User:Soap/PC

The PC languages were spoken by the aboriginals of the northeast of Rilola, and possibly also the northwest. They had been diverging for about 15000 years by the time of contact with Play speakers, but it is likely that one group overtook the rest at some point, perhaps multiple times, rather than having them diverge from each other for all 15000 years.

This may replace Haswaraba, despite the fact that cultures are in different places. See Outer Poswob languages for details, though I may have lost all records of the sound changes. It is possible that they are [1], and if so the phonology I was using for the parent language is very different from what it is now (it even had /f/).

The name PC describes its shifting the labiovelars to bilabials and the palatals to postalveolars, leaving just a single velar series. Note however that SE Laban, the branch that leads to MRCA, also does this.

Source phonology

Bilabials:      p   b   m   
Linguolabials:  þ   ð
Alveolars:      t   d   n   l   r   s
Postalveolars:          ň       ř
Palatals:       ć       ń   y
Velars:         k   ġ   ŋ  (Ø)      x
Labiovelars:    kʷ  ġʷ  ŋʷ (w)      xʷ
Glottals:                           h

The vowels were probably at least /a i u ə/ with two or more tones. There were no long vowels.

Primordial to Proto-PC

1. Syllable final -uŋ shifted to -um.
2. The schwa vowel ə shifted to e when adjacent to a palatal, postalveolar, or linguolabial consonant.
3. The postalveolars ň ř shifted to n r under some conditions.
4. The palatals ć ń shifted to š ň unconditionally.
5. The bilabials p b m shifted to pʷ bʷ mʷ under some conditions.
6. The labiovelars kʷ ġʷ ŋʷ xʷ shifted to pʷ bʷ mʷ hʷ unconditionally.
7. The rounded vowel u MAY have shifted to ə.
8. The schwa vowel ə (including the new one) disappeared in word-initial position.
9. Possibly, the velars k ġ ŋ x shifted to ć ǵ ń ś before the front vowels /e i/. This would be quite rare before /e/ however, so it may not be worth it.
10. The vowels a ə e all shifted to o when adjacent to a labialized consonant in either direction. (Thus, labialization overrules palatalization.) This would make the true palatals marginally phonemic.
11. The linguolabials þ ð shifted to p b.
12. The labialized consonants pʷ bʷ mʷ shifted to p b m; however hʷ shifted to f.
13. The glottal fricative h performed, shifting to š before a front vowel, to f before a back vowel, and disappearing to Ø otherwise.

The old sound change list does not explain the lack of schwa, and it is possible that the /ə/ > /e/ sound shift was intended to repeat twice.

Grammar

A closed class of adjectives for humans existed, where the stem of the adjective was surrounded by a circumfix marking gender and age.

THe gender prefixes t- l- probably trace all the way back to Primordial, since they are needed for this system, and it is unlikely that they had had a vowel padding. This means that vowel-initial adjectives existed in this closed class.

There may be a plural suffix -u.

For pronouns, see User:Soap/scratchpad#Gluons. There may have been a regular pronominal accusative suffix -l (despite it looking like a prefix) which passed into MRCA, and may or may not have been the sole marker in Primordial. Common nouns used -i by the time of MRCA but this may have been much more complicated and unpredictable in Prim.

The 1st and 2nd person identity/possessor suffixes are -m -t, but they may not have been suffixes originally. The corresponding agent prefixes appear to have been n- G-, where G is any consonant that can turn into MRCA /g~Ø/ and might most likely have been originally /h/.

Note that it's not clear the proto-language allowed final /-m -t/, so these might have been CV suffixes even if at a still earlier stage they really were /m t/.