Towards Proto-Atlantovasconic

[stinja]

I'm doing some conworlding related to Atlantis, and have decided that, for my purposes, Atlantean civlization flourished on Earth until about 1600 BCE when their entire landmass was suddenly and violently transported to another world. Their languages represent other branches of the Atlantovasconic vamily, a primary language family that includes the Atlantean languages and Basque.

To flesh out this family, I am starting with the reconstructions of Pre-Basque, as described in the Etymological Dictionary of Basque. Disclaimer: I'm neither a Basque speaker nor trained in Vasconic linguistics, so its very likely I've misunderstood my source material. That reconstruction seems to be confident about the state of the language back to ~0 CE, but unclear beforehand. My goal is to create a set of consistent, motivated sound changes that produce the situation reconstructed for Pre-Basque, to arrive at the situation 1500-2000 years previously, when Pre-Pre-Pre-Basque (P3V) would have diverged from Proto-Atlantovasconic (PAV).

Right now, I feel that the sound changes that I have turn the clock back ~800-1200 years. They only address the consonants, however, and I think that I would like to do some significant vowel shifts but I'm unsure of how to do so at the moment.

The reconstruction for Pre-Basque (PV, the end state of any sound changes I write) has sixteen consonants:

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p t k tz ts N L R
b d g z s n l r

The phoneme /z/ is a retroflex unvoiced sibilant and /tz/ a retroflex affricate. The phonemes /N L R/ are sustained or trilled versions of /n l r/. The phonotactics are very constrained:

• Only the consonants /b g z s n l/ can appear word-initially.
• Only the consonants /tz ts R N Z/ can appear word-finally.
• The only allowable intervocalic syllable clusters are /s/ or /z/ followed by a voiceless stop or /n/, /l/ or /r/ followed by any one of /p t k d g z s tz ts/

In my imagination, this situation is the result of a number of conditioned sound changes. My construction of Pre-Pre-Basque (P2V) has the following consonants:

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p' b p
t' d t
k' g k

z s n l r

Where /p' t' k'/ are aspirated stops. The status of aspiration in PV seems extremely murky, so I am taking some liberties with it. A syllable in P2V always begins with a consonant and optionally ends with one of the phonemes /z s n l r/. This develops into PV through the following sound changes:

1. Aspirated stops in clusters weaken or mutate:
   • p' -> b/C_
   • t' -> ts/C_
   • k' -> tz/C_
2. /z s/ are lost before a sonorant, which become lengthened/trilled. For example, the clusters /nn sn zn/ all become /N/.
3. Initial stops are weakened and final consonants are weakened.
   • p' -> b, b -> p, p -> 0 word initially.
   • t' -> d, d -> t, t -> 0 word initially.
   • k' -> g, g -> k, k -> 0 word initially.
   • z -> tz, s -> ts, n -> N, l -> L, r -> R word finally.
4. /d/ is deleted word-initially.

Although I'm still working out the details of this, I think that #3 is accompanied by a shift of stress to the final syllable of the word. Here's a segment of my lexicon so far:

• PV "ability, power" *anaL < P2V **nanal
• "apple" *sagaR < **sagar
• "arm" *beso < **p'eso
• "atmosphere" *giro < **k'iro
• "aunt" *izeba < **tizeba
• "back (anatomy)" *bizkar < **p'izkar
• "badger" *azkone < **t'azkone
• "bear (animal)" *artz < **tárk'a
• "beard" *bizaR < **p'izar
• "bee" *erle < **derle
• "birch" *burki < **p'urki

I have not quite figured out how I want to deal with vowels and stress yet, but to create PV words that end in clusters like *artz, I'm positing a final unstressed vowel that was lost (hence, **tárk'a), probably before the stress shift to the final syllable that I mentioned above.

A main goal in writing this post was to force myself to write my thoughts down coherently somewhere, but of course I'd welcome feedback.

[Travis B.]

I have to ask the hard question all of us want to ask but have been hesitant to do so: does this involve Basque Monks?

[stinja]

I can put your minds at rest: all of this takes place significantly before both Christianity and Buddhism, so no monks of any kind are involved.