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The last post in this series was about the role that stress-based sound changes play in the development of this language’s triconsonantal roots. This one is about everything else. Or at least, the remaining major¹I say major because I may make some other sound changes when it seems either necessary or interesting. But these are the ones that are going to most radically alter phonology, phonotactics and root structure. sound changes between Old Kyol and High Kyol. 

Ablaut

Ablaut is the simplest of the sound changes I’m discussing today. i pulls preceding vowels /a/ and /o/ to /ə/. This happened before the stress shift, so in some contexts i-ablaut will occur in the descendant language without an i triggering it – contributing even more to root-and-pattern morphology. 

Metathesis

Metathesis is the switching of two consonants within a word to make it easier to pronounce. It’s found most commonly in isolated cases, like english “cavalry” being pronounced “calvary”. But it can occur in grammatical patterns, especially derived stem forms in Semitic languages. In reflexive stems, such as the Hebrew hitpael form and Arabic form VIII, a /t/ in the prefix switches place with the first consonant of the root:

• Hitpael: šdl = hištaddēl (he made an effort)
• Arabic form VIIII: ktb = iktataba (he copied)

(Both examples, sadly, are from Wikipedia – I’m pretty swamped right now and didn’t have time to dig around for a linguistics textbook.)

Metathesis is fairly complicated to evolve. Among linguists there seems to be some debate about how to classify and understand metathesis, the nature of which I am unable to comprehend. That being said, there are some useful trends: Voiceless stops prefer being in onset positions, while continuants (fricatives & liquids) prefer to be in coda positions. Coronal²pronounced with the tip of the tongue touching the mouth, teeth or lips. consonants prefer to go after non-coronal consonants.³ https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~gene/papers/Buckley2011_metathesis.pdf

Let’s apply some of these trends here:

• /t/ switches place with following sibilant fricatives.
• /k/, /g/, /x/ and /ɣ/ switch places with preceding alveolar consonants.
• /ɣ/ and /ʝ/ switch places with preceding stops.

So that we don’t have some extreme weirdness going on, I’m going to place this before the stress-based vowel deletion. This will prevent the most confusing of the effects, where consonants within a triliteral root would regularly switch places -effectively destroying the triliteral root system. However, it does mean that some affixes will end up inside the root:

• ko.’sat.ga → ko.sag.ta → ksag.ta → ksagt

Syllabic Consonants

With the deletion of vowels, we probably already have some syllabic consonants being created. Take an example root r-t-n, proto *rotan. With the -ga suffix, this becomes:

 ra.tan.ga → r.’tan.ga → r.’tang

 It’s probably more reasonable to evaluate the /r/ as its own syllable, rather than trying to cram /rt/ into an onset.

But this isn’t enough syllabic consonants to satisfy my sadistic cravings. If nothing else, it means syllabic consonants will never occur in stressed positions. I simply cannot abide this level of pronounceability!

The process of getting more syllabic consonants is fairly simple. We often consider consonants assimilating into neighbouring vowels, but rarely vowels assimilating into neighbouring consonants. In Mandarin Chinese (and some other Sino-Tibetan languages), some fricatives near a high vowel will assimilate into that vowel, producing “apical vowels” – essentially syllabic voiced fricatives. There are two voiced fricatives, /ʝ/ and /ɣ/, which are already very close to our high vowel /i/. /ʎ/, being a palatal liquid, is also close enough to /i/ to assimilate it. While /ŋ/ at first seems unusual to assimilate an /i/, it’s pronounced as  [ɲ] close to high vowels, and so could also assimilate previous /i/.⁴ Technically, this would create a division between syllabic ŋ (from əŋ) and ɲ (from iŋ). But these two sounds are so close I think that they’ll just recombine into syllabic ŋ If these consonants are in coda position of a syllable after an /i/, they’ll assimilate the /i/ and become syllabic.

In addition, there’s the vowel /ə/. This vowel is very weak. As such, it’ll assimilate into coda liquids. This includes all the consonants which assimilate /i/, as well as /r/, /l/, /m/, and /n/.

In summary:

• i → ∅ / _ ʝ,ɣ,ʎ,ŋ $
• ə → ∅ / _ ʝ,ɣ,r,l,ʎ,m,n,ŋ $

Now something fun happens here. Let’s create the suffix -ɣi, and apply it to our example root *kosag. First, we have umlaut take effect:

• ko.’sat.ɣi → ko.’sət.ɣi

Next, we have metathesis:

• ko.’sət.ɣi → ko.’səɣ.ti

Then, vowel deletion takes place:

• ko.’səɣ.ti → ‘ksəɣt

Finally, the /ɣ/ assimilates the preceding /ə/, giving us

• ‘ksəɣt → ‘ksɣt

Not only does this wonderful word have no vowels whatsoever, but it also just inserted a consonant in the middle of the stem!

