The Dead in Kyol, Part 1: The Two Parts of the Soul

Nilakash Roy-Faderman

Note: This is a bit different (and shorter) than my previous posts. I’m now doing some culture-building, focused on the area of Kyol, a region in the subtropics. I’ll discuss Kyol more broadly later, but for now, here’s a bit of their religion. (I’ve been on airplanes for most of the past few weeks, so I unfortunately don’t have time for much more than this right now.)

The people of Kyol, like many on earth, divide the soul into two parts.

The first part is blood, the animating force. A newly conceived child takes a portion of its mother’s blood to sustain it, which then multiplies as it grows. This vital force in each individual is centered in the heart, which produces and purifies it.

The second part is bone, the part that allows for thinking and experiencing emotion. Bones aren’t transferred from the mother to the child – they are created upon conception. As such, it’s also the individual part of the soul – the part that distinguishes one person from another. This spiritual force is found in all the bones, but it’s most central in the skull.

The loci of these concentrations of spirit (the heart and skull) in part explains how this idea came about. If you stab someone in the heart, they generally die. But if you even slightly damage someone’s skull, they often start acting weirdly. This solid object that persists after death and looks similar to one’s face seems far more significant than the lump of jelly inside it. (Some historians theorize that the original two-soul system was specifically the heart and the skull, until it was later rationalized as blood and bone by philosophers.)

In the next posts, I’ll discuss the practical ramifications of this system, with particular regard to the afterlife and the disposal of the dead.

Avoiding the “Fantasy Racism” Trope

Nilakash Roy-Faderman

Fantasy racism is, simply put, “discrimination and/or prejudice involving fictional races or non-human species.” (According to TVTropes, at least.) Specifically, we’ll be talking about that second part – non-human species – because it’s what’s most immediately relevant to the world I’m building.

This is a trope that’s hard to do right. There are countless online articles, video essays, etc. that have broken down how fantastic racism in various media ends up with unintended and unfortunate implications about race – or worse, entirely intentional and unfortunate implications.* Even when fantasy racism is done well, there are some issues with the concept as a whole (that I may end up addressing in another blog post down the line).

* I’ve seen all kinds of things get critiqued, but by far the most common is the urban fantasy film “Bright,” which (although I’ve never watched it) seems to be a paragon of how not to do fantasy racial allegories.

It’s also just not a trope I’m particularly interested in developing. Fantastical allegories for racism are ubiquitous. It’s so common a trope in works with multiple species (or types of magic user, or whatever) that not including it is, I think, more unexpected and interesting than having it present. I’m sure there are still versions of this trope yet to be created that are still interesting, fresh, able to invigorate this trope with new life. But boring, repetitive versions have been done so often that the trope itself often leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I also simply don’t want to devote the time to trying to think of a new version of this trope that breathes new life into it. (Why do that when you could spend months mapping your world according to the Koppen Climate Classification?)

Of course, that’s not to say that there won’t be discrimination in this world. It’s just not going to fall along species lines, and it’s not generally going to be a direct parallel for modern Western visions of race.

Unfortunately, speciesism is hard to get rid of for reasons other than habit. The big problem is how seemingly inevitable it is. When two groups come into conflict with each other, more often than not they’ll try to find some fundamental distinction between them. This can be race, it can be language, it can be religion – really, anything works. And when you have two groups who are of different species coming into conflict, species is probably going to be fairly obvious as a “fundamental difference”. 

The first way I tried to get around this issue is by making it so that there are never single-species societies. If, from the onset of sapience, the two species have worked together and formed societies together, it might never occur to them to draw distinctions along species lines. Instead, self- and other-hood could be understood based along cultural differences, rather than appearance differences – language, religion, etc. Unfortunately, it’s not particularly plausible that these societies would be the first to occur – or, if they were, they wouldn’t last very long in comparison to single-species groups. In hunter-gatherer societies, which are generally fairly small, inbreeding can become a problem. Because of this, hunter-gatherers often practice exogamy with neighbouring tribes. But if each society is made up of two species, the available gene pool is cut in half. Each tribe would need to be able to coordinate meeting with twice as many tribes to have the same level of genetic diversity. Societies made up of two species would be at a considerable disadvantage to societies made up only of one.

