Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

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Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by Cedh »

Here's a challenge to all of you:

Reconstruct as much as you can of the latest common ancestor of the T1 language family of Akana!

This language family (obviously, the name is a placeholder until one of you can come up with a reasonable real name) has been created over the three or four years by several people, starting from a protolanguage that has been kept secret up to now. It is spoken in the southeastern part of the continent Tuysáfa. The languages in question are the following, listed roughly from southwest to northeast:
NB: There seems to be a technical problem with the current version of Firefox on Mac OS X, which may crash when visiting a wiki page that contains certain special characters in its title. It happened to me on the Hkətl’ohnim page, for example. If that should happen to you, use Chrome instead.

Almost all of the relevant apparent lexical cognates have already been compiled in the following publicly editable spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... sp=sharing

For most languages, the spreadsheet doesn't use the regular orthography but a variant that's closer to IPA. Morphophonological notation conventions have been retained, however, because they may prove useful for the reconstruction. Feel free to sort the sheet differently, or to move around items where you think you have found another cognate. Note that only a small part of the languages' morphology has already been included in the spreadsheet.

Here's a basic linguistic map of the region, with languages from the main two local families named (T1 languages in bright green, Dumic languages in red):
teamlocations-3.png
teamlocations-3.png (121.85 KiB) Viewed 13666 times
Your tasks:
  • Figure out regular sound correspondences between the various T1 languages.
  • Figure out the probable phoneme inventory of Proto-T1.
  • Reconstruct as many lexical items as possible. (There are about 500 words in the comparative spreadsheed which do have exact counterparts in at least one other branch of the family, but most of the other words also have a valid etymology in the protolanguage. Not all of the words are inherited though; some T1 languages contain loanwords from each other, from nearby Dumic languages, or from a few undescribed languages of the Macro-Anatolionesian family.)
  • Reconstruct the basic nominal and verbal morphology of Proto-T1. (The languages are quite divergent grammatically, with the protolanguage probably dating back more than 3000 years, but there should be enough data to work with.)
  • Reconstruct the most important sound changes from Proto-T1 to its descendant languages.
You can discuss all of this here in this thread, of course. This is intended as a group project, so work together, share observations, and motivate each other to discover new things!

Also, just so you know, thedukeofnuke has already done some work towards reconstructing Proto-T1, of which you can find a summary here. He doesn't have the time to finish it on his own (that's why we're proposing it as an open challenge now), but I'm quite sure he'll chime in here too when some other people are getting started with the project.

Have fun!

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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by Pole, the »

Also, just to be sure, the information regarding Old Yalan is far from complete at the moment, as can be seen, and would probably need to be updated. So, if you have any question about it, feel free to contact me.

* * *

And, as a teaser, several of the already gathered cognate sets, rendered as a table:
(some of them can be wrongly connected)

Image

Image
Last edited by Pole, the on Sun Jan 18, 2015 8:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by communistplot »

Pole, the wrote:Also, just to be sure, the information regarding Old Yalan is far from complete at the moment, as can be seen, and would probably need to be updated. So, if you have any question about it, feel free to contact me.

* * *

And, as a teaser, several of the already gathered cognate sets, rendered as a table:
(some of them can be wrongly connected)

Image

Image
Small mistake (I probably shouldn't conlang while half asleep), <ˈnek> should be <'nets>. I only just realised it now tho.
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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by Zju »

Just when I'm busy deriving the last descendant of PL this happens. Oh well, at least it's another motivation to go faster. I'll just make some shots in the dark:

1 - *not
2 - *nʲek
3 - *sa
4 - *ʔkep
6 - *toʔk
7 - *mul
9 - *ola
10 - *anada

Other than that, I'm looking forward to reading the others' reconstruction. :)

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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by Pole, the »

I suggest that you choose a name for the language family. If you have no idea, what do you think about, for instance, Idanuic (from Ced. ıdanu father) or Kataic (from Ced. kata man)?
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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by Fixsme »

+1. That would be cooler than "proto-T1."

I have a (probably stupid) question about the Cednitit language. How do you know the word for one, "ot" was at some point pronounced like something like [otʰ], if I understand the instructions given it should be pronounced like [oʔ]? Are we sure the glottal stop comes from an aspirated stop? Or does the "t" just means it was an alveolar stop.

