Today I’m going to be tackling prosodic sound changes in this conlang. (That is, sound changes based on stress.)
These sound changes are going to be important. So determining the stress system is going to be very important. Stress in the protolanguage always falls on the last closed syllable that isn’t the final syllable. (Closed syllables are syllables that end in consonants.) In words with no closed syllables, stress falls on the antepenultimate syllable.
Notably, this allows us to manipulate stress with affixes. Let’s make an example root, *kosat.
In base unmodified form, it has stress on the first syllable:
- ˈko.sat
Add a simple affix like -a, it still has stress on the first syllable:
- ˈko.sa.ta
But add a suffix like -ga, and the second syllable becomes closed, and the stress shifts:
- ko.ˈsat.ga
We can even shift the stress off the stem entirely, with an affix like -agra:
- ko.sa.ˈtag.ra
Using a prefix like an-, we can also shift the stress before the stem.
- ˈan.ko.sat
While I’m not committed to any of these affixes yet (and currently they don’t have any meaning), they cover most of the possible stress shifts that can happen to a verb in this language. I’m going to use these four examples to demonstrate our stress shifts.
Let’s look at the stress-based sound changes I’ve got from the protolanguage to Old Kyol.
Firstly, pretonic vowels are lost. (That is, the vowel directly before the stressed syllable.)
- ko.ˈsat.ga → ˈksat.ga
- ko.sa.ˈtag.ra → kos.ˈtag.ra
The new pretonic vowels then go to /ə/.
- kos.’tag.ra → kəs.’tag.ra
Then, posttonic vowels are lost. (The vowels directly after the stressed syllable.)
- ˈko.sa.ta → ˈkos.ta
- ko.ˈsat.ga → ˈksatg
- kos.ˈtag.ra → kəs.ˈtag.r
- ˈan.ko.sat → ˈan.ksat
That gives our final four forms:
ˈkos.ta, ˈksatg, kəs.ˈtag.r, ˈan.ksat
Something notable emerges here. Our old stem had a vowel pattern of CoCaC. But looking at the last three forms, we can’t tell that the first vowel was o. If the first vowel was a or i in the protolanguage, it would produce the same forms.
This is actually really good. If you had to know all three consonants and both vowels of the original root, it wouldn’t really be triconsonantal – you’d still have to know that the old root was *kodag. But if you don’t have to know that first vowel, the root can be reanalyzed as k-d-g with a thematic vowel a. Now, we could still analyze this as a root form ksat with a bunch of vowel changes, like some analyses of the Berber languages. But later changes will make it more difficult to analyze it this way.
Of course, we still have that first form sticking around, but it’s honestly fairly easy to have all the affixes you can apply to the verb shift the stress away from the first syllable. Perhaps a couple forms still preserve the “o” of the old stem. If so, they’re treated as irregular.
With the stress-based changes done, next time I’ll fill out the rest of the changes from Old Kyol to High Kyol that encourage the triconsonantal root structure.