#protolanguage

[yuk-tepat]

Kinship Terminology in Swiric

Let’s talk about kinship terminology in Swiric. (This has gotten long.)

Swira, mentioned occasionally, are a mostly nomadic nation living north of Tepat. They are many other steppe nomads belong to a larger language family I call Macro-Swiric. The protolanguage has been previously introduced here. Although society has evolved and gotten more complex, of course, like their ancestors the nomads are largely migratory and live in small groups, but have shifted from primarily hunting to herding.

The proto-Swiric most likely migrated in small bands - becoming larger bands throughout history. The group could be seasonal, with people gathering in larger groups at certain times. Within bands, people lived in small family groups, sharing one dwelling, the *igʷpi. This would include parents and any unmarried children. Married children often stayed nearby but moved into a separate dwelling.

Thus the nuclear family was prominent, as in modern industrial societies. But unlike American/European families there was an additional consideration for age that sometimes overrode characteristics such as gender, generation, and so on.

In Proto-Swiric, we can reconstruct words for parents and other family members - many have a reduplicated form which is otherwise unusual in Proto-Swiric: *nana ‘mother,’ *tata ‘father,’ *xaxa ‘grandmother,’ and *dladla (or *dlada or *dlala) ‘grandfather.’ Parents were also known as *qʷabtoʔi ‘one who sent me down’ i.e., gave birth to me. Common terms for siblings were divided by relative age. Older brother was *ɯχʷa, and older sister *ini, but younger siblings were *lig regardless of gender. Siblings in general could be called *tampid(-ʔi) ‘father [is] one’ or *nampid(-ʔi) ‘mother [is] one,’ regardless of age or gender. The whole nuclear family, parents and siblings, was *igʷǝmpitʔi ‘house [is] one.’

The reduplicated family terms were often possessed, and often occurred in non-reduplicated form when they were possessed: *qʷetata or *qʷeta ‘my father,’ *qʷena ‘my mother,’ *dlena ‘your mother, etc. The simple forms of the terms were also used as suffixes, for example on names: *-ta for men, *-na for women, and *-(d)la for old people. Depending on the overall word, they might have reduced forms *-tǝ, *-nǝ, and *-lǝ.

A son was *mu and a daughter *mag, but children overall could be called *kus, which also meant ‘small,’ and there were also compound terms, *mukus and *makkus.

Aunts and uncles could be specified by compound terms (notice the non-reduplicated form):

*tan ini ‘father’s older sister’

*tan ɯχʷa ‘father’s older brother’

*tan lig ‘father’s younger sibling’

*nan ini ‘mother’s older sister’

*nan ɯχʷa ‘mother’s older brother’

*nan lig ‘mother’s younger sibling’

However the words for older siblings could also be used generically to refer to older relatives, of any generation. So a person could say *ɯχʷa to his older brother, but also an older male cousin, or an uncle, and *ini to an older sister, older cousin, or aunt.

Conversely, the words for grandparents might also be used for older siblings of the parents, especially if the speaker was young. A term such as *dladla or *xaxa might have been used politely to address any old man or old woman.

Cousins - people in the same generation - were also distinguished by age, with older cousins being *iksi (female) and *utsu (male). All younger cousins, however, were lumped together with younger siblings as *lig. If necessary they could be specified as *iksinlig or *utsunlig, which evolved into terms of their own.

Beyond *dla ‘grandfather,’ there are words for further generations. The third generation above a person was known as *sab, and the fourth one is *gʷin. The female counterparts were *xa sab/sab xa and *xa gʷin/gʷin xa. Further generations might be indicated by compounding or reduplication. However the compound form *sab(ǝ) gʷin, as well as the plural forms *dlalod, *sabud, and *gʷinud, could all refer to ancestors collectively, or to the clan or tribe.

Going the other direction, *kus meaning both ‘small’ and ‘child’ generally could be appended to the grandparent terms to indicate grandchildren. Hence a grandchild is *dla kus, great-grandchild *sab kus, great-great-grandchild *gʷin kus etc.