For the declension of Yalan group, I guess that: genitive is in [-h], locative in [-tu] or [-tau], maybe an old particle that have been absorbed in the declension system, in West Yalan (WY) the "tu" can be independent, nominative being non-marked. The accusative 1 in East Yalan (EY) seems to have the same origin as the accusative in Early North Yalan (NY) with a [-k] suffix. The accusative 2 in EY and oblique in WY is less obvious, a [-u] suffix?

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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by Pole, the »

For the declension of Yalan group, I guess that: genitive is in [-h], locative in [-tu] or [-tau], maybe an old particle that have been absorbed in the declension system, in West Yalan (WY) the "tu" can be independent, nominative being non-marked.
You are on the right track.


Old Yalan, the common ancestor of WY, EY and ENY is public and it is a daughter of the Proto-T1, so I can tell you a few things about that one:

The short answer is, the locative ending in Old Yalan was [tuː].

The long answer is, the Yalan was never an uniform language and, depending on the exact place and time period, the exact forms used were varying.


If we start looking at the moment somewhere in the middle between the actual protolanguage and the two main Yalan dialects (West and East Yalan) — it is -1000 YP in the original timeline, but it will probably be modified; it is probably the earliest moment the published material is oing to cover — we'll see that Old Yalan inherited six cases.

Two of them, however, were outliers.

First, the forms of ergative have been conserved only in 1st and 2nd person pronouns. Also, the scale of its use is becoming unclear.
In the northern branch (yielding ENY) they finally replace the original nominative forms of the pronouns. Also, they simplify, e.g. [niːtʃaz̺a] → [nitʃʒ] → [nitʃʃ] → [nitʃ].
In the southern branch (yielding WY and EY) the forms are lost.

Secondly, the locative forms are somewhat unstable.
One thing is, it follows a different stress pattern than all the other forms. For instance, N. A.₁ viņi, A.₂ , G. vihi all have two morae. The locative form vītū has four.
What is more, it is in free variation with the equally long prepositional form, + A₁.

Example:

cīŝici house
cīŝicaņa house (Acc.₁)
cīŝicātū ~ tū cīŝicaņa in a house (Loc.)

tomū homeland
tomuņu homeland (Acc.₁)
tomūtū ~ tū tomuņu in one's homeland (Loc.)

In the northern branch, the locative forms have been lost.
In WY and EY, however, interesting things started happening.


In West Yalan the apocope caused the formation of a new syllable type. Closed syllables, prohibited in OY, were now permitted. Final -CVCV changed to -CVˑC, with the vowel length being somewhere in-between: longer than short vowels (to compensate the lost vowel), but not too long (as it would cause overlong syllables to be formed).
Then, the vowel length was lost anyway.
At the end the consonant /ŋ/ was also lost.
It affected primarily the oblique case endings:

cīŝicicīŝīc → [tɕiˈfitɕ]
cīŝicaņacīŝicāņ → [tɕifetɕaŋ] → [tɕifeˈtɕa]
cīŝicātū → [tɕifetɕaˈtu]

tomū → [toˈmu]
tomuņutomūņ → [tomuŋ] → [toˈmu]
tomūtū → [tomuˈtu]

Somewhere during the process another thing occurred: the locative ending has been reanalyzed back as a suffixed preposition, thus creating a set of new forms:

cīŝicātūtū cīŝicā + cīŝicā → Prep. [tɕifeˈtɕa]
tomūtūtū tomū + tomū → Prep. [toˈmu]

For consonantal stems (Nom. ending with a short vowel, e.g. cīŝici) it became finally the same as the accusative I, but stayed separate for long enough time to be grammaticalized.
For vocalic stems (Nom. ending with a long vowel, e.g. tomū) it turned out the same as nominative (and, in many cases, accusative I, as well).


In East Yalan the locative forms stayed unchanged for a long time.
Finally, the vowel shift caused the long vowels to be diphthongized (except a ā → /ə a/) and then shortened when unstressed:

cīŝici → [kaiˈsiki]
cīŝicaņa → [kaisiˈkəŋə]
cīŝicātū → [kaisikaˈtau]

tomū → [tuˈmau]
tomuņu → [tuˈmuŋu]
tomūtū → [tumɔˈtau]
The accusative 1 in East Yalan (EY) seems to have the same origin as the accusative in Early North Yalan (NY) with a [-k] suffix. The accusative 2 in EY and oblique in WY is less obvious, a [-u] suffix?
It's a bit more complicated.

The accusative in ENY, primative in EY and indefinite accusative in WY are all derived from the common source, i.e. accusative I in Old Yalan. In West Yalan the final /ŋ/ disappeared, so its source is less obvious.
Its form was ~aņa (C stems) and ~VņV (V stems).

