The Dailies. November 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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So I’ve been struggling to figure out the path my vowels took to begin Akachenti as a register tone language and in the process had to reacquaint myself with all the stuff I’ve been away from while not conlanging. Along the way, I remembered that glottal stops were the obvious key to some of it but they oddly didn’t quite pattern right when I was digging around and so I went back to original vocabulary. Then I ended up rereading some of that stuff on diachronic causes of phonation and was suddenly reminded that consonants condition vowel phonation, which then the consonant contrast is loss. Not the consonant, the contrast, which isn’t totally lost in Akachenti yet. The high-tense register is not solely on the vowel and I first noticed what it did to plosive consonants. They’re glottalic. To be specific, they’re either implosive (underlying voiced) or ejective (underlying voiceless) or preglottalized (click).
And there’s this one theory of PIE (proto-indo-european) that includes preglottalized consonants that became implosives in Sindhi. I went through and pronounced my exemplar sentence that always keeps me straight on how Akachenti is properly pronounced when stressed and abaga dáko behaves exactly as if the /d/ and /k/ are preglottalized and then implosivized or ejected. In short, it behaves as if there was an extremely direct path from ʔP > ˀP, then:
This is also in keeping with the fact that while I initially found these accented vowels as pronominal affixes for patientive arguments, the same phonation register appears in non-patientive instances on the imperative and imprecative where a patientive interpretation is not always reasonable. This would make perfect sense if in fact, pre-glottalized consonants were the culprit and wherever they appeared, they’d left traces. The glottal stop was apparently quite common at one point and placing it correctly is the key to figuring out why my high-tense vowels did what they did, though recognizing that it didn’t just stay a glottal stop on the consonant explains all the issues I’ve had getting it to pattern right.
And now I also get to figure out what this “secondary” accent I noticed initially is and decide whether to keep it. It shares enough elements of the high-tense register that I made note of it, thinking at the time it was secondary stress, but it does appear to be lexical and whatever elements it shares or does not share should be identifiable so I should get on that.
Next joy: figuring out what’s going on with the consonants around long vowels which are all pronounced breathy and low tone. I suspect the consonants adjacent to long vowels might be sufficiently constrained to give me a clue if there’s a reason the breathy low tone showed up there.