Returning to the plural form, , this plural is not strictly a plural in the English sense, but also referred to collective groups, typified by one member. So the plural form of ‘mother,’ *nanod or *nǝnod, did not mean that Heather had two mommies; it meant ‘mother and women of her generation, aunts,’ or even more broadly ‘maternal relatives.’ In parallel, *tatod/tǝtod was ‘uncles’ or ‘father’s relatives,’ or simply ‘clan, tribe,’ among groups with paternal descent. Paternal relatives / clan were also called *ahimud / *isod ‘bloods,’ and maternal relatives / clan were *χʷəlod ‘bones,’ reflecting the belief that one inherited one’s ‘bones’ from the mother, and ‘blood’ from the father, while either kin group might be *qalod ‘fleshes.’

The oldest male in a group was the *axʷǝn ‘chief’ or ‘master.’ Hence the *igʷ-axʷǝn or ‘home-master’ was ‘father’ or ‘husband’ - but also the *axʷǝn kus referred to the oldest son.

Upon marriage, the bride usually moved to the groom. The *akanisʔi or *akǝnesʔi was the bride or ‘one who is brought in [to the house].’ (Becoming enetsi.) The one who brought her in, her father, was *akanuʔi or *akǝnoʔi (> *eno’i). The mother-in-law was *akǝnoʔina, and the brother-in-law to the groom was *akǝnesʔin ɯχʷa or lig.

*Dibil referred to a variety of inlaws, including brother-in-laws. The basic meaning was related to ‘succeed,’ ‘inherit,’ ‘replace,’ or ‘exchange.’ It could refer to a youngest son - the youngest son was often the ‘heir’ of a family. In some historical Swiric families, older children would receive gifts on marriage and move away, while the last child would stay with the parents and receive whatever they had left. Dibil could also mean the son-in-law of a family without sons. But it could also refer to other in-laws, such as a brother-in-law. Many tribes had a custom of levirate marriage, where a man would marry a deceased brother’s widow, as a second wife if need be, and among later tribes where chiefs had multiple wives, whoever succeeded the chief, including his son, might marry the former chief’s wives (excluding his own mother).

The word *qɯd ‘part, side, half’ plays two different, important roles. In western languages, it evolved into a prefix or modifier in front of kinship terms, referring to more distant, thinner relationships, such as distant cousins, or to inlaws. Hence,  *qɯd ɯχʷa ‘brother in law,’ *qɯd ini ‘sister in law.’ (E.g. > Swiric kulini ‘sister in law.’) In Nasic languages, it referred to a side of one’s family, such as mother’s side, father’s side, becoming a suffix -χt forming words for groups of people.

Aside from the terms above, Proto-Swiric had several prefixes referring to particular categories of kinship, which could be added to some of the same terms to create several sets of other terms for kinds of relatives, such as in-laws, etc.

*O- paternal relatives (with vowel reduction)

*o-dlǝ grandfather

*o-lig uncle (father’s younger brother)

*o-χʷǝ father’s older brother

*o-xǝ paternal grandmother

*o-ni father’s older sister

*NA- maternal relatives (with vowel reduction)

*na-dlǝ maternal grandfather

*na-lig uncle (father’s younger brother)

*neni *neni mother’s older sister

etc.

*IB- husband’s relatives

*ib-pa husband

*ib-lig husband’s younger sibling

*ib-ta husband’s father

etc.

*UGI- wife’s relatives

*ugi-pa wife

*ugi-ta father-in-law

*ugi-na wi:na mother-in-law

*ugeni wife’s older sister

etc.

*SO- younger in-laws (with vowel reduction)

*so-mu son-in-law

*so-mǝg daughter-in-law

So, overall, there are a lot of possible relationship terms, but that’s fine; I have a lot to choose from in constructing later Swira’s words & can forget the ones that don’t sound OK.

[redd956]

Protolanguages & Conlang Youtubers & More

As a worldbuilder one thing big thing I occasionally decide to take part in is protolanguages and conlangs. Worldbuilding a language can be quite difficult. One thing that has helped me tremendously is a select few channels, communities, and resources.