The secundative in EY and deictic (proximal and distal) accusative in WY are derived from another case in OY, the accusative II.
Its ending was for both types of stems and assibilation was applied — it is reflected in WY only in the distal ending -hu. In EY there is another relict: in C stems the final /v/ changes to /ɦ/.
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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by Pogostick Man »

Pole, the wrote:The accusative in ENY, primative in EY and indefinite accusative in WY are all derived from the common source, i.e. accusative I in Old Yalan. In West Yalan the final /ŋ/ disappeared, so its source is less obvious.
Its form was ~aņa (C stems) and ~VņV (V stems).
Similarly, the recurring -an in Teyetáti is an accusative ending.
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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by Pogostick Man »

Anybody want to take a crack at this?
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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by Cedh »

There has been some interest in a challenge like this one over on the Conlang Mailing List, so I'm bumping this once again. Also, it's been almost exactly five years since the protolanguage for this family was finished and work on the daughterlanguages began, so...

All the relevant information is up in the OP. Anybody interested in having a go at this?

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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by sanskacharu »

To clarify: is this a project to reconstruct a protolanguage that has not already been developed, or are there "answers" already?

I think it looks very interesting. I might give it a go, though how fast I'd make progress given my schedule remains to be seen.
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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by Cedh »

The protolanguage for this family is an actual conlang with grammar and lexicon, and it did serve as the basis for diachronically deriving all the daughterlanguages. It has been kept secret for the exact purpose of being reconstructed, and one of the major incentives of this game is to see to what extent the reconstruction actually matches the description of the protolanguage. (When the reconstruction is declared "done", the protolanguage will be revealed to the general public.)

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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by Frislander »

If you go on the Akana wiki meta page you'll see that there have been several of these games over the past decade or so.

For me personally proto-T1 is the one I'm really excited by the prospect of, and I can't wait to see what people manage to come up with.
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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by sanskacharu »

Fascinating! I'll take a look at what's been done so far and see if I have anything to add after I finish my classwork for the day.
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  • Ku Ṣili -- Lonely Misfit. Can't make up its mind.
  • Ayakadiya -- Standoffish, self-important. Needs More Lexicon.

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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by Frislander »

Has anyone else noticed that Hkətl’ohnim uvulars and some cases of /h/ tend to correspond with Omari ˤ denoting "flattening", and that even when that's not present the correspondences only show the Omari reflex after non-high vowels, and that Omari ˤ only ever occurs after dorsals and /h/? So I think we should definitely consider reconstructing uvulars for the proto-language, given the last point especially.
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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by Frislander »

OK, I'm going to post my own reconstructions of the numerals here just as a kind of outline as to how I'm kinda approaching this, and also to contrast with Zju's earlier reconstruction. I reconstruct the numerals thus:

1: *noː
2: *niakɪ~*niakʲ
3: *saː
4: *qep
5: *reː
6: *toqʰ
7: *mul
8: *feː
9: *oːlaː
10: *aːnataː

The first important departure point is that I consider Cednìtıt, Yalan and Ḏoarevutan aspirated stops to be conservative, while Yalan, Omari and Tumetıęk voiced consonants represent secondary developments. This is based on systematic correspondences between the unaspirated consonants and aspirated consonants in the first three with those consonants which do and don't respectively undergo softening in Omari and Tumetıęk, where softening occurs between vowels. (However in the case of Ced. the apparent wird-final aspirated stops appear to be due to an error in reading the Ced. data since all word-final stops are phonetically [ʔ] but are written using the graphemes for the aspirated stops based on their etymological POA; indeed much of the Ced. orthography (and hence representation in the comparative table) is strongly etymology-based).

Secondly I consider the Hkətl’ohnim uvular stops to be conservative. This is based on correspondences with the Omari process of flattening. I reconstruct them as true uvulars rather than as clusters due to the distribution of the Omari flattening process, since it only ever occurs with dorsal/glottal consonants, never with coronals or labials. There also appears to be a correspondence where in Ced. historical velar were fronted and these uvulars became the new velars, though this did not apply in all environments and more research needs to be done.

Other minor details: I reconstruct the diphthong in 2 on the basis of the Hkətl’ohnim form; the Yalan and Omari forms could descend from *ie or *ia, and the /e/ in the Tumetıęk form may be the result of fronting due to the palatal articulation of the following consonant.

