alright time to do this nonsense what I have been putting off
Kaam-Yerte
Kaam-Yerte is a middlingly large language family spoken on Tsalaysia and surrounding territories, mostly coterminous with Tsiic speakers. Kaam-Yerte speakers mostly occupy the less fertile inlands, having been displaced from the better lands by the Tsiic speakers. The two families have had strong influence upon each other, Tsiic languages absorbing certain (especially phonological) features from their Kaam-Yerte substrates, and surviving Kaam-Yerte languages in return borrowing words and grammatical constructions from their Tsiic superstrates. An exception are divergent Kaam-Yerte languages spoken near the original homeland, which does not have a large population of Tsiic speakers.
Phonologically, the principal distinguishing characteristics are uvular and retroflex series, aspirated consonants, a more or less pervasive palatalization distinction, tone and a large vowel inventory, most of which features are shared with many Tsiic languages. Some Kaam-Yerte languages have borrowed clicks from Tsiic (perhaps even Hathic?) languages, and a great majority have borrowed breathy voiced stops.
Their most notable lexical feature is a relatively large set of highly specific locative verbs that can be serialised with other verbs to indicate location. For instance, there are words in most Kaam-Yerte languages meaning things like "be in a river", "be in a house", "be on the coast of a body of water" and so on. Many of these verbs are ancient, so that there is no connection, synchronically or diachronically, between a locative verb and the noun word it indicates location in. However, some are more recent, and a few languages retain the ability to derive new locative verbs. The majority of languages in which they are a closed class make use of several different strategies to form new locatives. Some have also mostly lost the locative verbs, using instead another strategy calqued on the local Tsiic language.
The only Kaam-Yerte language that has been thought about in any amount of detail is Ubghuu. Ubghuu is spoken on Risha, and is in heavy contact with the local Cuhbi dialects. There is significant lexical and grammatical influence from Cuhbi, including the shift of the relative form to closely match the Cuhbi conjunct form and the subsequent abandonment of the converbal forms, development of evidentiality clitics and the shift from person marking to egophoricity marking, as well as a greater prominence of aspectual in comparison to modal marking. How widely the original morphosyntactic features of (Old) Ubghuu are spread in KY is unknown, as I don't know about its exact cladistic position within the family.
Qoic
Qoic is a very diverse mountain-based language family, of which at least parts are presumably in contact with Kharidze (but who knows), roughly comparable to Sino-Tibetan if Sinitic were much smaller and Tibetan the most relevant language. The presumably biggest, and only worked-on, branch of Qoic is Kangshuic.
Kangshuic languages are, for the most part, highly tonal, strongly prefixing languages, tones generally attaching to the word rather than the syllable as a unit. Many Kangshuic languages display a strong noun class system. As in other languages of the area, person marking is uncommon on the verb, and mood and aspect are the primary TAM distinctions, tense being almost entirely unknown.
Phonologically, Kangshuic languages, apart from their generally very large amount of tones (Proto-Kangshuic must be reconstructed as having seven), generally also have unusual syllable structures, allowing large clusters in the onset, but no or very few consonants in the coda. Kangshi is a representative Kangshuic language.
A non-Kangshuic Qoic language is the strange Pirka, which is a sister language to the common ancestor of Kangshuic languages.
Other languages that may or may not exist are: Ntaratu and its relatives, including the highly divergent Nyipa. These are very straightforward SOV languages with a very Tsez-like system of noun cases and the maybe mildly interesting feature that the only contrast in their consonants is one of prenasalization. Jalvaan, which phonologically is basically Persian, and grammatically some form of shit Graeco-Latin with Kiranti and Dravidian superstrates. This was originally supposed to be the Sumerian in my conworld, but since it is somewhat boring and there ought to be better ways to get writing that probably won't happen.
These languages, if they are a thing, would probably be somewhere else entirely than every other language so far presented.
Last edited by Hallow XIII on Mon Aug 01, 2016 3:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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