Biblaridion

Youtuber number one being showcased today. His whole channel is all about conlanging, worldbuilding, and fun biology stuff. He has amazing tutorials in working on protolanguages and conlangs.

Etymology Nerd

I don't think this guy is human, but we're all going to pretend he is for now. You want to know anything about languages, conlangs, linguistics, dialects, etymology, anything words and language- look to this guy. He not only is incredibly entertaining, but I have learned so much from him in the very little time I've discovered his content.

Learning About Language First

A good place to start is learning about the nuances and funnies of language. One of my favorite videos in this category is this one. Go explore, look into languages you like or want to learn, etc.

r/conlangs

Some of Favorites:

Tsevhu (Koilang) by Koallary

Language that is drawn through the lens of an inked out koi pond. Yes, you are looking at a poem. Yes. A whole poem right there.

A'e'i'a (Dolphin Language) by Etymology Nerd

I can't make this shit up. Don't worry he has more animal languages, and has even started created Creole between them.

Baksami (Circular Script) by MeatThatTalks

CIRCLE SCRIPT! CIRCLE SCRIPT! CIRCLE SCRI-

[tepat-side]

Proto-Swiric (Swira Protolanguage)

Lots of work on Proto-(Macro-)Swiric, the protolanguage of the Swira and their language family.

The Swira people are nomadic herding "barbarians" living north of Tepat, mentioned before a number of times. For more information on the general history of these people, see this skeleton history of the Swira in flowchart form. Also, more examples of their language / culture: stuff.

They belong to a larger language family, the Macro-Swiric language family, spread across much of the north of the continent. Developing Swira necessitated more work on the protolanguage, which was underdeveloped, which will require more changes to Swira.

Anyway, an overview of the protolanguage:

The speakers lived in Northern Tiptum (the continent on which Tepat sits). The large Taknic language family also originated nearby. They lived at or near the junction of the Eastern Cordillera and the interior plains, and perhaps spanned across it. They were nomadic, at least some of them migrating seasonally between mountains and plains - similar to many of their descendants. But at this point, herding had not been adopted; that would come later, and so many words for things like horses, riding, etc. cannot be reconstructed this far back, only to subfamilies. Instead, they hunted, including some large grazers that are now extinct.

[nonprojectspecific]

Tumblr Created Conlang - Phonology and Phonotatics of the Protolanguage

Phonology

The protolanguage distinguishes four places of articulation and four manners of articulation. Resulting in the following consonantal phones:

As the speakers of TumblrCreatedConlang live in a mountainous region, inspiration was taken from the Caucasian languages, which results in the uneven nasal distribution and the ejective plosives and approximants.

The protolanguage uses a classic five vowel system.

Phonotactics

The protolanguage allows for a maximum of a three syllables per word and stress falls on the central or final syllable.

The maximal onset is CA and maximal coda is C. The protolanguage allows vowels and syllabic nasals in the nucleus, this results in the following maximal syllables:

CAVC

(S/F)N̩C

[max1461]

Is it fair to say that none of the protolanguages of the primary Indo-European branches are as thoroughly reconstructed as Proto-Germanic? Maybe Italic or Indo-Aryan are close?

[48lexr]

Ok, so, when reconstructing natural proto-languages, those protolanguages are almost never attested. Historical Linguists are basically making educated guesses and throwing darts against a wall when making the Proto-Indo-European hypothesis, it was just that the evidence was so compelling that linguists (and, most humans) believe it. For all intents and purposes, it's a really good guess.

The issue with my conworld? Classical Zispoel and Proto-Ytosi-Itaush are still fully attested languages with exactly 2 and 1 native speakers each, all still technically living.

To make matters worse, Lozerief is kind-of a scientific genius, and Pagjom is the literal Hero of Language. Together, they could reconstruct Proto-Zispoel and see what a god-awful, horrifying shit-show it was.