But there’s another method for getting around species-based prejudice. Instead of worrying about the groups in conflict, you worry about the conflict itself. What if the two species simply never clash? This seems hard to achieve. One option is for the two species to not be in competition for the same resources. There’s no reason for them to fight if there’s nothing for them to fight over.

This is the case for the humans and the golkh. Golkh can get enough nutrition from small sources of meat – rodents, birds, insects. They also are more disease-resistant than humans, meaning they can more reliably scavenge meat and eat windfall, and more toxin-resistant. But they’re worse at hunting than humans, meaning they don’t try and take down large game. As such, Golkh and humans won’t be in competition for food. Humans eat primarily large game which Golkh can’t hunt, as well as some plants (like roots, tubers and fruit). Golkh eat small game which is inefficient for humans to hunt, as well as scavenged meat, windfall, fungi, and some other flora. This neutralizes other potential resources which can be sources of conflict. As they don’t share a food source, territory won’t be as much of a concern – the two species can extract different resources from the same patch of land.

In some of these cultures, this cohabitation may evolve into a kind of mutualism. Humans may rely on Golkh to dispose of rotting meat, or to clear out pests, with the golkh getting a meal out of the exchange. Or perhaps a society of agrarian golkh relies on human hunter-gatherers, who trade the golkh meat that they wouldn’t be able to hunt for technology that the humans didn’t have access to. Eventually, these societies may become reliant on each other, shaping their lifestyles around this constant exchange.

Evolving Sapience (The Golkh, Part 2)

Nilakash Roy-Faderman

To understand the biology of the modern golkh, we need to understand where they came from. Let’s start out by examining an early ancestor: Primonasus sp., of the tribe Primonasini in the subfamily Procyoninae.

Primonasus was omnivorous, eating fruit, insects, fungi, and occasionally small birds and rodents. They lived in temperate forested habitats. They were semi-arboreal, scaling trees to avoid predators and forage for food. A partly opposable hallux and pollex assisted them in climbing.

Climatic shifts began to erode at the forest ecosystem. Drier interiors made forests give way to woodlands, to savannah, and eventually to arid grasslands. Organisms had to adapt to increased heat and limited food. Primonasus was in a good position to adapt for food scarcity: good at scavenging/foraging and able to use a variety of resources for food. This second capability further developed in the desert. They supplemented their diet with scavenging, and eventually evolved resistances to many common pathogens found in meat in the early stages of decay.

Using tools (a capability Primonasus already possessed) helped with foraging – tearing thick hide from carcasses, chopping through woody coverings around tubers, extracting grubs from borrows, mounds or trees. As tool use became critical to survival, a fully opposable pollux was selected for.

This brings us to bipedalism. Primonasus already could stand on its hind legs. Permanent bipedalism freed up the front limbs for better tool use. Fast moving wasn’t as important for them as it was for humans. They were primarily scavengers, not pursuit hunters, using tools for extractive foraging (and, occasionally, disuading their few natural predators). As such, the posture they used for walking wasn’t particularly efficient – there was never the selective pressure to force them to adapt to quick movement. Their gait was slow and shambling, and, though they could stand more or less upright, they typically walked with bent knees and a forward-angled back. To help balance, their foot shape somewhat changed, resulting in their halluces no longer being opposable. However, their toes remained far more dextrous than that of humans, allowing them to more easily navigate rough terrain. 

