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Proto-Chondru: A rough "reconstruction"

Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2016 5:25 pm
by Chengjiang
Some of you may remember my Chavakani thread from a while back. That hasn't progressed in a while because I decided I needed to research certain grammatical features of West African Niger-Congo languages better before I'd be comfortable continuing and have had trouble finding the time of late.

I have been considering how Chavakani's common ancestor with the other Chondru languages would have looked. This is hardly set in stone and will probably change somewhat, but I've got a tentative sketch and would like your input. This uses a rough non-IPA transcription to give certain sounds some fudge factor.

The consonant system is as follows:

Nasals: m n (ñ) ŋ
Prenasalized stops: mb nd ñj ŋg
Voiced stops: b d j g
Voiceless stops: p t c k
Fricatives: f s
Glides: w r y
"Laryngeal": x

Most of these have their IPA values. Those that don't are as follows:
  • y represents [j].
  • ñ represents [ɲ]. This segment may or may not have been an independent phoneme; I'm not sure yet whether I want it to occur outside of ñj.
  • j and c represent "palatal" consonants of a somewhat uncertain nature. They may have been dorso-palatal or alveopalatal stops, or they may have been postalveolar affricates of some kind.
  • r is a liquid. It may have been any number of rhotics, or possibly a lateral approximant.
  • x is a segment that surfaces as a glottal consonant or zero in most descendants but appears to have merged with [k] in some environments in one branch of the family. It may have been a velar fricative or some variety of uvular or other postvelar consonant, or the [k] realizations may result from "coloring" of a glottal consonant by neighboring vowels.
The vowel system:

Full vowels: i u e o a å
Reduced vowels: ĭ ŭ ă
  • a and å are both open to open-mid vowels, with å being probably more back than a.
  • The reduced vowels occur only in "minor" syllables and thus are arguably allophonic mergers of the full vowels. They may have been centralized and/or shorter in duration. They have wide ranges of possible qualities, respectively being "non-open unrounded front vowel", "non-open rounded back vowel", and "open-ish vowel".
Proto-Chondru had a distinction between two types of "major" syllables and one type of "minor" syllable. The major syllables fall into type A and type B, which may have been tones or possibly phonations; they correspond to tones in Chavakani and its near relatives but I'm considering having them surface as something else (e.g. glottalization or retracted/advanced tongue root) in more distant relatives. If they were tones, their values cannot be confidently reconstructed: I know I want at least one case where type A and B syllables correspond to opposite tones (high and low versus low and high) in different descendants. Major syllables only had full vowels as possible nuclei. The type of a major syllable is indicated by a subscript A or B.

Minor syllables had no defined tone (if the A-B distinction was tonal) and only had reduced vowels as possible nuclei. They may have been unstressed. In many of the descendants they are partially or fully lost, leaving changes such as new consonant clusters, consonant mutations, new tone contours, or vowel quality changes via umlaut.

Proto-Chondru allowed syllables of the form (C)(w/r/y)V. Vowel-initial syllables were only allowed word-initially. Consonant clusters were almost never encountered in minor syllables.

A few sample words:
*(nĭ)dråA "fire"
*tyuBtyaB "father"
*weA "ox, cow"
*ciB "here"

Later I'll post the sound changes to Chavakani I've decided on so far.

Any questions or suggestions?

Re: Proto-Chondru: A rough "reconstruction"

Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2016 5:41 pm
by mèþru
So far so good, but it seems like there is a lot of conservatism in the phonology of Chavakani, similar to how Italian is more conservative than French. Is this intentional? Also, what are the other Chondru languages? Are they also this conservative? Does Chavakani have a "conservative" look because the split into many languages is recent, or is this actual conservatism?

Re: Proto-Chondru: A rough "reconstruction"

Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2016 9:32 pm
by Chengjiang
mèþru wrote:So far so good, but it seems like there is a lot of conservatism in the phonology of Chavakani, similar to how Italian is more conservative than French. Is this intentional? Also, what are the other Chondru languages? Are they also this conservative? Does Chavakani have a "conservative" look because the split into many languages is recent, or is this actual conservatism?
The similar consonant inventories (simple voiced stops aside) between Proto-Chondru and Chavakani are actually deceptive; a lot of consonants in Chavakani, despite being present in Proto-Chondru, developed from something else. For example, most Proto-Chondru *s are actually reflected as [h] in Chavakani, and one of the main sources of Chavakani's [s] is Proto-Chondru's *c. Chavakani isn't particularly conservative among its brethren. In particular, Chavakani ended up deleting a lot of segments: Its ai "two" reflects Proto-Chondru *B and its kre "way" reflects *kŭteB.

That said, Proto-Chondru isn't as far from Chavakani as PIE is from its modern descendants. The difference is more like the difference between Mycenaean/early Ancient Greek and Modern Greek.

I don't have big plans for other Chondru languages as yet, but at the very minimum several of them will contribute significantly to Chavakani's vocabulary and even more will be sources of place names.

