So far I have worked out one relatively small continent. The conlang below is intended to be a protolanguage for the languages spoken on the continent
Rough sketch, drawn by hand and scanned:
More: show
The continent lies in the high antarctic on a very earthlike planet, roughly the lattitude of cape Barrow or Nordkap, just towards the south pole instead. A relatively low, but steep mountain chain runs along the entire continent, close to the northern cost. The northern coast is very dominated by the mountains. Towards the south, the slope is gentler, and the area along the sea and some distande inland is relatively flat.
The continent was colonized in one wave from the northwest and eastwards. The people on the northern cost depend mostly on the sea for food, while the people on the south coats live as a mix of herders and fishers/sealers/whalers.
Proto-language for all the languages on the continent:
Phonology:
/p p' t t' t͡ʃ t͡ʃ' k k' q q' ʔ/ <p p' t t' c c' k k' q q' ʔ>
/m n ŋ/ <m n ng>
/β z ɣ ɣʷ ʁ ʁʷ/ <v z g gw r rw>
/l ɮ/ <l ll>
/a a: ə i i: u u:/ <a á e i í u ú>
Syllable structure: CV(C)
For clusters of 3 or more consonants /ə/ is inserted, with respect to phoneme boundaries.
Clusters of an alveolar and a postalveolar or a velar and a uvular assimilate to the POA of the first one (/t t’/ becomes / t͡ʃ t͡ʃ’/ and vice versa).
Consonant clusters are either totally voiced or unvoiced with exeption of clusters consisting of an ejective and a nasal. An ejective makes the cluster unvoiced, otherwise the cluster is voiced unless it consists of two plosives. /ʔ/ does not get voiced (obviously).
A cluster of two of the same consonant or a plosive + ejective with same POA becomes geminated.
A plosive followed by /ʔ/ becomes an ejective. An ejective followed by /ʔ/ becomes geminated.
Stress
Syllables may be heavy or light based solely on vowel length
Stressed non-long vowels are slightly lengthened.
Stress is placed using an iambic stress pattern. If the last syllable is not part of a foot, it takes stress if the iamb before has left-leaning stress. The stress falls one the rightmost of the two syllables in the iamb unless only the left one is heavy. There is no primary and secondary stress, there is only stressed and unstressed syllables.
Most of the grammar is still up in the air, but i have decided that it will be pretty sytethic and heavily suffixing. I will probably draw a lot of inspiration from the inuit-aleut languages.
How do you guys think it looks so far, and what would it be smart to try to work out next?