Heat was also a factor that shaped the modern Golkh. Like humans, they lost most of their fur. (Yes, that’s the reason that I often draw them with wrinkles – their modern forms bear a slight resemblance to a sphynx cat, or a Mexican hairless dog). However, they didn’t keep a patch of hair over their head. In humans, this patch shielded the head from the sun. Given human bipedalism, this was especially important, as their heads were far more exposed than the rest of their body. However, the stance of these early Golkh exposed both the head and the back of the torso to the sun. Instead of hair, the Golkh instead relied on preexisting traits of their coloration. Like many carnivora, Primonasus exhibited countershading – a lighter underbelly and a darker top. In the desert, this feature adapted for sun protection. In addition to a large overall increase in melanin production, the back and top of the head of these early Golkh became much darker. (Like in humans, this trait would diversify as the Golkh moved into different climates, with different groups having different skin colors, but some trace of the darker back would always remain.)

Golkh also had to deal with heat dispersion. However, they didn’t need to be as efficient at this as humans. Sweating for evaporative cooling is useful in humans in part because it can be toggled on and off – greater exertion heats up the body and triggers sweating. But, again, the Golkh were scavengers, not pursuit hunters. They lived at a fairly constant rate of exertion. Sweating, as such, didn’t have as many advantages, and was a waste of valuable water in an arid environment. Instead, the ears of Golkh enlarged (an adaptation seen in many hot-habitat creatures – big ears means more surface area, which means better heat dispersal.)

Choosing a Clade to Evolve Sapience (The Golkh, Part 1)

Nilakash Roy-Faderman

If you’ve seen my other work, you may have noticed some drawings of these guys:

Along with humans, these creatures form the majority of sapient life on this planet. Descended from large procyonids (relatives of raccoons), they long ago adopted bipedalism and lost most of their fur. While they have had many different names in different places and at different times, we will call them the Golkh. 

When designing a “sapient species,” speculative biology often isn’t just concerned with making a species that is sapient. What we want is a species with members that can interact with each other and the world around them, forming societies and creating new technologies. We aren’t just looking to make a species with the same level of cognition as humanity (a trait probably already shared with some cetaceans and possibly with other organisms) – we’re trying to make a species that can use that cognition to impose its will on the world.
 Procyonids seem uniquely suited for this purpose. In particular, members of the genus Procyon, commonly known as raccoons, have many of the qualities that help with the development of this kind of sapience:

  • They’re intelligent; studies have shown them to be quick learners and good at retaining learned information. (They also have an unusually high neuron density, something that has been proposed as a neuroanatomical indicator of intelligence.)
  • They exhibit sociality.
  • They have high manual dexterity, even without opposable thumbs
    • And we can always give them opposable thumbs, or something that functions like them, later
  • They’re generalist omnivores – a niche which Adrian Tchaikovsky in Children of Time argues is highly conducive to development of sapience
  • While they don’t commonly use tools in the wild, they are adept at doing so in experimental conditions, suggesting that they have the capacity. (See Morton, F. Blake)

Given this, it’s surprising that procyonids aren’t more common as creatures chosen to evolve sentience in speculative biology. My personal theory is that they’re just too straightforward to be of interest to most speculative biologists. Cetaceans, a common choice, offer some unique challenges when it comes to developing societies: their underwater habitat makes developing the use of fire, and thus traditional metallurgy, impossible, and they lack appendages that are ideal for tool use. Insects, particularly eusocial ones, offer interesting social structures – either navigating how individuals work within the hive structure or how a hive itself can function as a sapient entity. Cephalopods, in addition to the sheer weirdness/coolness factor, also have an underwater mode of living as well as unusual neurology. But procyonids are already close enough to humans that creating a society out of them doesn’t present much of a challenge.

But that’s actually good for my purposes. The golkh aren’t supposed to be alien to humanity. Humans and golkh have been in contact since prehistory, and throughout history they’ve worked together, lived together and built civilisations together. This is only possible because the two species are so similar. They share potential habitats (both requiring air, not water, and both living above ground.) Their articulators (organs used to produce speech) are more or less the same. Their bodies end up similar enough that technology usable by a golkh should be usable by a human and vice versa. This means that humans don’t need special technology to communicate or live with golkh.

But humans and golkh do have differences, and, over millenia of close contact, these differences will become very obvious. This is part of what you have to consider when designing them. Minor details – slight differences in life cycle, anatomy, or even diet – can create larger differences in lifestyle and worldview. When considering a society that includes multiple species, which of these differences will cause rifts in the society? Which conflicting needs can be simultaneously met? Which different ideas can find a middle ground? And how will a society based on multiple species understand concepts like ethnicity? Nationhood? Personhood?