Conclusion

But this isn’t the end of the language’s lineage, and the root-and-pattern morphology will develop in its descendant languages. Next time I’ll discuss the sound changes in the daughter language, with a particular eye to the reduction of the consonant clusters created in today’s changes.

After I finished discussing the broad idea of triconsonantal roots in the last post, I wanted to show how I’m going to start constructing them in my conlang. But as I tried, it became clear that, even with the background of my last post, a lot of my motivations for what I’m doing with this language are still pretty unclear. So let’s establish some goals. 

For me, the primary goals are features I know I want to have in my language. These are: Semitic-style root and pattern morphology, grammatical gender, grammatical honorific speech, and complex consonant clusters. Let’s examine each of these in more detail:

Semitic-style root and pattern morphology. Given the subject of my last post, this one shouldn’t be much of a surprise. I think they’re cool and can work with some of my other ideas.

Grammatical gender. This comes less from my ideas about the language itself and more from my ideas about Kyol culture. Kyol society is heavily based around gender roles. In particular, it’s matriarchal both in organization and in worldview, to a degree not seen in any human culture on Earth. (I’ll discuss this in its own post later.) Grammatical feminine-masculine-neuter distinctions seem like a good way to show this in the language.

Honorific speech. Again, this idea comes mostly from my ideas about Kyol culture. Not only does Kyol culture place emphasis on hierarchy, but it also highly values propriety and politeness. While all languages have registers of some kind, I want this language to have a more complex and grammatical register system like Korean. 

Complex consonant clusters. I want the phonotactics to be really loose, with lots of syllable-initial and syllable-final clusters, as well as a lot of syllabic consonants. In addition to the obvious syllabic sonorants¹Nasals, laterals, and the trilled [r̩] – which I was worried about being unnaturalistic except it occurs in a bunch of Slavic languages., there’s also syllabic voiced fricatives. 

I’ve learned in my early drafts that a language isn’t as interesting as a root-pattern language when most of the vowels are gone entirely. However, it does make a really good middle stage for a language developing triconsonantal roots. I’m currently labeling this stage ‘Old Kyol’, as I think it’s a good language for the ancient Kyol Allegiance. Then, various forms of epenthesis (inserting vowels to make the word easier to pronounce) will come in, making more obvious root pattern morphology.

In addition to these basic goals, there are two considerations that I want to keep in mind when making this language. These aren’t exactly goals, but more guidelines that I want to be working within.

Not too similar to a Semitic language. Triconsonantal roots already are very indicative of a Semitic language, and I’m already straying into this territory with some of my other goals. On the phonology side, clusters and a lot of dorsal fricatives already give the language a kind of Arabic-like sound. On the grammar side, I know I want verb agreement (that only references the subject), agreement with regards to gender, and a derived stem system like Semitic languages. Thus I want to make other parts of the language different from Semitic languages where possible. But I don’t want to be adding features that feel like they’re layered on for no reason, so I’m going to have to be careful with what I’m doing in the future. I’ll revisit this idea when we get to some of the grammatical ideas.

“Snarl-like” phonaesthetic. See the consonant clusters, and also a dorsal-heavy phonology. Normally I try to make my phonaesthetics more distinctive than this one. This phonaesthetic is a common signifier for a “warlike” or “savage” culture. See Orcish, or Lovecraft’s weird chant-language. This isn’t only racist if you do it wrong but also not particularly interesting. It’s a very cliche way of showing certain societal traits.

The reason why I like it here is that Kyol culture is an exact opposite of these stereotypes. Kyol culture places great emphasis on propriety and respectability. Violence is taboo to even discuss, and overt aggression is frowned upon. Like a lot of Kyol culture, the symbolism here is running a bit counter to the cultural traits it’s expressing, but I think it’s an interesting challenge to reconcile the contrast in the reader’s mind.

For Kyol, a large part of this will come from the Kyolite operatic and literary traditions. Despite what I post about on my blog, I am actually mostly a composer and not a linguist or anthropologist. So I’d like to write some vocal music in this language! And I don’t want it to all sound like war songs – I want to attempt to write genuinely lyrical and beautiful music in this language. The weirdness of the phonaesthetic provides both a unique challenge and a unique sound that I’m looking forward to getting to work with.

