Today I'll be discussing more about the history of the conlang and its speakers. I will also run down the prelimnary set of sound changes the ancestor language must undergo to reach the phonological system found in the modern language.
Recalling the ideas I set out for the history of the speakers, I will now set out to give a summary of the history of the speakers, focusing on their interactions with speakers of other languages, and the adstrates, substrates, and superstrates that will overlay the modern language.
I first should give some basic defintions for the calendar system I will use when describing the world. Presently, I lack any kind of worldbuilding that would justify a calendar beginning at a given date, so instead I will use a system of YBP (years before present). As the 'present day' of the setting is comprabable to the real world 16th century, this means that I can approximate, following real world history and dating, when certain things should have happened. I will now give a simplified timeline of world events before the present day, concerning technological and societal developments. Note that these developments refer to when they occurred earliest, which is primarily concerning the Fertile Crescent and more widely, within Afro-Eurasia.
| Stone Age | |
|---|---|
| c. 15500 YBP | Early domestication of animals |
| c. 11000 YBP | Founder crops (wheat, barley, etc) |
| c. 10500 YBP | Sheep, archery commonplace |
| c. 10000 YBP | Pigs, cattle |
| c. 9500 YBP | Rice |
| c. 8500 YBP | Bees |
| c. 7900 YBP | Metalworking (copper ornamentation) |
| c. 7500 YBP | Rye, proto-cities |
| c. 7000 YBP | Early pastoralism |
| c. 5700 YBP | Steppe pastoralist migrations |
| c. 5500 YBP | Wheel |
| c. 5000 YBP | Writing systems |
| Copper and Bronze Ages | |
| c. 4700 YBP | Copper working |
| c. 4500 YBP | Earliest civilisations/states, sorghum |
| c. 4000 YBP | Bronze working |
| c. 3500 YBP | Chariot |
| Iron Age | |
| c. 3000 YBP | Iron working |
| c. 2000 YBP | Water wheels, watermills |
| c. 2000-1000 YBP | Regional empires, expansion of trade |
| c. 1900 YBP | Cast iron, catapult |
| c. 1200 YBP | Stirrup |
| c. 500 YBP | Gunpowder |
Considering all these developments, and the fact I stated that the society should be in the early local Iron Age. What I meant by this is that ironworking has reached the region relatively recently (within the past millennia) and has been widely adopted. A society that adopted ironworking at a comparable time to this date would be Kofun period Japan, which adopted ironworking from China and the Korean peninsula, which spread to these regions around 500 BCE. Ironworking spread across Afro-Eurasia between around 1200 BCE and 400 CE, a period of only 1600 years.
So the present situation in the region where the language is spoken is of an isolated civilisation that has developed progressively over the past 3000 or so years. Around 3000 YBP was when urban centres began to develop in this region, due to trade with other civilisations via the sea, though organised states did not develop until around 2000 YBP. Writing presumably was adopted and spread around the same time states did, and the writing system was likely descended from one brought by traders.
At this point nomadic groups migrated into the region and introduced bronze working, horses, and the wheel. This was when the speakers of the ancestor language, or more accurately, their descendants, adopted pastoralism, and proceeded to migrate into the civilisation, and began to spread their language family. This adoption of pastoralism by hunter-gatherers can be compared to the adoption of pastoralism by Turkic and Mongolic peoples due to Indo-European influence.
Iron working was later introduced by sea trade and/or nomads around 1000 YBP, though iron tools and weapons were likely already present in their society before this. The speakers of the modern language descend from a tribe that was forced to migrate east by nomads around 1500 YBP and eventually established themselves as the dominant ethnic group within a river basin, forming an empire there around 1000 YBP, coinciding with the spread of iron working. The speakers at present are the descendants of the mixed descendants of that tribe and the native population of the river basin, and presently are split across a number of states.
Now I'm going to detail the sound changes that have caused the ancestor language to become the modern language, noting periods in which these sound changes occurred, which will allow me to design the neighbouring languages, given the expected areal influences that will have effected the language.
| Pre-Nomadic Period Sound Changes (3000-2200 YBP) | |
|---|---|
| 1. | Uvular/velar merger. |
| 2. | Largyneal fricatives are lost entirely, causing vowel lengthening. |
| 3. | Diphthongs become long vowels; chain shift affects non-high short vowels /ə/ → /ɑ/ → /æ/ → /e/. |
| 4. | Chain lenition of stops/fricatives in medial position. |
| 5. | Palatal series are fronted to alveolar consonants, becoming affricates in the case of stops. |
| Nomadic Period Sound Changes (2200-1500 YBP) | |
| 6. | Vowel/consonant length is lost; non-high back vowels merge as /ɑ/; stress shifts to the initial syllable. |
| 7. | Palatalisation effects velar and alveolar consonants. |
| 8. | Unstressed non-low vowels are syncopated in unstressed syllables, but only before single consonants. |
| 9. | Dental fricatives merge with alveolar sibilants. |
| 10. | /j/ and /w/ are fortified in onsets to /ɟ/ and /b/. |
| Early Settled Period Sound Changes (1500-1000 YBP) | |
| 11. | Aspirated stops are affricated. Affricates are then all turned into simple fricatives. |
| 12. | Clusters assimilate, and some simplify, especially obstruent-obstruent clusters. |
| 13. | New diphthongs shift, and long vowels arise from fricative weakening. All voiced fricatives become approximants. |
| 14. | /ʎ/ becomes /j/, and then this new instance of /j/ merges with /ɟ/ in onset positions. |
| Imperial Period Sound Changes (1000-600 YBP) | |
| 15. | Long vowels become fixed to short vowels in terms of articulation, but these are not necessarily the same vowels they arose from. |
| 16. | Some approximants are lost medially. Vowel hiatus is resolved by the forming of new diphthongs/long vowels/glide clusters. |
| 17. | Stress shifts to the antepenult, and to the penult if it is heavy. |
| 18. | Metrical rules force coda consonant dropping and vowel shortening in some contexts. This is due to a limit on the number of mora per foot to two mora in feet that are not stressed. |
| Post-Imperial Period Sound Changes (600-0 YBP) | |
| 19. | Chain shift of voiced > voiceless > aspirated with obstruents. |
| 20. | /f/ is debucalised to /h/, and this causes vowel lengthening when occurring in coda position. |
| 21. | Apocope occurs, affecting only short high vowels, earlier mid vowels then become high in this context. |
| 22. | Final stops and fricatives are dropped, lengthening the preceding vowel if allowed by metrical rules. |
| 23. | /ɛ/-/e/ merger occurs, while back vowels are raised, with /u/ becoming /ʉ/. |