Of course, I’m not trying to answer these questions in this post. We still need to discuss the species itself. So, in the next post on the Golkh, I’m going to discuss their evolution – the creatures that they evolved from, and what pressures led them towards sapience.

Worldbuilding Geography, Part I: Early Iterations

Nilakash Roy-Faderman

Hi! The following are reposts from Instagram, but they’ve been supplemented by occasional retrospective sections. In this, I look back on my ideas from the stage I’m currently at in the process, and sometimes critique my ideas and methods.

(Originally posted August 16 2022) The humble beginnings of this world map, adjusted from a simulation made using tectonics.js. Most of the work here was warping the map into a shape I liked in Photoshop, but I also rendered some of the islands in finer detail. (see the black outlines)

Retrospective: tectonics.js, and other tectonic-plate-modeling softwares, are valuable tools for doing worldbuilding, especially if you want to achieve maximum realism. I chose tectonics.js because it doesn’t require any technological knowhow to use – in fact, it operates entirely from the web. However, this comes at the sacrifice of any kind of control over what the final product ends up looking like, except for generating maps over and over until something interesting comes out. Because of this, tectonics.js ended up not being ideal for me. While I had no specific ideas for continent shape or history, I did have specific ideas for cultures and ecosystems – things which are impacted significantly by the geography of the planet. While I could use GPlates to model with more control, I’ve ultimately ended up deciding that precise tectonic history is of less importance to me than a workable present-day map. However, tectonics.js is something that I could see being useful when starting a new project tabula rasa, as it can generate a tectonic history and give you a good jumping off point for present-day mapping.

(Originally posted August 18 2022) The climates are here! Sort of. I decided that I wanted to know the broad climactic layout before getting too deep into the topography. The color scheme used here is pretty much the standard for the Koppen Climate Classification system. Note that this planet has an 18º axial tilt compared to Earth’s 28º, so the climate’s wetter and the equatorial and polar regions are smaller, and don’t line up as well with the prevailing winds or the ocean currents. Once I’ve gotten in the actual topology, these zones will be a lot messier and more natural-looking, but for now, they’re giving me a broad sense of what I’m dealing with.

Also thank you Artifexian for your excellent tutorials on designing realistic climates, ocean currents and wind patterns. I highly recommend them if you are interested in making realistic climate zones for your world (or if you just want a crash course in basic climate science).

Retrospective: I later end up switching from Artifexian’s method of placing climate zones to one with a bit more precision (more on this method when I start using it.) However, I still think Artifexian’s method, while somewhat simplified, is a very good approximation of actual climates. I primarily switch away from it for two reasons – for one, it provides less guidance as to the subtypes of each Köppen climate type; secondly, it’s not very intuitive to try to adapt to planets with features like different obliquity. (However, he does provide guidance for adapting it to hotter and colder planets.) The level of detail I’ll go into later is on par with what he’s currently doing with geology in GPlates – only important if you want to be very accurate.

That’s all for now. Further reuploads will have more posts, as I’m grouping them by the basic map and process I’m using.

I’m Back!

Nilakash Roy-Faderman

 

A picture of my cat, Roo. He has nothing to do with this post.

So you may have noticed that this blog has been silent for a while. Partially, this is due to my time at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute. While I was pretty productive on composing there, it didn’t leave me much time for worldbuilding, let alone posting here. After BUTI, I was determined to get back to posting. Then school started. After the initial flood of school assignments passed, I was looking forward to finally getting down to business. Then the High Holy Days happened.

Now, however, the High Holy Days are over, and the tide of schoolwork has somewhat abated, so I have at least a bit of time to blog again. Currently, this is what is on my horizons:

  1. More on the current conlang family I’m working on, as well as potentially another.
  2. The magic system, and my thoughts on building a magic system in general.
  3. The other sapient species on this planet, the Golkh.

