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tanadrin · 6 years ago

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On the Whaikeyo language

Proto-Windlander, or Whaikeyo, is the reconstructed protolanguage of the Windlander language family. The Windlander family is not to be confused with Ovjanec langauges in general, the non-phyletic group of all languages spoken in the Windlands. Proto-Windlander is sometimes called Old South Ngaran, after the marginally-attested Windlander language known from inscriptions in southern Dap Ngara, which may be a late or dialectical form of Proto-Windlander. The region has been proposed as one of several possible areas of origin for the Proto-Windlander language.

The Windlander language family is named for Ovjan (Sea Kuthra "Wind lands"), the long peninsula which extends from southeastern Altuum and divides the Southern Sea from the Sea of Rains. Windlander languages probably first appeared on the peninsula about two thousand years before the Conn invasion. (One local year is equivalent to a little more than half a terrestrial year.) The language family subsequently underwent a rapid breakup and transformation, being heavily influenced by both the non-Windlander languages of the southern part of the peninsula and the arrival of Sea Kuthra from the west, and the various languages of the Oroso missionaries of Velannu and southern Altuum from the northwest. Although Windlander cultural identity remained strong, the Oroso faith and Sea Kuthra dialects were particularly influential along the narrow western coastal plain; most subsequent thriving Windlander languages were to be found in the wet, hilly uplands, and they became somewhat associated with traditional Windlander animist beliefs.

Whaikeyo's first remarkable feature is its rigidly symmetric phonology. All Whaikeyo consonants are interpreted as occurring at one of five specific places of articulation (labial, dental, velar, retroflex, and uvular) and having one of five manners of articulation (stop, ejective stop, nasal, sibilant fricative, and non-sibilant fricative). Additionally, the three Whaikeyo vowels have three allophones each (back/high, front/high, and back/low), which depend on the vowel harmony governing a Whaikeyo word. In practice, the Whaikeyo phonology had some variation, especially in the fricative series, which were regularized differently by its daughter languages. The stops, nasals, and ejectives were fairly straightforward, thus:

Stops: /p t ʈ k q/ Ejectives: /p' t' ʈ' k' q'/ Nasals: /m n ɳ ŋ ɴ/

Note, however, that /n/ could be realized as [ɱ], [n̪], or [n]. The two series of fricatives exhibited even more allophony. Nominally, they were:

Sibilant: /ɸ s ʃ ʂ ɕ/ Non-sibilant: /ʍ θ ç x h/

But the dental sibilant was clearly /f/ in the loanwords found in early Ovjanec dialects of Sea Kuthra, and there is some evidence /s/ had both dental and alveolar allophones. [x] or even [ʃ] are sometimes found for /ɕ/, and its numerous, and often wildly different, reflexes in the daughter languages have been used to argue that there was in fact no fifth sibilant in the protolanguage. Similarly, the non-sibilants show clear signs of being an eclectic group of consonants that were grouped together by happenstance, insofar as they did not find a home in one of the other consonant series; /ʍ/ may have in fact been a voiced fricative /v/ originally. /θ/, /x/, and /h/ all had at least two forms, with [χ] and [ħ] being commonly accepted as allophones for /x/ and /h/.

In addition to the five-by-five voiceless consonant series, there are three semivowels or invariant vowels in Whaikeyo. While normally vowels in Whaikeyo experience vowel harmony based on the first vowel of a word (the vowel of the noun root), the invariant vowels do not; in the daughter languages, the invariant vowels are normally realized as liquids or semivowels, but evidence from Sea Kuthra loanwords and some Old Windlander dialects indicates the invariant vowels may have been short vowels or simply the second half of diphthongs that did not experience harmony.

Semivowels: /j~ɥ w~ɰ ʕ̞~ɑ̯/

The vowels and their allophones were as follows:

Back/high (u): /i u a~ɑ/ Front/high (i): /i ʊ æ/ Back/low (a): /e o a~ɑ/

The overall character of the vowels in a word was determined, in nouns and verbs, by the vowel of the root noun, normally the first vowel in the word. In particles and adverbs, it was determined by the vowel that carried the most emphasis, which was normally the vowel of the first long syllable (open or closed with a single final consonant) in the word.

Whaikeyo was also remarkable for being, as one Preshi linguist put it, "Nature's first, and so far only attempt to evolve a statically typed object-oriented natural language." All verbs and adjectives in Whaikeyo have an intrinsic noun root. The noun root defines the scope of the verb or adjective, and actions or states are expressed as modifications of the natural state of the root noun. Moreover, relations between distinct objects are usually communicated by passing one object to the verb of another. For example, the utterance "I see a dog wagging its tail and begging for scraps" in Whaikeyo could be said to have the following underlying structure:

var animal pronoun1 = Dog(tail_wagging = true, begging = true) var person pronoun2 = Speaker.see(pronoun1)

In normal speech, generic objects like dogs are understood, as is the type (i.e., noun class) of common pronouns. Thus, simplified:

that (animate, nonhuman) = Dog(tail_wagging = true, begging = true) this (speaker) = I.see(that)

Or, in idiomatic Whaikeyo:

Mai (q'uy), q'uypaknu q'uytuk'xu t'imiy (mai). "That (is) a dog, tail-wagging (and) begging; I see (it)."

Alternatively, if we wish to translate "wagging" as a full verb in its own right, and not merely as a verbal modifier paknu:

Mai q'uytuk'xu, mai q'uypaknu nga q'uythint t'imiy (mai). "That (is) a dog begging, that dog wags its tail, I see it."

In more sophisticated or more abstract discussions, it may become necessary to use generic pronouns like t'uyyi and kaq'ngo which also require the speaker to specifically state the relevant class of the noun they wish to specify. Information about verbs, like aspect and tense, is either described by modifying the state of the governing noun ("Q'uya, formerly, follows us", with context distinguishing between likelier meanings like "Q'uya was following us" and unlikelier meanings like "The thing that used to be Q'uya is following us") or by adverbs that act as additional, optional objects of the verb (e.g., shekkait'e, "time-made-past" or "time.elapse()", i.e., "formerly"). In later Whaikeyo, different verb roots came to acquire different connotations of aspect and tense, leading to many common verbs in the daughter languages having (often slightly differing) suppletive tense/aspect conjugations. However, Whaikeyo grammar was in general quite unstable; even if all these features coexisted simultaneously, alongside additional posited features that have been suggested, like the use of a rootless verb t’suw "exists" that functioned like a __main__() method, they did so only briefly. Whaikeyo's daughter languages, though they exhibit numerous atypical features like intrinsic noun roots and complex verb object clusters, are altogether more straightforward in their syntax--which is to say they exhibit the usual ambiguity and chaos of natural human languages.

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