Re: Proto-Chondru: A rough "reconstruction"

Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2016 10:34 pm
by Chengjiang
Here are some of the sound changes on the way from Proto-Chondru to Chavakani. This isn't an exhaustive list, and I may decide to change the order in which some of them happen.

First, the changes separating Proto-Chondru from Proto-West Chondru, the ancestor of Chavakani and its close relatives:
  • a and å merge to [a], except in situations where å and a were in neighboring syllables, in which case å became [o] instead
  • The non-prenasalized voiced stops b d j g lenite to fricatives (or possibly approximants) [β ð ʝ ɣ]
  • The sequences fy and sy, as well as s before i or ĭ, become [ʃ] or a similar palatalized sibilant
  • All remaining s debuccalize to [h]
  • x, whatever it was, becomes [ʔ]
  • ñj becomes [ⁿdʒ]
  • c becomes [ʃ] in most environments (but [tʃ] in some; I haven't worked out where yet and the waters are probably going to be muddied by dialect mixing anyway)
  • Close vowels i u become mid [e o] if followed by an open vowel
  • Type A syllables develop a high tone, and type B a low tone
  • Vowels in minor syllables are lost, creating consonant codas and new consonant clusters
  • Most of the new consonant clusters are simplified. In many cases this means deleting everything that comes before an obstruent, but some patterns can be observed. Clusters that had a nasal consonant precede a (not already prenasalized) obstruent produce prenasalized consonants, with voiceless stops voicing, spirants becoming stops again, and [ʃ h] becoming [ⁿdʒ ᵑɡ]. Clusters that had a non-coronal consonant followed by an alveolar tend to convert the alveolar to a rhotic, e.g. [kt] > [kr]. Clusters beginning with [w j] convert them to .


And now, the changes separating Proto-West Chondru from an archetypal Kimao dialect, the main "ingredient" in Chavakani:
  • Coda consonants affect tone: Voiced codas lead to low tone and voiceless to high, producing a low rising tone when a low syllable has a voiceless coda and a high falling tone when a high syllable has a voiced coda
  • Coda consonants vocalize: Labials and palatals/palatoalveolars become respectively, while others become a short-lived central or back unrounded close vowel that soon vanishes altogether
  • [w] is deleted after front vowels and before back vowels
  • [j] is deleted before front vowels, and between front vowels and [a]
  • Further evolution of the voiced spirants: [ð] merges with [r] word-initially and is deleted elsewhere, [ʝ] merges with [j], and [ɣ] is deleted in all positions
  • Palatalization: Voiceless stops plus [j] become [tʃ], nasals plus [j] become [ɳ], prenasalized stops plus [j] become [ⁿdʒ], and non-nasal sonorants plus [j] simply become [j]
  • [ʃ] becomes [s] except in the sequences [iʃ] and [ʃi], where it remains [ʃ]
  • Remaining [w] that aren't preceded by a consonant become [β]
  • Voiceless fricatives fortite before the rhotic: [fr sr hr] become [pr tr kr] ([βr] becomes [r])
  • Vowel-vowel hiatus is resolved by merging vowels: Sequences of the same vowel become long vowels first and then regular length vowels, while sequences of unlike vowels become diphthongs
  • High tone plus low tone yields falling tone, while low tone plus high tone yields rising tone
  • [ti] and [ⁿdi] become [tʃi] and [ⁿdʒi]
  • Sporadic loss of [n] in non-initial positions, which continues through to the present day (e.g. colloquial -ngai "plural marker" for orthodox -ngani)
  • [io ie uo ue wo] become [eo e u oe u] (converting [ʃ] to [s] where it would no longer be in a [ʃ]-preserving environment as per the earlier shift to [s])
  • [r] becomes a flap [ɾ]
  • The rising tone becomes a high tone


I'm a little unsure about what order I want for the second set of changes.

Some sample changes that occurred in various other West Chondru dialects:
  • Prenasalized stops lost the nasal portion and became simple voiced stops
  • [ð] became [l], contrasting with [r]
  • [ð] became [j]
  • [ð] became [z]
  • All palatoalveolars, not just [ʃ], shifted to alveolar sibilants
  • Other consonants, such as [h] or [ʔ], were deleted
  • Some diphthongs monophthongized, such as [ai au] becoming [e o]
  • Different tonal evolution (no, I don't have details yet)

Re: Proto-Chondru: A rough "reconstruction"

Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2016 2:07 pm
by Chengjiang
Although this thread is mostly focused on sound changes, I have thought some about other features of the Chondru languages' common ancestor. It had an extensive noun class system expressed through prefixes, many of which could be used derivationally, and some inflectional marking of TAM on verbs and possibly case marking on nouns expressed through suffixes. Many of its descendants have lost most or all grammatical inflection (Chavakani among them), but this leads to a large number of words for related things differing by a tone or an initial mutation in descendants. It probably did not have person marking or generalized number marking.