Takkenit

Takkenit language or Takkenkikle [ˈtɑ.kːən.ˌkik.lə] - is a language, spoken in a mesolithic Eastern European plains (circa 5000-7000 BCE) on the territories of modern Northern Ukraine and Western Belarus. It shows some features, found in distant languages like Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Yuralic or even Chukchi and Yukaghir to the far east of Siberia. Some linguists claim this to be relicts of a hypothetical proto-Nostratic unity, however this theory is still disputed.

Takkenit language
Takkenkikle
Pronunciation	[/ˈtɑ.kːən.ˌkik.lə/]
Created by	Raistas
Setting	Almost real world
Language family	Indo-Uralic Takkenit language

General information

Takkenit is an agglutinative language, which was typical for the region it came from at those times. It shows many lexican parallels with steppe languages to the south-east, which means, its homeland was somewhere to the east of the Caspian sea having been much larger that it is now and covering plains of a modern Volga river basin.

External history

Once upon a time I happened to read an article about lexical similarities between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic and I asked myself, how that language could have sounded. It became a bit interesting to me, but there was just too little information on this topic. So I did my own research (maybe it should not be called a "research", but rather an extrapolation) and found just enough to create a daughter-language of a common ancestor of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic (which was not my goal at first, but why not?) and saw what it was like. It seems to me, that there to little evidence left indeed, so a proper reconstruction ca not be made: Proto-Indo-Uralic was spoken circa 10 000 BCE or even longer ago if it existed at all.

Internal history

The name Takkenkikle comes from takkune ("tribe", "people, related to each other") and kikle ("speech", "language"), so it translates as people's language. Its homeland is claimed to be Central Asian steppe between the Caspian sea and the Aral sea, which was forming, but hasn't become a single body of water yet. During 7000 BCE the earliest forms of the Takkenit language became distinct and Takkenit people separated from neighbouring tribes and moved westward to the sea. There is no consensus, why exactly the migration happened, but the most prominant factor was definitely climate change which brought less rains and caused animals to migrate further north.

Soon the people left northern shores of the Caspian sea and by the 6500 BCE reached the territory of forests and swamps in Eastern Europe, rich in food and materials for daily life. During this time different tribes and even villages were speaking slightly different dialects, which started diverging more and more, creating a dialectal continuum. But due to a semi-nomadic lifestyle contacts between people remained pretty high and thus their dialects did not become too distinct to be unintelligible.

By 5000 BCE Takkenit tribes became surrounded by various linguistically diverse peoples, most of which migrated from the south. The climate was already warm enough to establish agriculture and soon neolithic tribes from Anatolia and Balkans started spreading and assimilating indigenous people due to greater numbers and technological advantages. Takkenit people slowly intermixed with its neighbours and shifted to their languages leaving only a bunch of substrate words and place names. Those new cultures would be quite advanced and prosperous for a long time until about 3000-2800 BCE, when they were also assimilated by the Corded Ware and Yamna people from the east.

Phonology

Orthography

Takkenit has never been a written language, its stories and songs were transfered orally from generation to generation until the extinction of the language. I use Latin script with some additional letters (ŋ and sometimes also ə) to fully cover the phonology of Takkenit, which is fairly simple.

Consonants

The Takkenit consonant inventory is very simple. The most interesting feature of it is a complete lack of any fricatives. Geminated consonants, which are represented with double letters (like tt, or kk) can be analyzed as a sequence of two same sounds. The consonants [n] and [t] are more often dental while [l] is more often alveolar and [r] is always alveolar, that's why t near [r] is also always alveolar, like in English, but near [n] it is always dental, like in Spanish or other non-Germanic languages. The [j] sound can palatalize a preceding consonant but this palatalization is not phonemic and occures only before this sound.