I’m going to try to have at least one blog post on here per month. (Sadly, I can’t get much more precise than that in my schedule, as the amount of spare time I have currently fluctuates with the whims of fate and/or homework.) I’m also reuploading and collating some of my earlier Instagram map posts onto this blog. While I’m going to be keeping their content mostly intact, I will probably add some additional details where I think they may be necessary or helpful, as well as linking to some of the sources I’ve used (something that Instagram won’t do.)

Creating a Conlang Family Part 14: Planning Aspect & Mood Morphology in Language 1a

Nilakash Roy-Faderman

Before we get into the morphology, I think now is a good time to talk some about my morphological visions for the 1a and 1b language lineages. We’ve already established protolanguage 1 as an agglutinative, heavily inflected language. The 1b lineage slowly shifts towards simpler inflectional morphology – while it still relies on the direct-inverse system and polypersonal agreement, many other inflections are replaced by periphrastic constructions. We’ve already seen this at work as the aspect system in protolanguage 1 replaces the tense system in language 1b, meaning that perfect and prospective meanings will have to be created with adverbs, time clauses, or some other construction that is yet to be determined. Language 1a, on the other hand, will not only keep much of the morphological complexity of the protolanguage but also develop new morphology.

We’ve already discussed how the affixation of light verb constructions led to the development of aspect morphology in protolanguage 1. However, we’ve only scratched the surface of what this process could do. Protolanguage 1 could have developed other aspectual affixes, and even modal ones – affixes that would be lost entirely in language 1b, but retained in language 1a. 

Furthermore, let’s say that this process happened a second time, after the sound changes that led to language 1a. A new set of verbs, which could themselves take the aspectual and modal prefixes of protolanguage 1, became light verbs and then prefixes on the stem. Keep in mind that these prefixes don’t take vowel harmony. In fact, they block it, transmitting their own vowel harmony to the previous prefixes. This results in two classes of aspectual/modal prefixes (harmony-blocking and non-harmony-blocking). Up to one prefix from each class can be attached, with the non-harmony-blocking prefix coming before the harmony-blocking prefix. 

Now, we need to decide what these prefixes are. This was a fairly simple process. First, I came up with a list of the aspects and moods I wanted to be conveyed this way. Then, I divided them up in a way that maximized the utility of the potential combos. Here’s what I came up with:

Harmony-affected Preverbs
Function Original Verb Meaning
Perfect have
Prospective go
Permissive get
Obligative

owe

Harmony-blocking Preverbs
Function Original Verb Meaning
Durative remain
Iterative return
Inchoative start
Cessative stop
Abilitive/Potential know
Desiderative love

I’m calling these affixes preverbs for now, although I’m not particularly happy about it. “Preverb” isn’t a widely accepted linguistic term, and although it is discussed in the context of Caucasian and Algonquinian languages (two major inspirations for this language), it’s used there primarily for location/direction meanings, with the aspectual & modal information that they could convey being secondary. However, I’m calling them preverbs until I can think of something better, because “Harmony-blocking and Non-harmony-blocking modal and aspectual prefixes” was proving far too clunky.

So that’s the preverbs done! This isn’t the end of verb inflection, but the conlang is slowly forging ahead. I haven’t done any further reading recommendations in a while, so now might be a good time to mention the World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. It’s available online, and is an excellent resource for anyone interested in conlanging. It gives a list of common lexical sources for grammatical meanings, as well as the ways that grammatical meanings can change over time. It’s fairly comprehensive, and has a handy glossary at the beginning.

Creating a Conlang Family Part 13: Reconstructing a Middle Stage of Language 1b

Nilakash Roy-Faderman

So I was playing around with the language family when I realized that I really liked the sound of Language 1b partway through its evolution. If you allow the language to develop back harmony and vowel coalescence, but stop it before it develops rounding harmony, the result has a fun and distinctive phonaesthetic. I picture this ancestor language being kept around primarily as a liturgical language, while the later language 1b is used in day-to-day speech. I’ll call the ancestor language Ancient 1b, and its descendant Common 1b. (Better names coming soon.) That by itself would not be a full blog post. However, there are a few changes that I want to make to alter (and hopefully improve) the phonaesthetic.