I also provisionally reconstruct 5 and 8 with the same vowel, as they have identical reflexes in all the languages except Tari, and in that language there may be some conditioning of the vowel which produces the separate reflexes, however this will require further investigation.

Finally I disregarded the Ced. form when reconstructing the form for 1, since this would require Ced. to lose the initial nasal in this one form and all the other daughters to lose the coda consonant instead, when there is at best only sporadic evidence for either process.
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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by Zju »

Reconsidering the numerals again, Cednìtit otʰ may not be a cognate to the other words for one at all: why would it lose initial n, yet nətʰ retain it? Considering that and the fact it has just one segment in common with others (tʰ may not be due to analogy, but original), the case for being a cognate is not that strong.

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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by Frislander »

Just added a load of Northeastern Bay cognates to the table, which is super helpful because they provide a lot of super-helpful information as to the correspondences, especially with regards to the clusters.
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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by communistplot »

Good thing I started working on my stuff again. Don't worry no major changes. The NEB language is set in stone as far as sounds go, the only thing I'm working on there is fleshing out the grammar and beefing up the lexicon, also correcting the name to Thaxarevemni [tʰɑ.xɑ.ɻe.vem.ni]. Most of the work tho is on its descendent languages, which isn't as relevant for this task.
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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by Cedh »

I notice someone has added data for "Proto-Far Western" to the table; a language that has never been mentioned before AFAIK, and doesn't seem to be especially closely related to any of the known other T1 languages. I'm curious. What's up with this?

Also, I suggest keeping the "#C" column (number of apparent first-level cognates) updated whenever someone adds a word to the spreadsheet; sorting by this column will make searching for the most promising correspondences much easier.

And: Frislander, maybe you could suggest a name for the family at some point?

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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by Frislander »

Cedh wrote:I notice someone has added data for "Proto-Far Western" to the table; a language that has never been mentioned before AFAIK, and doesn't seem to be especially closely related to any of the known other T1 languages. I'm curious. What's up with this?
They were already there when I first looked at it I've no idea. I'm in two minds as to whether to consider it in my reconstruction (because it wasn't part of the original set of languages so it shouldn't be required to reconstruct it) and therefore whether or not I should count it in the "C" column.
Also, I suggest keeping the "#C" column (number of apparent first-level cognates) updated whenever someone adds a word to the spreadsheet; sorting by this column will make searching for the most promising correspondences much easier.
I have been doing this yes, I've even taken the liberty of increasing it in some caes even when no new word has been added because I suspect that more of the words may be cognate than originally thought.
And: Frislander, maybe you could suggest a name for the family at some point?
Will do, but I'll probably base it off of a reconstructed form and I'm still a way off proposing a full reconstruction yet.
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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by Pole, the »

Also, I suggest keeping the "#C" column (number of apparent first-level cognates) updated whenever someone adds a word to the spreadsheet; sorting by this column will make searching for the most promising correspondences much easier.
I wonder if it would be a good idea to have this auto-generated based on the number of non-empty cells (looks like =COUNTA(F2:H2;L2;P2) would suffice). In case if the correspondence is not good enough, you can move the odd ones to a separate row.

Also, it would be a good idea to add Buck codes, so the list can be ordered thematically as well as alphabetically.
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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by Frislander »

Pole, the wrote:
Also, I suggest keeping the "#C" column (number of apparent first-level cognates) updated whenever someone adds a word to the spreadsheet; sorting by this column will make searching for the most promising correspondences much easier.
I wonder if it would be a good idea to have this auto-generated based on the number of non-empty cells (looks like =COUNTA(F2:H2;L2;P2) would suffice). In case if the correspondence is not good enough, you can move the odd ones to a separate row.

Also, it would be a good idea to add Buck codes, so the list can be ordered thematically as well as alphabetically.
We have that already; the table has an additional "category" column between the GLOSS and #C columns.
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Re: Protolang Reconstruction Challenge (Akana)

Post by communistplot »

Cedh wrote:I notice someone has added data for "Proto-Far Western" to the table; a language that has never been mentioned before AFAIK, and doesn't seem to be especially closely related to any of the known other T1 languages. I'm curious. What's up with this?
That was me, it's sort of a side project for when I have no energy to work on the NEB languages/have ideas that would require the complete rewriting of NEB, instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater I figured it'd be easier to just work it into its own thing. It's not really that fleshed out except for sound changes and a word list thus far, which I figured might be useful for reconstruction.
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