Creating a Fictional Language Family Part 1: Proto-phonology, and a Discussion of Emphasis Harmony

Hello! This time, as promised, I’ll be actually getting into the conlanging. Let’s start with some protophonology:

Lang 1-proto Consonants		Bilabial	Alveolar	Avleolopalatal	Velar
Stop/Affricate	Voiceless	p	t	tɕ	k
	Emphatic	pˤ	tˤ tsˤ	~	kˀ
	Voiced	b	d	dʑ	g
Fricative	Voiceless	f	s	ɕ	x
	Voiced	v	z	ʑ	ɣ
Liquids		–	ɾ l
Nasals		m	n	–	–

Lang 1-proto Vowels	Front	Back
Close	i iː	u uː
Open	a aː

Phonotactics: Default (C)V(C) syllable structure. Allows word-initial syllable structure of sPV(C), where P is a voiceless plosive. Allows vowel hiatus of up to two vowels.

On the whole, this is a fairly standard phonological system: it’s got a classic three-vowel system with a length distinction, full series of voiceless and voiced plosives at the three major places of articulation, and a fourth palatalized place of articulation (though note the alveolo-palatal obstruents instead of the more common palato-alveolars). But you’ve probably noticed the “emphatic” category. Let me explain that.

Some Afroasiatic languages, such as Arabic, have a series of consonants with a pharyngeal secondary articulation*. These consonants are referred to as emphatic consonants, and they derive from a series of obstruents in Proto-Afroasiatic that contrasted with separate voiced and voiceless series, much like the one you see here.

These pharyngealized consonants often have the interesting property of spreading their emphasis to nearby sounds. In some dialects, this may only affect adjacent consonants – in others, it can affect the entire word, in a process called “emphasis harmony”. Even more intriguingly, vowels affected this way tend to change their quality. Sometimes vowels affected this way will back, sometimes they will lower, sometimes they do both. This starts to create something that looks like vowel harmony.

However, there’s nothing happening at the phonemic level. These vowel shifts are purely allophonic, still being determined by the presence of an emphatic consonant. However, if the emphasis distinction were to be lost after emphasis harmony has taken effect, we might end up with a system of actual vowel harmony. In fact, we could end up with several different systems in different descendant languages, depending on how emphasis harmony affected the vowels. The two descendant languages that I’m creating differ in how they handle emphatic vowels, resulting in two very different harmony systems.

In these systems, vowel harmony will spread like emphasis harmony did in the protolanguage, resulting in some unusual properties. Emphasis harmony tends to spread bidirectionally. When it spreads regressively, it is most often unimpeded, but when it spreads progressively, it often is blocked by high front segments. This includes the vowel [i], but also consonants like [j] and even [ʒ]. For this protolang, I’ll follow this pattern. Emphasis harmony isn’t blockable regressively, but is blocked progressively by [iː], [ɕ], [ʑ], [tɕ], and [dʑ]. These patterns will persist into the descendant languages, meaning they’ll end up with vowel harmony being blocked by consonants!

In the next installment of this, I’ll be getting into the actual languages, evolving out vowel harmony systems for two descendent languages. Future posts on this won’t be nearly as research-heavy. Emphasis harmony is a niche enough feature that I thought it merited a fair bit of explanation; most of the other changes won’t need a whole blog post of background.

*It’s actually uvularization in Arabic, not pharyngealization. However, it’s almost always represented with the pharyngealization symbol, and a lot of places will still refer to it as pharyngealization instead of uvularization, so I’ll follow the standard. Also take note that references to “emphatic” consonants aren’t always talking about pharyngealization/uvularization. In Proto-Semitic, the emphatic consonants were ejectives, and they retained this quality in some modern languages. Emphatic consonants also gave rise to implosive consonants in some non-Semitic Afroasiatic languages. 

Editor’s Note: I’m completely guessing at the date on this one. The concept of evolving emphasis harmony into vowel harmony goes all the way back to Yiksighe (though I did it really weirdly there). I’m dating this to December 8, 2022 – the creation date for the earliest documentation I have of the protolanguage – but most of the research here was done earlier for Yiksighe.