The primary change I made was putting velar-uvular harmony in this language too. I like the uvulars for this language, especially combined with /ɯ/. It gives it a very Turkic sound that reminds me especially of languages of the Kipchak family, such as Kazakh and Kyrgyz. We can say that the uvularization of emphatic velars was an allophonic feature in protolanguage 1 before language 1a and 1b diverged. The uvulars will still be ditched by Common 1b – I don’t like them as much there aesthetically, and it provides another point of divergence between 1a and 1b.

I also changed around the ordering of sound changes. I wanted this language to keep the voiced stops, so I moved voiced stop changes to happen after rounding harmony, which I hadn’t initially planned for. This means that the voiced uvular stop, /ɢ/, will be present in this language. I’ve already talked about /ɢ/ and its rarity compared to other uvulars. However, I like it for this stage of the language – it gives a very distinctive sound, and separates it from the Turkic languages. This gives us this final list of sound changes:

Protolanguage 1 to Ancient 1b

kˤ, xˤ, gˤ, ɣˤ → q, χ, ɢ, ʁ

short i, u → j, w / V _

short i, u → j, w / _ V

a → ∅ / _ V(+long)

uj, aj → yː, ɜː

a → ɜ

iˤ, ɜˤ, yˤ → ɯ, ɜ, u

iw, ɯw, ɜw, ɑw → yː, uː, ɞː, ɒː

Emphasis distinction lost

Ancient 1b to Common 1b

q, χ, ɢ, ʁ → k, g, x, ɣ

Rounding harmony: i, ɯ, ɜ, ɑ → y, u, ɞ, ɒ

C(+voiced)(+obstruent) → C(-voiced) / _ C(-voiced), C(-voiced) _, _ #

b, d, dʑ, g → β, ð, ʑ, ɣ

tɕ, ɕ, ʑ → tʃ, ʃ, ʒ

Here is the phonology and romanization for Ancient 1b:

Ancient 1b Consonants Bilabial Alveolar Avleolopalatal Velar Uvular
Stop/Affricate Voiceless p ⟨p⟩ t ⟨t⟩ tɕ ⟨ch⟩ k ⟨k⟩ q ⟨q⟩
Voiced b ⟨b⟩ d ⟨d⟩ dʑ ⟨dzhj⟩ g ⟨g⟩ ɢ ⟨gq⟩
Fricative Voiceless f ⟨f⟩ s ⟨s⟩ ɕ ⟨sh⟩ x ⟨kh⟩

χ ⟨qh⟩
Voiced v ⟨v⟩ z ⟨z⟩ ʑ ⟨zh⟩ ɣ ⟨gh⟩ ʁ ⟨rh⟩
Liquids – ɾ l ⟨r l⟩ j ⟨i⟩ w ⟨u⟩ –
Nasals m ⟨m⟩ n ⟨n⟩ – – –
Ancient 1b Vowels

Front

 Back

Unrounded

 Rounded Unrounded Rounded
Close i iː ⟨i ii⟩

yː ⟨y⟩

 ɯ ɯː ⟨ı ıı⟩

u uː ⟨u uu⟩
Open ɜ ɜː ⟨e ê⟩ ɞː ⟨eu⟩ ɑ ɑː ⟨a aa⟩ ɒː ⟨au⟩

Some things to note:

  • For this language, I opted for vowel doubling to indicate length. I used a circumflex instead on ⟨ê⟩, because ⟨ee⟩ looks like /i/ to English speakers. Besides, I like the circumflex.
  • As vowel hiatus isn’t a thing, I can use vowel letters for glides.
  • I opted for historical spellings for ⟨eu⟩ and ⟨au⟩. They look cool and aren’t that uncommon for open front and back rounded vowels respectively.

That’s pretty much all the phonological information for Ancient 1b! Next time, I stop going on tangents and return to making morphology, setting templates for some morphological innovations in language 1a.