	Labial	Denti-Alveolar	Palatal	Velar
Nasal	m	n		ŋ
Plosive	p	t		k
Approximant	(w)	l	j	w
Trill		r

Vowels

The vowel inventory of Takkenit is even simpler than the consonant one containing only four phonemes, but the allophonic variation is much greater. Despite that, the phonology became even simpler near the time of language's extinction with all unstressed vowels merged into [ə] and vowel assimilation, which then gave new consonant alterations. This was due to increasing contacts with more technologically advanced mesolithic and neolithic tribes. The table below shows the middle stage of the language right before those contacts and language assimilation process in the period of its largest ammount of speakers.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i	(ɨ)1	u
Mid	(e)1	ə	(ɤ)1 (o~ɔ)2
Low	(æ~ɛ)2		ɑ

1. These sounds are allophones of /ə/. When under stress it is pronounced [e], in words with high vowels it is [ɨ] or [ɤ] and near [ɑ] it remains [ə]. The pronunciation vary greatly between different tribes, showing some kinds of vowel harmony, which was present earlier but broke soon.
2. Can be found in South-East dialect as an archaic feature of older vowel harmony. However its vowel harmony is based on frontness and backness (like in modern Finnish, for examle), while the older one was based on vowel height. For example kemi [ˈke.mi] which means "blood" is komə [ˈko.mɤ] in this dialect. The word itself comes from *kɯmɨ. Or kikle [ˈkik.lə] ("speech") which is käkle [ˈkæk.le] in South-East and comes from *kekemə ("to make sounds", "to tweet").

Stress

The stress is not phonemic in Takkenit, at least in its middle and late stages. It has a trochaic system, where the main stress is always on the first syllable of the word and secondary ones are put one every odd-numbered syllables exept for the last one, which is always unstressed. Similar system is in Finnic and Samic languages and was also present in Proto-Uralic. An early pre-ablaut stage of Proto-Indo-European could also have such a system. Because of this and also due to some other features, like absence of consonant cluster inside a syllable, the Takkenit speech is very fast with words blending with one another, which can create a misunderstanding or confusion in someone, who do not speak the language perfectly. Some words can even change their shape in fast speech and such words can also be incorporated into action verbs.

Phonotactics

The Takkenit language has a somewhat restricted ammount of syllables, meaning it allowes only CV and CVC, where C is any consonant and V is any vowel. Vowel-initial syllables (V and VC) are rare and are allowed only word initially. No consonant clusters are allowed within a single syllable, which also means no initial or final consonant clusters. However if a last syllable contains /ə/ as a nucleus (such as in genitive plural ending -nək) the vowel can be dropped in the fast speech (so the ending will become -nk). The hiatus (sequence of two vowels) is also not allowed. All of these rules make Takkenit words sound a bit similar, so many of them has suffixes attached. This not only makes a more specific meaning but also helps to differentiate words that otherwise would sound the same. For example murke can mean "to kill an animal prey", "to hit an animal" or "to gather woodsticks". That's why murekke is used for the first meaning, murkete - for the second and murakte - for the third.

Morphophonology

When attaching various suffixes or endings to a word, many consonant clusters would appear. In these cases an epenthetic vowel (mostly e /ə/) is inserted between, for instance "I'm catching (successfully)", which would be kakettemi phonologically and kak-tt-m-i morphologically. If two vowels would appear side by side, the previous one is simply elided (kulu ("small", singular) would give kulit ("small", plural) and not *kuluit).

Morphology

Nouns

Takkenit nouns have the grammatical categories of number (singular, dual, plural), case (nominative, genitive, accusative, locative, ablative and vocative) and possessivity (non-possessive versus possessive forms). Yet because the language is active-stative rather that nominative-accusative, the nominative case is sometimes called the agentive, the accusative - the patientive and the locative - the indirect or oblique case (locative has also the function of dative and marks an indirect object of a sentence). If a clause has more that one word (such a in "a small bush") endings are attached only to the main word of a clause: kulu kenna ("small bush", nominative singular) and kulu kennim ("small bushes", accusative plural).