So, with my goals set and some guidelines established, I’m going to start getting into the conlanging itself!

Yes, I’m making another language family.

I’m taking a break from the last one until I have a more clear idea of where it fits. The cultures I had speaking those languages have been undergoing a lot of flux, as I’m still unsure where they fit into this world, and how I need to change them so that they work better. To continue developing those languages, I need a better understanding of their speakers – so they’re on hold until I can do that.

This language family shouldn’t have that problem. It’s in the part of the world that I’m currently developing. The protolanguage that I’m going to be talking about today originated in the Kyol River Valley. Languages of this family will be the dominant languages across the reaches of the empires descended from the bronze-age Kyol Alleigance.

Let’s now look at the phonology of that protolanguage:

This is a somewhat unconventional table. Primarily, this is because the main speakers of Proto-Kyol weren’t human, but Golkh – a species of bipedal sapient evolved from raccoon-like organisms. Because they still had a procyonid-esque jaw, their lips weren’t as mobile as human lips. This has a few consequences:

a. While Golkh can pronounce bilabials, they’re harder to produce, and thus rarer. The exception is the bilabial nasal /m/, which is simply formed with a closed mouth, and thus perfectly pronouncable to a Golkh.

b. Golkh can’t produce rounded vowels or labialized consonants.

It should be noted that the vowel ɤ is sulcalized. This means that it’s pronounced with a grooved tongue, similar to a sibilant fricative. This gives it a rounder sound, and thus helps to distinguish it from front vowels. Sulcalization is most documented in the extinct language Tillamook, but it has also been suggested that received pronunciation’s /ɒ/ is sulcalized, not rounded, in some speakers.

Now let’s note some of the other unusual things here. 

a. The inclusion of a full palatal series. I wanted this language to sound harsh and rasping, but given the number of other languages with uvulars I have planned for this world, I didn’t want to include them here. (Also, they seem like the obvious choice.) I like the palatals – they give a kind of gnashing hissing sound.

b. The three-vowel system, and specifically that I included an o-analogue over a u-analogue. I wanted to use as minimal a vowel system as possible, for reasons that’ll become apparent next post. I initially had a four-vowel system with both /ɤ/ and /ɯ/, but I found I wasn’t using /ɯ/ at all, so condensed it into this system. A vowel triangle with a mid back vowel is unusual, but not unheard of – it’s the system of piraha, and the short-vowel system of Ojibwe.

• It’s quite possible that there was an /ɯ/ at some point that either merged with /ɤ/ or /i/; it’s also possible that there was an /e/ that merged with /i/ or /a/. We’ll explore these possibilities later.

c. The extra nasals & laterals. Partially, I want more phonemes – the somewhat constrained root structure of this language and the lack of labials means I’ll take what I can get. Also, I like the sound of them.

The name “Kyol” is somewhat confusing. In my previous posts, Kyol has primarily referred to the Empire of New Kyol, an empire in the latter half of the postclassical era. This empire took their name in an attempt to call upon the glory of the Kyol Allegiance, the ancient empire from which New Kyol (alongside several other nations) sprung after its dramatic collapse. While these states differed significantly in technology and power structure, New Kyol took significantly after the old Alleigance with regard to many parts of the religion – thus, it made sense to talk about them as a direct through-line with the Allegiance when speaking about death practices. The Kyol Allegiance itself takes its name from the Kyol River valley where it originated. It is that valley I will talk about now.

The Kyol River lies on the western coast of the Continent, spilling down from a massive coastal mountain range. During the summer, the coast takes the brunt of the storms that have built up over the vast ocean that makes up much of the planet’s surface. The orthographic lift generated by the mountains sucks the remaining moisture out of the air, making the western coast one of the rainiest places on the planet. During the winter, the winds reverse course, and the same mountains that made Kyol so rainy in the summer block any residual moisture from the eastern portion of the continent. Because of the planet’s heightened axial tilt, temperatures regularly drop below freezing during the height of winter. This period is the cold drought, known as the dry season, where the plants lose their leaves to conserve water and prevent frostbite, turning the forest into a sea of brown and black branches.

The Valley is shielded from the worst of the weather. The mangroves of the coastline take the brunt of the cyclones, and the depression of the valley shelters it from some of the high winds. But it faces its own problems. During the summer, the river – and most of the low-lying ground in the valley – floods. Plants must adapt to surviving partial submersion for a third of the year or be restricted to the sides of the valley and rare patches of high ground.

