etc > čč. Any other syllable-final č assimilates to the following consonant.
11. Any heterorganic stop/aff after a stop turned into a fricative.
12. The affricates c ʒ changed to s z when not after a high tone.
13. Voiced stops became voiceless when occurring before a high tone.

Changes common to Central and Eastern Subumpamese languages

After the loss of Vuʒi, the remaining Subumpamese peoples continued to speak a single common language. The ejective series was preserved, and is here considered to be postvelar because it does not obey the sound changes that involve velars. /l/ is preserved in this stage; it disappeared only in the PES branch which was influenced by Pabappa.

NOTE ON POLITICS: THIS IS WHERE THE 2 DIALECTS SPLIT UP INTO CENTRAL VS EAST.

Changes unique to Central Subumpamese

1. gʷ hʷ > w f.
2. The high central vowel ə changed to i unconditionally.
3. Syllable-final ŋ changed to match the place of a following consonant, and changed to n if word-final. This probably also affects ǹ and ń.
4. the palatalized alveolar consonants č ǯ ň ł become plain alveolars c ʒ n l.
5. The palatal ć is shifted forward to č . Allophonically, velars become palatal before [e] or [i]. Prevelar must also.

Changes common to Eastern Subumpamese

No more than about 20 changes in any language are possible, and it should be more like 15. That is the total for the changes on this list and the individual language lists below. This branch is influenced heavily by Pabappa. It is spoken in Paba too, and the entire branch could perhaps be better named "Lenian languages" even though the much larger number of Pabaps who spoke Pabappa also considered themselves Lenians.

1. gʷ hʷ > w f.
2. The high central vowel ə changed to i unconditionally.
3. Syllable-final ŋ changed to match the place of a following consonant, and changed to n if word-final. This probably also affects ǹ and ń.

   pʷ bʷ mʷ w > p b m v. (Possibly /ə/ > /o/ when facing a labialized consonant before this shift.)

4. ai (on any tone) became ē (perhaps not always long).
5. Palatals č ć ǯ ň ł > c c ʒ n l.
6. Velars (but not labiovelars) shifted doubly forward:

   c̀ k ŋ x g > č č ň š ž. (Possibly velars remain in some positions, as in early Proto-Indo-European. This would best be explained as labialization.)

7. The uvular stop q shifted to k. /h/ became /x/ in most positions, but the spelling remained.
8. In syllable-final position, f c shifted to p t. (Thus /k/>/t č/, /h/>/s š/, even though the shifts were not related.)
9. gʷ > g.
10. The fricative h shifted to q after a high tone.

This is ~1900 AD or a little bit afterwards. The last few changes likely spread areally through the PES languages, however, so they can be treated as canonical for the sake of comparing words.

PES soon redeveloped phonemic /q/, due to Andanese influence, interpreting it as an allophone of /h/ after a high tone. This is the same process that occurred in early Thaoa. Likewise, the frequent Gold diphthongs ai əi were interpreted as a new vowel, /e/, while au əu were interpreted as /o/. These diphthongs occurred only on the long tone in Gold, since Gold did not contrast tone in diphthongs, but Old Andanese provided other tones for those vowels. Lastly, Old Andanese /i/ was pronounced [ə] in the vicinity of [q], and this practice was also borrowed (as it was in Thaoa). Thus for example, Old Andanese kòhi "flag, sign" was loaned as kòqy.

Later developments

All Subumpamese languages were submerged by the immigration of Merar (Tarpabappa) speakers in the year 2674 AD. Descendants of Kava survived only because they had earlier fled Subumpam.

Grammar

The grammar of Proto-Subumpamese resembled that of Old Andanese, even though Subumpamese was more closely related to Gold than to Andanese.

