Quote:
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.
vī A.₁
viņi, A.₂
vū, 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,
tū + A₁.
Example:
cīŝici housecīŝicaņa house (Acc.₁)
cīŝicātū ~
tū cīŝicaņa in a house (Loc.)
tomū homelandtomuņu 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:
cīŝici →
cīŝīc → [tɕiˈfitɕ]
cīŝicaņa →
cīŝicāņ → [tɕifetɕaŋ] → [tɕifeˈtɕa]
cīŝicātū → [tɕifetɕaˈtu]
tomū → [toˈmu]
tomuņu →
tomūņ → [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:
cīŝicātū →
tū cīŝicā →
tū +
cīŝicā → Prep. [tɕifeˈtɕa]
tomūtū →
tū tomū →
tū +
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]
Quote:
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
~ū 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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