Next up, I’ll be talking about some of the flora of this area, and the ways that they’ve adapted to this bioregion.

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.

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.)

• The Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder
• The Art of Language Invention by David J Peterson (also his book with the same title)
• Biblaridion’s How To Make A Language series
• And of course, my old friend wikipedia.org

If you don’t know about/want to research conlanging, that’s great, and there will still be some stuff in here that might be of interest. I’ll be translating some important texts for the constructed cultures that speak these languages and making a writing system which hopefully at least looks pretty. Right now, I’m firmly in the charts & jargon phase of the process. 

Context

If you’ve been following my worldbuilding project, you may be thinking: “Why on earth are you doing a conlang now? You’ve barely even got a map!” This is reasonable, but I’m impatient, and I got to work on this conlang family before I forgot all my ideas for it.

Because of this, some of the historical elements won’t be coming into play yet. For now, I won’t be dealing with creoles or imported words, and my lexicon will be mostly pretty fundamental. That being said, I have a rough idea of the people who are going to speak these languages, which will influence some decisions I make. Importantly, this language family originated among humans, and the language family was primarily spoken by humans until present day. This is important because it means that I won’t be dealing with nonhuman mouth shapes, and thus my phonology needs to be naturalistic for a human language.

The Origins of this Project

This language family is loosely based off of my first completed conlang, Yiksighe, which I started in early 2021. For a first full language, it was honestly not bad, but there were definitely some things that could have been done better. I felt that some of the ideas in it were good enough that I wanted to give them a second chance, applying some of the lessons I learned while creating it to make a better final product. 

I will also be posting some stuff about Yiksighe itself, because it’s probably the most polished of my conlangs right now. However, the posts will be much less polished and detailed than the ones about the languages currently under construction; I’ve reached the point with that project where it pains me to look at it, and I just want it out of my hair.

The Plan & Terminology

I’m not yet at the point in this process where I can give these languages endonyms, and I don’t have enough worldbuilding around them to give them exonyms either. As such, I’ll be referring to them like this:

I’ll be starting off by examining the Lang 1 branch of the family tree, going back and doing some reconstruction of Lang 0 as necessary. Later on I’ll also look at the Lang 2 branch.

Another quick note: As with most of the worldbuilding things on this blog, subsequent posts on this will be backdated significantly. This is to make the timeline consistent with when I first finalized the topic in my notes. Part of my goal here is to show the process, and I believe the time frame is an important part of that. I’m not always able to get stuff up on the blog as soon as I add it to my notes; in fact, I already had the complete phonology (and a fair bit of the morphology) for two of the languages drafted out several months ago, far before I even got around to making the blog. 

Hopefully that’s all the introduction you need to this part of the project. Next time, I’ll actually get into the conlanging.

So you may have noticed that there was a gap of over two months between the last actual conlanging post and this one. I wish that was an error. But schoolwork, personal projects, and the sheer time and energy that I used in this step of the process combined to make this take forever.See, the personal affixes in protolang 1 had to accomplish these things:

• Hit the phonaesthetic of language 1a
• Sound somewhat euphonous in language 1b
• Not get boring in either language even when used multiple times in every sentence
• Feel vaguely naturalistic

This, unsurprisingly, turned out to be very hard. It didn’t help that my primary reference, Ojibwe, has an incredibly confusing verb conjugation system, where it looks like each combination of focus, non-focus and direct/inverse affix is fused together into its own circumfix with only a tangential relationship to its component parts. However, after three failed drafts and much hair-pulling, I somehow stumbled upon this draft, which I ended up liking:

Some notable features:

• The first and second person plural prefixes are actually circumfixes. This was based off what I could understand from the Ojibwe system for intransitive verbs.
• In the third person prefixes, you can kind of see a potential -i plural affix that might have been in play.
• The suffixes don’t have vowels on them (except for the suffix whose corresponding prefix is long). Perhaps some word-final vowel deletion happened after protolanguage 0.

The relativiser prefixes are also done:

These forms came fairly transparently from a relative pronoun, va-,  + the original prefixes. 

So, those are the affixes. This was shorter than usual, because this was the last logical breaking point before I get into a bunch of detail which would have made this far too long. To make up for that, the next installment will be part 8.5 – a continuation of this one where I’ll show what these will look like in the descendant languages, as well as laying out how I’ll write the phonemes for vowel harmony.