The idea that my characters could derive my god-awful, good-for-nothing protolanguage is, somehow, deeply disturbing to me. I think they would realize they were in a simulation if they did that.

[yuritypology]

Conlang Diaries, Respianan Languages Typology.

Hey, it's been a while, so I've been thinking of making a typology paper* for my conlang family, the Respianan languages. This langfam includes my most developed conlang so far, Ekavathian, alongside more fragmentary projects such as Anindira and Hyragnon.

Part 1:

Proto-language.

I didn't wanna make the proto-language that detailed just yet, but I'm outlining my plans for the protolanguage.

Historical Respianan languages:

This is still WIP. I still haven't written much about these dead languages yet, but there will be more in the future (expect grammar sketches!) But these are mostly preliminary and just so I can develop them later.

Synchronic Typology

Well, this is a small part of typology that I'm still working on, but here's some sneak peek.

[mosquito-queen]

yelena knows the formation of fist and fight to break kate in half. she knows the weight required to snap bone, to rupture vital organs, she knows how to take the kill shot. but kate’s hands are on her in a way that she doesn’t know how to reciprocate: soft, wanting, asking… no, begging. it makes her want to run. intimacy isn’t in the vocabulary of her body. but the way kate stares up through thick lashes makes her want to learn a new language. what’s one more anyways?

except this script is in the same language family as violence - just a different font. because kate is dragging her nails down yelena’s back, tacking into her shoulder, whining. but yelena’s brain is stuttering danger, is confused how she can flex her fingers over kate’s throat in a way that makes her arch towards yelena instead of away. because how can the way kate’s hands twist up in her hair, the way kate sinks teeth to bruise her shoulder, the way their bodies tear into the other not warrant suffering? does it even matter the protolanguage when kate soothes every wound with a soft mouth? hurt written in cursive.

yelena knows the formation of fist and fight to break kate in half. she knows the weight required to snap bone, to rupture vital organs, she knows how to take the kill shot. her resolve has never wavered. she knows her hands are capable of a 8.7 magnitude earthquake, knows they can rearrange the topography of a body like some unholy apocalypse. her hands have never wavered. except now. except when kate says please.

and she buckles. because no one has ever waited for her answer. because she’s a weapon, a tool, a means to an end. never a person. never anything more. always nothing. just the weaker version of a machine. kate does something, something she’ll never have words for. something that escapes russian, and hungarian, and english, and everything else drilled into her. instead, she finds an outlet in something older, something ancestral and forgotten: she cries. tastes salt instead of the familiar metallic of blood. and kate. oh god, and kate. she goes to hold yelena. but learning a new language is hard and yelena uses her first word for comfort. 

hostility wraps snug, familiar, fits perfect between tongue and teeth. she shoves back from kate, away from the girl that knows adoration, and comfort, and belonging. the girl that wants her to be something. she pushes away from the potential of kate saying: none of this was real. because yelena has tried to learn care before. and it turned out to be a synonym of agony. she’s standing now, backing away. kate is slowly mirroring, hands up like yelena is something feral, something that needs a soft tone and soothing and, and and what is love but another word for cage?

she goes out the window.

[deadpoet117]

Old Dwarven Updated

Hello all! I've updated my Old Dwarven conlang that I'll be using as a protolanguage for the Dwarven dialect of my version of D&D (basically).

Here's the comprehensive grammar and overlook of Old Dwarven, enjoy!

[datasoong47]

If we had access to time travel and could study the history of a language going back far beyond what the comparative method could ever hope to reconstruct, tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, it occurs to me that we'd eventually hit a point where we get a Ship of Theseus situation, a point where not a single morpheme survives, the syntax has been completely replaced, grammatical categories have been thoroughly changed, the phonology has no recognizable relationship to the present form, etc.

And perhaps that ancestral language would actually be the protolanguage of a whole "family" (although that term would be rather inadequate for such a deep relationship), with branches that have been equally completely restructured. In short, a mega-family whose members don't retain any inherited features, and whose branches are functionally indistinguishable from being unrelated families

[aardappel-van-mijn-oog]

So I have two a priori conlangs that I'm working on right now, they're two related languages spoken by arctic hunter-gatherers on a small peninsular subcontinent in the conworld I'm making.

