Ketanian

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Nloki
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Ketanian

Post by Nloki »

For some time I've been working on a new a-priori project of mine, namely Ketanian (the modern lang's endonym is Kthndvöshk ([kθn̩ˈdvøʃk])). Although neighbouring cultures and sister languages within the context of the conworld I'm working on are still blurry, the defying characteristics of the Ketanian speakers' community have been already mostly stablished, yet by this point grammar is far for complete. I'll be uploading my progress on this topic as time goes on and I continue developing and fledging out the language further.

PHONOLOGY:
•Phonemic inventory:
/m n ɲ ŋ/
/ˀm̥ ˀn̪̊ ˀɲ̊ ˀŋ̊/
/p b t̪ d̪ k g/
/v θ s ʃ x/
/t͡s t͡ʃ/
/ɾ l j/

/ɪ ʏ u/
/e ø o/
/a/

•Phonotactics:
Maximum syllable structure allowed:
#KSC/CViK/NF#.
C = any consonant.
K = non-sibilant obstruents, and nasals.
S = sibilant fricatives.
N = assimilated nasals/sibilants.
F = coronal and velar stops.
V = any vowel.

•Allophony:
/ɾ/ -> [r] word initially.
-Sibilant assimilation: /s/ -> [ʃ] while preceding /k/, /ʃ/ -> /s/ when preceding /t/. Example: vöshk (language.NOM), vöst (language.ERG).
-Sibilant fricatives become affricates when preceding other non-sibilant fricatives.
-In stop+sibilant+stop clusters, the sibilant fricative assimilates to first stop, rather than the second one.
Thus, clusters like pshk- and kst- are illegal, their correct versions being psk- and ksht- respectively. However, since /t͡ʃ/ is deemed as a single phoneme, chk- may exist (it is in fact the contracted root for "to eat").
-/nv/ cluster becomes [ndv].

•Sibilant harmony: alveolar and postalveolar sibilants not only get assimilated to the following/surrounding stop(s), but also trigger sibilant harmony in that position, causing all other sibilants on a word to shift to the same sound.

•Stress:
In contrast with previous stages of the language, where such an strict stress pattern would later cause vowels to dissapear in unstressed syllables when affixation occurred resulting on its reduced stems' system, modern Ketanian has quite a free prosody, with intonation and stress varying wildly among different speakers, having earlier become a diglossic feature mainly caused by the divide between higher and lower classes in society, fossilized in the colloquial and formal registers of the modern language. Nobles tended to put more emphasis on the last syllable of an inflected word, whereas most people would stress the stem itself rather than the case/whatever affix, which eventually might be reanalyzed as separate from the word it used to be attached to in future stages of language evolution. All that alongside the actual dialects varying between distant regions in Shkanem.

As a first cultural note about this fictional speaker community, their endonym and the word for "mountain" share the same root!

•Proto-Ashaean:
keth aana (lit. "mountain-person"), keth jaanu (lit. "mountain-place").
•Modern Standard Kdnvoshk: kthan ("man"), shkan ("mountain").

The phonological explanation to those bizarre sound changes in /ketʰ ˈjaːnu/ -> /ʃˈkan/ involves the following evolution:
-Aspirated stops become fricatives in all environments.
-/θ/ -> /s/ before palatals, thus ksaanu.
-Sibilant clusters metathesize word-initially; skaanu.
-Sibilant allophony develops, long vowels are shortened and the short ones are lost in most unstressed syllables; shkan.

The diachronical explanation to this lies in the very settlement of Old Kehjan, first home to the Ketanian mountain-dweller culture.
It is said they had been inhabiting those mountains for thousands of years already, but given a certain moment, catastrophic events led the Old Ketanians to migrate, leaving their homeland in the steep slopes of Kehjan, around 2300-2200 years in the past to the modern era. Since then, their original settlement has become a site of pilgrimage for expeditioners and archaeologists, since the Old Ketanians had quite an intricate infrastructure in their mountains, tunnels and mines all over the place, and by the modern times, their secret knowledge on astronomy, metallurgy and other sciences is only just beginning to get unraveled.
Returning to the Old Ketanians and their migration towards the south, once they had to abandon the northern mountain ranges they used to inhabit they got scattered across the lands, mostly intertwining with other cultures and forgetting about the former civilization they had been stripped of. But some groups recalled their ancestral distinctive of mountain-dwelling and joined together to find a better place to live. And by the time they found it, they just got invaded by an empire soon fallen, not before having been slaughtered and decimated in a terrible war against the oppressors lasting for over two decades.
The name given for that place was Shkanem, and it would become the permanent nation and residence of the New Ketanian peoples.

Noun morphology; coming soon!