Proto-Subumpamese early on shifted from CV classifier prefixes into CVC, but with the second C always the same as the first whenever the original morpheme had been a pure CV. In fact, these reduplicated classifiers were more common than the innovated type with two differing consonants. These consonants interacted with the initial consonant of the stem of the word, so that for example the classifier huh- attached to the word stem mìna produced humpìna "newt". TENTATIVE! the development of CV > CVC is solid, though.

Nouns

Subumpamese nouns have a true noun class system, not a gender system like that of the Gold language, and it is very similar to that of Andanese. Subumpam is a fairly diverse empire. The climate ranges from subtropical and nearly tropical in the south to the cold and rugged mountains of the north, whose people are much poorer than those of the tropics but also much better protected from foreign invasions. In the mountains, most people speak Andanic languages, a family which is related to Subumpamese but much more conservative.

The richer natural environment of the south has led its people to prosper and bring cultural innovations into the north, as well as a more diverse cuisine flavored with tropical fruits such as pineapples and coconuts as well as large, deep-water fish such as tuna.

The peoples of the north borrowed the words for these concepts from the various Subumpamese peoples of the warmer climates, and in most cases, the words were borrowed with their classifier prefixes intact. Thus the already large classifier prefix inventory of the various Andanic languages became even further enlarged as new noun classes were created to mirror the noun classes of the various Subumpamese languages providing the loanwords. In many cases, the noun classes were already homophonous with an Andanic noun class of the same or similar meaning, simply due to the conservatism of both language families and their distant shared ancestry. However, in most cases the Subumpamese languages have diverged much further from the parent language.

For example, most Andanic languages distinguish between the noun class pe- for crustaceans, he- for most other sea life, and pi- for water and weather itself. But the Subumpamese language of Kava has merged all three of these into a single noun class pi- "water". Thus the Kava word pipùna "starfish" was loaned into the Andanic languages as part of the noun class for water and weather, rather than being incorporated into the noun class for most other sea life.

In other cases, a Subumpamese loanword would be borrowed into a noun class with an entirely different semantic meaning, or into a class that did not previously exist in the Andanic languages. For example, the names of many fruits in the eastern Subumpamese language of Pačēpus began with ŋu-. Most Andanese speakers realized that this noun class was cognate to their own nu-, which contained words for fruits and also words for buildings. This is because the parent language's /ŋ/ phoneme had changed unconditionally to /n/ in the early common Andanic language. But a new /ŋ/ had arisen from the sequence /nw/, and thus Andanic languages were able to loan foreign words with /ŋ/ without replacing the phoneme. And so new words for fruits introduced by the Subumpamese people were borrowed with the ŋu- prefix intact, and ŋu- came to specifically denote tropical fruits, even those introduced from other tropical nations.

Some borrowed prefixes were extended to native words. For thousands of years, Andanic and Subumpamese languages had been actively coining new words by shifting existing words from one noun class to another. For example, the words for body parts could also serve as words for edible animal parts, by changing the prefix from one of the human classes to i- "meat". The same root, hìqi, meant "arrow" with the tu- prefix and "key" with the yo- prefix.

But now some long-established Andanic words were given new prefixes of Subumpamese origin to denote that the objects they described were of foreign origin. An arrow produced in Andanic territory would be called tuhìqi as it had always been, but if produced in Subumpam or by Subumpamese people in Andanic territory it would be called kʷuhìqi, borrowing the Subumpamese classifier, but preserving the native root for the noun itself.

Rarely, words moved in the opposite direction. The Subumpamese people generally did not need heavy clothes, as their climate was fairly warm even in winter. Heavy clothes and long pants were most often used to protect their wearers from thorns and thistles, not from winter cold. Thus, some Subumpamese languages borrowed the Andanic classifier prefix ho- to denote heavy clothes or clothes made in the Andanic style. (The native Subumpamese cognate of this prefix varied from one Subumpamese language to another.)

This page has been scrubbed in preparation for the introduction of a new set of languages descended from proto-Dreamlandic.

Later descendants

At least one Subumpamese language also survives to develop into Meromo.