Akangka wrote: ↑Fri Jul 05, 2019 11:59 am
By the way, the phoneme inventory reminds me of Bantu languages. Also, can you give the diachronics and deep representation, so I can make the nonphonemic orthography for your conlang?
Sure thing! The diachronics of this one is basically that I'm still screwing around trying to imagine what possible potential descendants modern English is going to have in the hypothetical sci-fi future, and this here is a member of the Suraic language family, named so after the planet they evolved on.
So, there are some main diachronic sound changes that all Suraic languages share, because they got done before the entire mess with the forced exodus and whatnot scattered the Sura people all over the galaxy:
- mb nd ndʒ ŋg → b d dʒ g → p t tʃ k → f ts ʃ k, a pull chain shift that lenited the aspirated/fortis English consonant, devoiced the lenis ones and made new fuly voiced ones out of nasal+lenis sequences.
- θ ð → t̪ d̪, interdental stopping that created a distinction between dental and alveolar stops that is actually still preserved by most languages.
- ɪ ʊ ʉ → ɨ; i ɛ → i; ɔ → u; ɑ → ɔ; æ → ɛ; ʌ ə → a, this one affected the monophthongs only.
And that's basically it.
Now, this here language belongs to the East Suraic branch, which had an uncoditional change of ɹ → j, which drowned the languages in yods and made most of them develop some form of yod-coalescence palatalisation from merging yods into consonants next to them. In this language, the postalveolars got reanalysed as palatalised forms of alveolars and velars, and you can see that in the palatalisation column in the chart I'll repost in a paragraph or so, and they were also joined in the palatalised series by t̪s̪, d̪z̪ (for dentals), true palatals (for sonorants) and actual palatalised consonants (for labials). Later on in the diachronic history, voiced affricates d̪z̪ and dʒ lenited to z̪ and j, respectively, v and ʒ devoiced, s became dental and two more extensive phonetic processes happened - n-fortition and cluster lenition. N-fortition basically involved fricatives fortitioning into voiceless stops and everything else becoming a voiced stop when preceded by a nasal. Cluster lenition, meanwhile, meant that voiceless stops got deleted before another stop, nasal or l and voiced stops became liquids in the same position. Oh, and ŋg simplified to just ŋ.
Now, all these processes are still perfectly functional accross morpheme boundaries, which basically means that if agglutinative morphology puts a consonant and j together that consonant becomes palatalised, if it puts a nasal before a consonant that consonant undergoes n-fortition and if it puts a consonant before a stop, a nasal or an l, the consonant undergoes lenition. And because of unstressed vowel deletion shenanigans, it's possible that things like nCj, or jCt, or njC, or even njCt happen on the deep level, which is where the three phonological processes interact in the way detailed here:
https://imgur.com/a/Tgo2jwu to give actual surface realisation. Note that the yod gets absorbed by the palatalised consonant, which means that the palatalised series can also be analysed as phonemes, while a preceding nasal doesn't, unless it's before a velar stop, in which case it does get absorbed and the result is ŋ.
The vowels? The vowels remained mostly intact, just switching around a bit, but nothing major. The only major sound change that happened to them is that the diphthongs and Vl sequences smoothed over into long vowels and the rhotic vowels became Vj/jV sequences (which do trigger palatalisation): oʊ → uː; aɪ → ɛː; eɪ → iː; aʊ → aː; ɔɪ → ɔː; ɨl oʊl aʊl → ɨː; ɜ˞ → ej; ə˞ → ja; ɑ˞ → aj; ɔ˞ → ɔj
