Hello! You may remember from the first installment that protolanguage 1 wasn’t in fact the oldest reconstructable language in this family. It’s a descendant of protolanguage 0. Now, I’m going backwards to take a look at what protolanguage o looked like, by talking about the sound changes that turned it into protolanguage 1.
Perhaps the most prominent feature of protolanguage 1’s phonology is the emphatic consonants: /pˀ tˀ tsˀ kˀ/. For the origins of these, I’ll take the same path as the Semitic languages, having them develop out of ejective consonants: /pʼ tʼ sʼ kʼ/.
Another important phonological feature of protolanguage 1 is its vowel hiatus. I want this to be a feature protolanguage 1 developed after protolanguage 0. The most common way for vowel hiatus to develop is because a consonant is deleted in between two vowels. The most likely target would be a glottal consonant, like /ʔ/ or /h/, as these are conspicuously absent from protolanguage 1. However, I want to do a bit more than that. Given that I’m taking some inspiration from Proto-Semitic, it seems natural to include an additional voiced/voiceless/emphatic contrast: /l ɬ ɬʼ/. /ɬ/ often weakens to /h/, and I could see /ɬʼ/ weakening to /ʔ/. If this happens before glottals are deleted, this gives us further places for vowel hiatus.
ɬ → h
ɬʼ → ʔ
{h,ʔ} → ∅
I’d also like the alveolopalatal consonants to come from palatalized alveolars. This gives us more potential for evolution in protolanguage 2. I’ll make it so that there are emphatic palatalized alveolars, /tʲʼ/ and /sʲʼ/, as it makes more sense to me than omitting it. When the emphatics go to pharyngeals, we can say that the palatalization cancels out the pharyngealization, so /tʲʼ/ and /sʲʼ/ just goes to /tʲ/ and /sʲ/.
That gives us the following table:
|
Protolanguage 0 Consonants |
Bilabial | Alveolar |
Velar |
||
| Normal | Palatalized | ||||
|
Stop/Affricate |
Voiceless |
p | t |
tʲ |
k |
|
Emphatic |
pʼ | tʼ | tʲʼ | kʼ | |
| Voiced | b | d |
dʲ |
g | |
| Fricative | Voiceless | f | s |
sʲ |
x |
| Emphatic | – | sʼ | sʲʼ |
– |
|
|
Voiced |
v | z |
zʲ |
ɣ |
|
| Laterals | Voiceless | – | ɬ |
– |
– |
|
Emphatic |
– | ɬʼ | – | – | |
| Voiced | – | l | – |
– |
|
| Taps | – | ɾ | – |
– |
|
| Nasals |
m |
n |
– |
– |
|
(Notice that I deleted /j/ and /w/ from this table. I’ve decided to delete them from protolanguage 1 as well – it just felt like they weren’t fitting.)
This isn’t very different from protolanguage 1 yet, but fear not – there are more changes coming soon. I previously mentioned that word-final vowel deletion might explain some of the morphological features of this language. In the next installment, I’ll finish up (for now) the sound changes by deleting word-final vowels, and maybe some other vowels along with them.