this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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Constructed Languages

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The main idea behind this language is to become evolutionary food for other languages of my conworld. As such I'll probably never flesh it out completely, only the necessary to make its descendants feel a bit more natural.

Constructive criticism is welcome.

Context and basic info

The conworld I'm building has three classical languages, spoken 2~3 millenniums before the conworld present: Old Sirtki, Classical Tarune, and Mäkşna. And scholars in the conworld present are reconstructing their common ancestor, that they call "Proto-Sitama".

What I'm sharing here, however is none of their fancy reconstructions. It's the phonology of the language as it was spoken 7 millenniums before the conworld present. Its native name was /kʲær.mi.'zɑst/, or roughly "what we speak"; the language itself had no written version but it'll be romanised here as ⟨Cjermizást⟩.

Its native speakers were a semi-nomadic people, who lived mostly of livestock herding. They'd stay in a region with their herds, collect local fruits and vegetables, and then migrate for more suitable pasture as their animals required.

It was quite a departure from the lifestyle of their star travelling ancestors, who were born in a highly industrialised society in another planet.

Grammar tidbits

Grammar-wise, Cjermizást was heavily agglutinative, with an absolutive-ergative alignment and Suffixaufnahme. So typically you'd see few long polymorphemic words per sentence. Those morphemes don't always "stack" nicely together, so you often see phonemes being elided, mutated, or added to the word.

Consonants

Manner \ Set Hard Soft
Nasals /m n/ /mʲ ɲ/
Voiceless stop /p t k/ /pʲ tʲ kʲ/
Voiced stop /b d g/ /bʲ dʲ gʲ/
Voiceless fric. /ɸ s x/ /fʲ ʃ ç/
Voiced fric. /w z ɣ/ /vʲ ʒ j/
Liquids /l r/ /ʎ rʲ/

Cjermizást features a contrast between "soft" and "hard" consonants. "Soft" consonants are palatalised, palatal, or post-alveolar; "hard" consonants cannot have any of those features. Both sets are phonemic, and all those consonants can surface outside clusters.

Palatalised consonants spawn a really short [j], that can be distinguished from true /j/ by length.

Although /j/ and /w/ are phonetically approximants, the language's phonology handles them as fricatives, being paired with /ɣ/ and /vʲ/ respectively.

/r rʲ/ surface as trills or taps, in free variation. The trills are more typical in simple onsets, while the taps in complex onsets and coda.

The contrast between /m n/ is neutralised when preceding another consonant in the same word, since both can surface as [m n ŋ]; ditto for /mʲ nʲ/ surfacing as [mʲ ɱʲ ɲ].

Coda /g/ can also surface as [ŋ], but only in word final position; as such, it doesn't merge with the above.

Liquids clustered with voiceless fricatives and/or stops have voiceless allophones.

Vowels

Proto-Sitama's vowel system is a simple square: /æ i ɒ u/. They have a wide range of allophones, with three situations being noteworthy:

  • /ɒ u/ are typically fronted to [Œ ʉ] after a soft consonant
  • /æ i/ are backed to [ɐ ɪ] after a hard velar
  • unstressed vowels are slightly centralised

Accent

Accent surfaces as stress, and it's dictated by the following rules:

  1. Some suffixes have an intrinsic stress. If the word has 1+ of those, then assign the primary stress to the last one. Else, assign it to the last syllable of the root.
  2. If the primary stress fell on the 5th/7th/9th/etc.-to-last syllable, move it to the 3rd-to-last
  3. If the primary stress fell on the 4th/6th/8th/etc.-to-last syllable, move it to the 2nd-to-last.
  4. Every two syllables, counting from the one with the primary stress, add a secondary stress.

Phonotactics

Max syllable is CCVCC, with the following restrictions:

  • complex onset: [stop] + [liquid]; e.g. /pl/ is a valid onset, */pw/ isn't
  • complex coda: [liquid or nasal] + [stop or fricative]; e.g. /nz/ is a valid coda, */dz/ isn't

If morphology would create a syllable violating such structure, an epenthetic /i/ dissolves the cluster.

Consonant clusters cannot mix hard and soft consonants. When such a mix would be required by the morphology, the last consonant dictates if the whole cluster should be soft or hard, and other consonants are mutated into their counterparts from the other set. For example, */lpʲ/ and */ʃp/ would be mutated to /ʎpʲ/ and /sp/.