EDIT: syntax is head final, an the language is, overall, agglutinative on inflection and fusional on derivation. I thought not having stated this wasn't enough.
Last edited by Nloki on 23 Jan 2020 18:18, edited 9 times in total.
Nloki
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Posts: 65
Joined: 15 Dec 2018 16:01

Re: Ketanian

Post by Nloki »

NOUN MORPHOLOGY:
¶Stem reduction system:
Nouns in Ketanian tend to behave differently in the nominative than any other form in the singular (plural involves reduplication so it doesn't happen there). Basically, in prior stages of the language, quite a strict stress pattern forced inflected nouns to inherently change shift stress one syllable to the right, and when short vowels were lost in unstressed syllables, this root contraction system was left. Long story short, the vowel in the stem disappears, leaving a half-Georgian-likely structured word. Some other sound changes may apply as well, for the amount of consonants getting into contact with each other is really inscrutable. This happens as well in verbs for its dual-stem system, but that's for the next post.
—Examples:
Shek ("elder") -> shk-.
Shen ("wolf") -> shn-.
Shkan ("mountain") -> shkng-.
Süth ("flower") -> ts-.
Büshk ("mouse") -> *psk-.
Tnok ("Sun") -> tngk-.
Keit ("land") -> kth-.
Vöshk ("language") -> fshk-/vzh-∅-k.

*Sibilant assimilation doesn't apply here because of that /p/ blocking it.

¶Plural marking:
The most common strategy for marking the plural in Kthndvöshk is reduplication, although more specific semantics may be conveyed by means of determiners, but we will go on that later...

Since most incorporated elements within compounds (compounding and incorporation are quite common across Ketanian) are now unrecognizable from either each other or their isolated forms in the modern language, the reduplication patters applied are highly irregular and often require memorization for most common compounds and derivates.

Clear examples of this are common terms of everyday use with incorporated elements;
Kthan ("man", "highlander", "Ketanian"), kthnan ("men", "highlander", etc.), from Proto-Ashaean keth aan(aan)a
Shkan ("mountain"), shkajan ("mountains"), from keth jaa(jaan)u.

Also, since the vowel of the duplicated syllable tends to differ from that in the stem, even simple roots may undergo irregular pluralization;
Vöshk ("language"), pl. vevzhök.
Nguk ("woman"), pl. ngonk.
Shek ("elder"), pl. shishk.
Nang ("river"), pl. nenggĕ.
Soth ("flower"), pl. sest.
Eshk ("hand"), pl. ikeshk (some Southern speakers might pronounce it as jeshk instead).
Vikht ("child"), pl. vifk.
Shen ("wolf"), pl. shizhn.
Kngish ("baby, newborn"), pl. knginksh.
Pkhushk ("pig"/"numb, stupid one"), pl. pkhukshk.

None of these ten words share any pluralization strategies among them, and you might find this all across the language, having to memorize the plural form for almost every noun.

¶Case:
Here's where the animacy split comes at first. Animate and inanimate nouns in Ketanian often undergo different paradigms for inflection and derivation depending on whether they're clustered on one group or another, as well as separate alignment treatments, with animate nouns mostly treated as nominative-accusative in any given sentence, and inanimates tending more towards an ergative pattern.
Also, speaking of case, it must be agreed with by adjectives on their head nouns (if not standing on their own, another possibility). However, determiners don't agree with their head nouns, but rather undertake the case suffix whereas the noun is kept plural marking, and postpositions (postositions' meanings may vary depending on the case the noun is placed in) are set after a(n inflected) noun.

•Animate nouns: they inflect for six cases; nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, essive and vocative.

—Examples: kthan ("man") and shek ("elder").

Code: Select all

     SG     PL      SG      PL
NOM: kthan  kthnan  shek    shishk
ACC: kthnu  kthnanu shko    shizhok
GEN: kthnin kthnain shken   shishken
DAT: kthni  kthnai  shki    shizhik
ESS: kthnta kthnant shekhta sista
VOC: kthnei kthneni shkei   shizheik
•Inanimate nouns: they inflect for six cases as well; nominative (absolutive), ergative, genitive, instrumental, locative and lative.
The ergative marks inanimate subjects of transitive verbs, and the lative case is most often used for motion towards referent, but may also have apropositive uses.

—Examples: shkan ("mountain") and vöshk ("language").

Code: Select all

       SG      PL       SG     PL
NOM:   shkan   shkajan  vöshk  vevzhök
ERG:   shkant  shkajant vöst   vefst
GEN:   shkngen shkainen fshkin vefshkin
INSTR: shkngik shkainik vzhik  vevzhik
LOC:   shkam   shkajam  fshkem vefshkem
LAT:   shkngar shkainar fshker vefshker
Verb morphology; coming soon.
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