Anyway, I absolutely love how weird the cognates ended up being, like they're so fun. If I have a word in the protolanguage I have literally no clue whether it's gonna turn out super similar or nothing alike in the two daughter languages. Okay examples, let's take the word for 'berry'. Protolanguage *nhathan'ngha [nˤaˈtˤan.ŋˤa] Léna: nátángá [ná.tá.ŋá] Kkeṛhaqom: naṭannga [nä.ʈ͡ʂäŋ.ŋä]

Like okay that's relatively similar, fair enough. How about the word for 'wind'?

Protolanguage *ğharwxodh [ˈɣˤarʷ.xodˤ] Léna: árwxǝt [áɾʷ.xǝt] Kkeṛhaqom: harxuṭ [ˈhär.xʊʈ͡ʂ]

Fair enough, that's not too bad. Hmm... how about the word for 'a hunter'?

Protolanguage *ałhasocw [aˈʎˤa.socʷ] Léna: ǝlyásotw [ǝ.ʎá.sotʷ] Kkeṛhaqom: aghass [ˈä.ɣäsː]

PARDON ME SIR?

[yuk-tepat]

Proto-Nastowic Abstract

Three abstracts of my working file on the Proto-Nastowic language.

The Swira language, spoken by nomadic herders in the northern frontier of Tepat, is one of many “barbarian” tribes ringing Tepat, belonging to the widespread Nastowic language family. This family is named for two of its branches, Nasic and Towic, whose names both mean “people.” Swiric comprises another branch, as does Para-Towic, and the extinct historic language Wepum. Proto-Nastowic is a head-final, head-marking, compositionally polysynthetic language. Phonologically, Proto-Nastowic includes a series of labialized dorsal consonants and distinction between lenis and fortis consonants, and a hierarchy of vowel strength that interplays with stress assignment and other processes. It has an extensive system of personal prefixes, noun-incorporation and verb-root compounding, allowing very long verbal forms (compositional polysynthesis), possessor-raising incorporation, with several applicatives. Word order is flexible with a default of SOV. Nominal modifiers precede heads while verbal modifiers follow, because of basic SOV order combined with internally-headed relative clauses. Most of these features apply in daughter languages as well. However, their well-known pastoral culture evolved later than the protolanguage itself.

The Proto-Nastowic language is the reconstructed ancestor of the Nastowic language family, which includes Swiric, Towic, Nasic, and the extinct Wepum language. It was a polysynthetic, head-final, and head-marking language with extensive verb morphology, including noun incorporation, personal prefixes, and applicatives. Its phonological system featured labialized dorsal consonants, a distinction between lenis and fortis stops, and a vowel hierarchy that influenced stress and phonotactic rules. Proto-Nastowic had a flexible SOV word order, with nominal modifiers preceding nouns and verbal modifiers following verbs. The language likely originated among semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers living north of modern Tepat, with vocabulary reflecting their environment and way of life. Over time, Proto-Nastowic diversified into its daughter languages, influenced by interactions with neighboring linguistic groups.

Proto-Nastowic is the reconstructed ancestor of the Nastowic language family, which includes Swiric, Towic, Nasic, and the extinct Wepum language. It was a polysynthetic, head-final, and head-marking language with an extensive system of verb morphology, including personal prefixes, noun incorporation, and multiple applicatives that allowed highly complex verbal constructions. The language had a flexible SOV word order, with nominal modifiers preceding nouns and verbal modifiers following verbs, likely due to the presence of internally-headed relative clauses. Phonologically, Proto-Nastowic featured a distinction between fortis and lenis consonants, labialized dorsal consonants, and a hierarchical vowel system influencing stress patterns. Its vocabulary reflected the semi-nomadic lifestyle of its speakers, who inhabited the northern frontier of Tepat, transitioning seasonally between mountain and grassland environments. Early Proto-Nastowic lacked terms for agriculture and horse domestication, though later borrowings suggest cultural shifts. As it evolved, Proto-Nastowic diversified into distinct branches, with Towic becoming the most widespread. The language also exhibited contact-induced changes due to interactions with neighboring Taknic and Yuktepatic languages. These influences, along with internal phonological and grammatical developments, shaped the emergence of its descendant languages, each preserving and innovating upon Proto-Nastowic structures.

