Middle Albic

Middle Albic is a term for an intermediate stage of the Albic languages between Old Albic and the modern Albic languages. Middle Albic spans the time between the Tartessian War (629 BC), which is considered the end of the Old Albic period, and the 6th century AD. There is no single standard Middle Albic language, and few documents survive from this period. One extensive Middle Albic document is known, though: the Gospel of Joseph of Arimathea, which was found in the Tresco Library. The language of this gospel is an intermediate between Old Albic and the Low Elvish languages.

Compared with Old Albic, Middle Albic has undergone several simplifications. In the language of the gospel, unstressed penultimate vowels have been lost (thereby leading to a language with consistent penultimate stress) and consonant clusters (including those resulting from the vowel loss) have been simplified. Lenitions of intervocalic stops have become phonemic; as these also operated across word boundaries in certain contexts, this change resulted in initial mutations. The number of noun cases has been reduced from ten to five, and the dual is lost as a category. In the verb, the objective personal suffixes have been lost and replaced by prefixes. Despite these changes, the language still resembles Old Albic more than the modern languages as the final syllables and thus the inflectional endings have not yet been reduced.