Creating a Conlang Family Part 12: The Verb Agreement of Proto-language 0

Nilakash Roy-Faderman

We’ve already established that protolanguage 1 had a direct-inverse system of alignment. (See the seventh post in this series, “A Sketch of Verb Agreement”). However, I don’t want that to be the case in protolanguage 0. Instead, I want protolanguage 0 to only have focus agreement in the verb, using the inverse as a kind of “patient trigger” to specify that the object’s being marked rather than the subject. I use the terminology “patient trigger” because this looks fairly similar to a rudimentary system of symmetrical voice, also known as Austronesian alignment. While symmetrical voice is extremely complicated, here’s the brief run-down:

  • One noun is marked as the focus.
    • In Austronesian languages, this is typically done by placing the noun in the direct case. In protolang 1, it’d be done by subject agreement.
  • The verb takes a marker to show how the focus relates to it. For instance, the “patient trigger” specifies the focus as the verb’s object.

In language family 2, my plan is for this to develop into a more robust symmetrical voice system. The patient trigger will fuse with various applicatives to form into other agreement markers. In protolanguage 1, on the other hand, the non-focus pronoun is incorporated into the verb as a suffix. This means that, when the patient trigger is absent, the suffix pronoun is the patient, but when the patient trigger is present, the suffix pronoun is the agent. Now, our patient trigger is starting to look a lot like an inverse marker, especially as protolanguage 0 preferred to make the higher-animacy argument the focus. The applicatives will then stick around as true applicatives.

Now is probably a good time to note that protolanguage 0 uses verb-initial word order. I have the vague idea that there was a pre-protolanguage 0 which was SVO, which explains why subjects were marked as prefixes. However, as the language shifted to a more symmetric-voice-like system, the subject moved after the verb, a better configuration for this type of alignment. Verb-initial word order isn’t something that conlangs often play around with, but I think it makes sense for this language. 

Now that we know how protolanguage 0 operated, we can start to figure out more about how protolanguage 1 will operate. Specifically, we can now begin to evolve some tense and aspect. The tense system in protolanguage 0 was very simple. A past tense suffix, /-ɬaː-/, was affixed, directly after the verb stem. Any tense other than the past was inferred by context or a time-specifying adverb or clause.

The past/non-past distinction from protolanguage 0 is kept in protolanguage 1. However, aspectual distinctions will begin to emerge. Two verbs begin to semantically weaken, becoming light verbs that serve to convey aspectual information. These light verbs take focus agreement, but the patient trigger still occurs on the main verb. I think this makes sense – after all, in English, we say “It has been broken,” not “It is had broken.” The past tense affix also goes on the main verb. Because of this, it’s easy for these light verbs to agglutinate to the main verb, with the weak verb root essentially becoming an aspect marker that goes between the focus marker and the main verb. Because this occurs before most of the impactful sound changes between protolanguage 0 and protolanguage 1, they’ll behave like normal verb prefixes. 

I’ve decided to keep the aspect system itself fairly simple, with two affixed aspects, perfect and prospective:

/-hu/ (own, v. protolanguage 0) → 

/-u-/ (ᴘᴇʀꜰ., protolanguage 1)

/-ri/ (go, v. protolanguage 0) → 

/-ri-/ (ᴘʀᴏsᴘ., protolanguage 1)

In language 1a, these affixes will stick around alongside the past tense affix. This provides a 3-aspect 2-tense system, kind of similar to latin’s 3-tense 2-aspect system, except with a future-in-the past and no future perfect:

  Past /-aː/ Non-past /-∅/
Perfect /u-/

Pluperfect

 Perfect
Simple /∅-/

Past

 Present
Prospective /ri-/ Future-in-the-past Future

The future-in-the-past is very volatile, and may gain some kind of modal or conditional meaning. I also need to figure out the distinction between past and perfect. I’m thinking that the simple past either becomes a past imperfective (like in Latin & the romance languages) or a discontinuous past. We’ll see what’s necessary once I start developing more morphology and periphrastic tense/aspect constructions in language 1a. 

