zompist bboard

The Cuezi lexicon has entries of words classified as 'Karazi-Central'. They have cognates in both families, but there is no trace of them in other Eastern languages.

Can we speculate why this happens? Can we suppose that Karazi-Central is an Eastern superfamily with a 'last common ancestor' called proto-KC? were proto-Karazi and proto-Central sister distinct languages? Was KC a next stage of the Eastern language, and if yes, can we trace Cuezi and Cadhinor words to proto-KC reconstructions?

By the way, I would like to comment on the words for boar in Cuezi and Cadhinor. Although the lexicons don't mention an etymology of Cu. xaviu and Cad. obelis, I can imagine a common ancestor like *HAUBEIL'S (although I admit I don't know the sound changes of each language).

Exez wrote:The Cuezi lexicon has entries of words classified as 'Karazi-Central'. They have cognates in both families, but there is no trace of them in other Eastern languages.

Can we speculate why this happens? Can we suppose that Karazi-Central is an Eastern superfamily with a 'last common ancestor' called proto-KC? were proto-Karazi and proto-Central sister distinct languages? Was KC a next stage of the Eastern language, and if yes, can we trace Cuezi and Cadhinor words to proto-KC reconstructions?

Well, they'd be aerial features. The Karazi-Central appears to be a genetic branch of the Proto-Eastern language that's ill-defined, if only because there's a shared lexicon set that is not identifiable anywhere else in the Eastern families. Rather than speculate, I'd check the sound correspondences between Karazi-Central lexemes; if there's a shared sound correspondence, then it means that there is a branch worth investigating. If you cannot find a direct sound correspondence, then these are borrowings from a separate language that is unique to the area (you could then reconstruct these lexemes using other methods).

Exez wrote:By the way, I would like to comment on the words for boar in Cuezi and Cadhinor. Although the lexicons don't mention an etymology of Cu. xaviu and Cad. obelis, I can imagine a common ancestor like *HAUBEIL'S (although I admit I don't know the sound changes of each language).

Yeah, the sound changes don't support them being related intra-branch (Cuêzi doesn't have any root vowel reductions, and Caďinor's relevant one is *aw>u). And unless Southern Monkhayic had something like š/ç which Cadhinor dropped initially (rather than assimilate it to s or ĥ [x]) while Cuêzi retained it (Cuêzi x is [ç]), I find borrowing a bit unlikely. Possible if they were borrowed from different Southern Monkhayic languages which had done the retention/dropping for them. Honestly the only similarities the words have is the v~b, everything else would have to be accounted by differences in the source languages; it's easier to say they are probably not related, Occam's Razor and all.

One more note: in the pE wordlist, there are some reflexes that occur only in Cuezi and Cadhinor and not in the other 3 exemplary languages. Such roots īl 'that', ktods, negnes etc.

Although their reflexes in the lexicons aren't marked as 'K', how safe is it to assume that these roots are K-C?

Y'could also compare the Cadhinor past participle ending -ul and the Cuezi passive -l ending; no other Eastern language has that.

So maybe it isn't unreasonable to assume that these languages branched off from each other a bit later than they branched off from pE.