Proto-Yeldhic: Difference between revisions

The proto-language originates in the work of Arnic linguist Môhwod ða-Téfir, who first formulated the Yeldha Language Theory, which proposed that many very different languages in Talkoch actually descended from one singular language family, which he called the Yeldhic language family after [[Ancient Yeldha]], which he initially believed was the original source of the Yeldhic languages.

Although the theory was initially ridiculed, fellow Tiragii linguist and calligrapher Dól-Pŷçkevç began to find a lot of evidence supporting Téfir's theory. Eventually, Téfir was on his deathbed, and he doubled down on his theory by collaborating with Pŷçkevç as well as other prominent linguists to form the first version of Proto-Yeldhic. Shortly after Téfir's death, the Késkéanya Fûhraritat, the linguistic authority of his home country of Arnah, finally accepted the theory as "very probable".

The main evidence towards the Proto-Yeldhic hypothesis is mostly described in Téfir's initial work on the subject, wriṱen in Moshurian and published in Taráhus due to political instability in his home country, the ''Tezyém Yéleduhir''. In short, Téfir observed that several morphological, phonemic and phonetic similarities could be found within his proposed Yeldhic family of languages.

As such, though Téfir's work is the most cited and the most detailed and probable, there are many variations of what one could consider an attempted "Proto-Yeldhic" language, both before and after Téfir.

For example, the word ''*vudas'', meaning "sheep", was reconstructed from Ilda ''usda'' and Vulgar Maranz ''vodvadas''. The Téfir equivalent of the word is ''*ʕʷejtu''. Though seemingly a radically different word, some aspects that Zeror noticed were factored in, such as a fricative at the beginning and a plosive before the final vowel.

! rowspan=2 | Plosive

| *p *b || || *t *d || || *k *g || *c || || rowspan=6 | *ʕ, *ʕʷ

| || *ð || *s *z || *š *ž || *x || rowspan=2 | *ç || *h

| || || *ś *ź || || ||

Long vowels in PY are not very common among most branches of the Yeldhic language family, with the exception of the Gadaïc branch, which preserved long vowels in certain languages, like [[Psér]].

In other Yeldhic branches, long vowels were either shortened(as in the Paleoyeldhic languages), dipthonged(as in [[Etzeá]]) or omitted entirely(as in the Ulmic languages, in particular [[Ormå]]). Some examples are:

** Etzeá ''meág''

* PY ''*ɣōsan''

** Etzeá ''xoisen''

* The palatalised consonants were preserved in Etzeá, though *ź split into two consonants: ''j'' [zʲ] and ''zz'' [ʒ].

There is no generally agreed upon stress pattern for Proto-Yeldhic, as stress patterns are so varied among PY descendants that scholars generally agree that a single pattern can not be accurately attested from such a wide data set. Téfir himself did not even bother mentioning stress in the ''Tezyém Yéleduhir'', though this may have been because his native language, [[Arnic]], has no concept of lexical stress. However, the ''Yéleduhir'' was written in Moshurian, a language with a strict paroxytonic stress pattern, rendering this theory amusing but unlikely.

! Original Téfir !! Modern

| ''*tikumam'' || ''*igʰoīm'' || ''tikoyam'' || five