The Dailies. October 3
Did you work on your language today? Create any new rules of grammar or syntax? New progress on a script? New words in your lexicon?
On the other hand, do any excavating or reading or enjoying stuff you’ve already created? Do you have any favorites to share?
How did you conlang today?
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One thought on “The Dailies. October 3”
I’ve verified the only thing that makes sense for Akachenti is that since the imperative and imprecative speech and forms are both marked by infixing of a glottal stop orthographically and primary patientive forms are marked by glottalic high tone, that imperative, imprecative, and patientive agreement markers and affixes all included a glottal stop and trigger the same tense register.
Also imprecative has not yet fully lost the consonant distinctions, as it’s still in the orthography, whereas imperative verbs and patientive agreement pronominals have both moved to merely marking the vowel as tense. The pronominal sound change happened earlier and is being generalized to imprecative as glottalic tone is not always realized where the glottal stop is indicated. It’s essentially becoming a tone pattern and trying to regularize to other tone patterns in the language.
In short, the language is in a long, slow process of losing the glottal stop as a consonant and turning it into a pitch register.
The likely origin of breathy voiced vowels is the breathy glottal fricative /ɦ/ merging with adjacent vowels and its duration being added to the length of the vowel. This would fit with the overall move from consonant clusters to clicks or glottalic accent demonstrated elsewhere and possibly explain why long vowels in particular trigger breathy voice. In contrast to tense register, which is associated with particular grammatical concepts, lax register is entirely lexically determined. While it constrains grammatical forms, it does not have any grammatical properties of its own.
This also fits with the small number of consonants that allow a cluster with /n/ or /ɹ/ and variations between dialects (some allow even fewer than others). Clusters all seem to be moving in the direction of simultaneous pronunciation, then reinterpretation as either a tone or a single consonant, e.g. kl has become the tenuis lateral click.
As far as the progress of sound change:
Things that predate the written language, tongchan, can be determined from orthographic artifacts:
Small note: my notation may not be quite right for sound changes. I don’t normally do these and I just scribbled it down off of memory.