Stops and fricatives clustered together cannot mix voice. Similar to the above, the last consonant of the cluster dictates the voicing of the rest; e.g. */dk/ and */pz/ would be converted into /tk/ and /bz/ respectively.

Gemination is not allowed, and two identical consonants next to each other are simplified into a singleton. Nasal consonants are also forbidden from appearing next to each other, although a cluster like /nt.m/ would be still valid.

Word-internal hiatuses are dissolved with an epenthetic /z/. Between words most speakers use a non-phonemic [ʔ], but some use [z] even in word boundaries.

Romanisation

As mentioned at the start, the people who spoke Cjermizást didn't write their own language. As such the romanisation here is solely a convenience.

  • /m n p t b d g s x w z l r/ are romanised as in IPA
  • /k ɸ ɣ/ are romanised ⟨c f y⟩
  • "soft" consonants are romanised as their "hard" counterparts, plus ⟨j⟩
  • ⟨j⟩ is omitted inside clusters; e.g. /pʲʎ/ is romanised as ⟨plj⟩, not as *⟨pjlj⟩
  • /æ i ɒ u/ are ⟨e i a u⟩
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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Bonus - the phonology of two child languages, plus the most important bits of their phonological history.

Old Sirtki

Over the span of centuries, the Cjermizást dialect that gave origin to Old Sirtki got rid of the voiced fricatives. /ɣ/ became /g/; /ʒ z/ were rhotacised into /ɹʲ ɹ/; /vʲ/ was merged into /fʲ/; and while phonetically /j w/ didn't change, the language was handling them in the same "set" of consonants as /l/, specially after /ʎ/→/j/ made /j/ the "soft" counterpart of /l/.

/æ i/ were centralised to [ɐ ɨ] in most environments, so the distinction between /æ i/ and /ɒ u/ became mostly roundness. That caused the collapse of the vowel system into a vertical one; /æ i ɒ u/ are reinterpreted as /ɐ ɨ ʷɐ ʷɨ/. The labialisation would attach itself to a preceding non-soft consonant (if any), otherwise spawn a /w/. This means the two-way contrast between soft/hard consonants became a three-way contrast: plain vs. palatalised vs. labialised.

/ɹ ɹʲ ɹʷ/ were short-lived; in some cases they simply disappeared, in others they were merged with /l j w/ respectively.

The final result was Old Sirtki having a phonemic inventory that vaguely resembles real life Ubykh:

Manner \ Set Plain Palatalised Labialised
Nasal /m n ŋ/ /mʲ nʲ ŋʲ/ /(m) nʷ ŋʷ/
Voiceless stop /p t k/ /pʲ tʲ kʲ/ /(p) tʷ kʷ/
Voiced stop /b d g/ /bʲ dʲ gʲ/ /(b) dʷ gʷ/
Fricatives /f s ʃ x/ /fʲ sʲ ʃʲ ç/ /h sʷ ʃʷ xʷ/
Liquids /l r/ /j rʲ/ /w rʷ/
Vowels: /ɐ ɨ/

Classical Tarune

While Sirtki expanded further the soft/hard contrast from Cjermizást, Tarune did the opposite - labials were merged, and the other pairs decoupled. This can be exemplified by the voiceless stops, /p pʲ t tʲ k kʲ/→/p p ʈ t̪ c q/.

The voiced fricatives were lost, but mostly through lenition; alongside a change of the phonotactics to (C)V(C), and compensatory lengthening, this means Tarune developed a vowel length contrast.

/æ æ: ɒ ɒ:/ were eventually merged into /ä ä:/; however the merge was complicated, and in some cases it spawned a glide.

Consonant nasalisation was further and further delayed, until it became mostly associated with the vowel instead. This caused the loss of the phonemic category of nasal consonants, alongside the vowels splitting into oral vs. nasal. Phonetically there are still nasal consonants, but only as allophones of voiced consonants between nasal vowels; e.g. /ãbã asã/ as [ãmã ãz̃ã].

As of the Classical period, Tarune's phonology is rather unique, with some vague resemblance to Sanskrit on one side and Kaingang in the other:

Manner Labial Dental Retroflex Palatal Uvular
Voiceless stops /p/ /t̪/ /ʈ/ /c/ /q/
Voiced stops /b/ /d̪/ /ɖ/ /ɟ/ /ɢ/
Fricatives /f/ /s/ /ʂ/ /ç/ /h/
Other consonants /w/ /ɾ l/ /ɻ/ /j/
Vowels: /a i u a: i: u: ã ĩ ũ ã: ĩ: ũ/