Which is mine and which is AI?

[vitor034]

my solution to the protolang blues: only make a rough sketch, and only refer to that sketch when you feel it necessary.

real life linguists haven't worked out the entirety of most protolanguages, and even the ones that are pretty well worked out (basically just PIE) aren't as well understood as any extant language.

if you want some historical context for a word, or some grammar, tinker with the protolang and then work through your changes. it's only necessary to make a whole protolanguage when you plan on deriving a huge family, and if you are that's awesome but i have not and will never take on such a challenge.

i think i'll mess around a bit with the protolang and try to get somewhere. my initial idea was creating a small family, but i've decided i'm gonna focus just in one language for now.

anyways, thanks a lot for the comment/help!

[thequietabsolute]

The view that held language to be an entirely human phenomenon: this view became current once it was discovered empirically that the so-called sacred languages [those of ancient theologies, primarily] were neither of primordial antiquity nor of divine provenance. What Foucault has called ‘the discovery of language’ was therefore a secular event that displaced a religious conception of how God delivered language to man in Eden. 

For the linguist, language cannot be pictured as the result of force emanating unilaterally from God. As Coleridge put it,

Language is the armoury of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

The idea of a first Edenic language gives way to the heuristic notion of a protolanguage (Indo-European, Semitic) whose existence is never a subject of debate, since it is acknowledged that such a language cannot be recaptured but can only be reconstituted.

— Edward W. Said, from Orientalism (1978.)

[outofangband]

(another) Early Quenya board!

x x  x x  x x 

Early Quenya was one of the first stages of development that the language went through, prior to 1930. At this stage, it was spoken only by the elves who would become the Vanyar as the Noldor spoke Gnomish, a protolanguage to Noldorin which is more related to Sindarin than later Noldorin Quenya.

[max1461]

When you want to write a longpost about some interesting aspect of your conworld, like the Hhotakotí revolution, wherein a charismatic young military leader united the Hhotabain for the first time, abolishing the clan system and replacing the traditional positions of clan representatives on local councils with guild representatives, creating an industrial-oligarchic state which would rapidly become a major regional power. But you can't write a longpost about that yet because in order to do that you need to have a good picture of the rhetoric and the writings of the movement, and for that you need to have the details of the traditional clan system and the pitfalls pointed to by its discontents worked out. And the clan system grew naturally as the Hhotakotí spread across the archipelago so you need to have all the early population movements mapped out (for which you need your map, but we'll get to that) and in order to do that you need to decide on a branching for the different dialects of Hhotakotí. Now obviously if you're going to be making decisions about dialect branching you need the basic structure of the grammar down, and the grammar of the protolanguage. But a major part of the grammar that you've been using for years evidently runs up against putative syntactic universal FOFC, which places limits on mixed head-direction structures related to center embedding. And now you've found a possible counterexample in Sumerian, so you want to base your structure on this example, and there's various strange embedding depth constraints you have to account for as a result, but also you have no idea about the diachronics of the Sumerian case obviously. So you have to look into the grammar of some other proposed counterexamples, which mostly come from Australia. Now this is promising because case stacking is an areal feature in both Australia and the Caucasus region, which is probably why these weird center embedding phenomena show up in Sumerian, so you hope that the relevant syntactic structures might be similar enough to be useful. But combing through grammars like this is a lot of work and you have homework all the time so you can't do it right now. And also to place the protolanguage geographically you need your fucking map, which has been lost for 8 years now even though you KNOW it's in a box in your parents' basement somewhere. So you can't write the longpost yet. Anyone else have experience with this?