In language 1b, however, I want the past/non-past distinction to dissolve, and have it be supplanted by the aspect system (with the perfect turning into the past and the prospective turning into the future). Aspectual morphology can be conveyed by periphrasis. A fun thing about language 1b is that the perfect aspect marker, /u-/, will take part in vowel coalescence. This means that you have to learn a separate set of personal prefixes for the past tense:

  Singular

Plural
1st

sYː-

sYː-…-k
2nd

ʃuː-

ʃUː-…-k

3rd proximate

 u-

xYː-

3rd obviative

ðOː-

 ðYː-

3rd inanimate

 ʒUː-

Indefinite

 nOː-

This ended up being much longer than I had intended, and I honestly have no clue how to finish it up neatly. But I think that this is all the work we need to do on protolanguage 0 for now. Next up, I go on another completely random tangent because this is how my brain works I guess.

Creating a Conlang Family Part 11: Reconstructing Protolanguage 0, Part 2: Vowel Loss

Nilakash Roy-Faderman

Let’s finish the sound changes between protolanguage 0 and 1 by adding some vowel loss. This will help with some synchronic features – justifying the forms of the personal suffixes and adding some interest to verb conjugation. 

I’ve already established that word-final vowel loss happens between protolanguage 0 and protolanguage 1. This explains why an affix that shows up as prefixed /si-/ shows up as suffixed /-s/ and not /-si/. However, there’s a bit of a problem with that. Protolanguage 0 permitted words to end in consonants. That means, that if you have a root like /xat-/, and you suffix the ending /-da/, after vowel loss it’ll become /xatd/, which is extremely noncompliant with the phonotactics of protolanguage 1. We can insert the epenthetic vowel /a/ to clear up this issue, making /xat-da/ become /xatad/. This change will make long vowels short, rather than deleting them, and it will also happen before the disappearance of /h/ and /ʔ/, giving a contrast between word-final consonants, short vowels and long vowels.

However, that’s not the only vowel loss I want to implement. I really like verb roots that start with CCV in this language. However, to do that, right now you need a verb that starts with VCCV by default, which won’t be too common. However, we can get more CCV roots by generating them from CVCV. I’ll therefore make this rule:

V[-long] → ∅ / _ CVV // $ _, $ C _, CC _

In other words, short vowels are deleted in syllables directly before long vowels, if it wouldn’t cause an illegal syllable structure. I’ll also say that when an /i/ dissappears this way after an alveolar or velar obstruent, it’ll palatalize it:

{t,k}, {d,g}, {s,x}, {z,ɣ} i → tɕ, dʑ, ɕ, ʑ / _ CVV // $ _, $ C _, CC _

Combine these changes with the voiced obstruent shifts in languages 1a and 1b, and this produces some very interesting divergent forms:

/gitaːb/ → /gitaːb/ → /kitɑːv/, /ɣitɜːp/

/si-gitaːb/ → /sidʑkaːb/ → /siʝtɑːv/, /sitʃtɜːp/

I’ll also add a similar rule for vowels in syllables after long vowels, though there won’t be any palatalization occurring here:

V[-long,-stress] → ∅ / VVC _ // _ CC, _ C $

(I added the stress exception so that the prefix diː- and other prefixes with long vowels can’t trigger this in the stem.)

In practical terms, this means that every verb will have a maximum of three principal parts – one for when they only take a prefix, one for when they only take a suffix, and one for when they take both. (There’s no situation in this language where a verb takes no prefix or suffix.) Not every verb will have all of them, so I picture an English-like situation, where only as many as are necessary will be listed in the dictionary.

This may not truly be the end to the sound changes between protolanguage 0 and protolanguage 1, as they are looking far too similar for my liking still. But this is enough to go off of right now – we can back-implement other sound changes later. Next time, I’ll return to verb agreement. But this time, we’re looking at protolanguage 0 again, and seeing how its system of verb agreement evolved into the one in protolanguage 1.