Meskangela

Meskangela language
མསྐཾངེལཿ Mëskaŋelā
Created by	Raistas
Setting	planet Earth (Europe)
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Himalayan Meskangelan Meskangela language
Early form	*Proto-Himalayan Proto-Meskangela (4000–1300 BNE) Old Meskangela (1300–300 BNE) Classical Meskangela (300 BNE–0 NE)

Meskangela (Classical Meskangela: མསྐཾངེལཿ mëskaŋelā; Western མསྐཾངེལཿ mëskaŋela; Eastern མསྐཾངེལཿ mëskåŋeła; Southern མཁཾངྃག măkhoŋäg) is a Himalayan language of an unknown origin. The most common hypothesis suggests its origin in the West Himalayan region and migrated westward over the period of three thousand years. For a millennium, Old Meskangela served as a language of public life and administration as well as a language of divine worship. The Classical Meskangela (also known as “Meskangela Proper” མསྐཾངེལཿ རནཏཾཀེ Meskangela Rántake) was a standardised dialect that emerged from Old Meskangela in approximately 300 BNE and remained spoken until the New Era, after which it remained only a written standard, as local dialects gained more recognition and prominence. Seven dialects are still spoken, but only the Southern variety diverges from the classical spelling and uses its own modified version of the Meskangēl script.

New Meskangela dialects are written in the Meskangēl script, a descendant of the Ancient Himalayan script, and the classical variety remains most prominent. The earliest inscriptions date from 13th century BNE, although such inscriptions remained scarce until approximately 500 BNE, when first religious texts were written. However, the linguistic history of Meskangela prior to the appearance of such textual sources remains unknown.

Name and history

The name of the language was coined during the classical period from the word སྐཾང་ skaŋ “mountain” and means “pertaining to the mountains”, since the land where it was traditionally spoken is mountainous. Other groups used different terms to refer to themselves and their languages: མྸཾཨྃལཿ mágailā “Southern”, སྱ྅རེལཿ syörilā “Western”, ཀལོནེལཿ këlónelā “Plain dialect”, ཁམེལཿ khëmelā “Coastal dialect”.

Historically Meskangela had always been the language of the mountainous islands. Its origin, however, is obscure, as all documentations of the previous eras were lost, and local folklore only briefly mentions an ancient journey to the west, called ཨཱགརྭཾཏུ Āgërwatu. Little is known about the language of that period itself, its phonology is the only part that is well understood, which allows to reconstruct many Proto-Meskangela words. By around 1300 BNE, the Meskanel people had a many chiefdoms in all of the three main islands. During that period the written language rose to prominence and was standardised for the first time (300 BNE). Later, Meskangela Proper became a prestige language after being adopted as a lingua franca between its various dialects. The dialects themselves had already developed their distinctive features by the classical period, and Meskangela Proper was not a common ancestor of those dialects, instead it was a standardised variety of the Central Syörilā, which comprises Western and Eastern Tūŋëdēla (“Innersea”) group. During the New Era Meskangela is still often referred as a single language, even though by the end of the classical period it had already been a group of closely related languages. The most accurate term to describe Meskangela as a whole is a dialect continuum.

Geographic distribution

The Meskangela language is spoken on three main landmasses, which are used to group its dialects: འས྅རིཀཿ Hasörikā “Westland”, སྱཾརལིངཿ Syarëliŋā “Eastland” and མྸཾགཾརིཀཿ Mágårikā “Southland”, as well as on many islands surrounding the landmasses. There are also some small communities in the southern continent Lyökimëranā, but most of those settlements are recent, and for the most part originate from the Southland.

Dialects

Seven main dialects of Meskangela:

  Outer Syörilā

  Inner Syörilā

  Western Tūŋëdēllā

  Eastern Tūŋëdēllā

  Outer Khëmelā

  Inner Khëmelā

  Southern

  sparsely populated or uninhabited

Linguistically speaking, Meskangela is not a single language, but a group of closely related languages, divided into three subgroups: Western, Eastern and Southern, based on their relative location. Some dialects within one subgroup may differ more from each other than other dialects belonging to different subgroups, which mostly depends on their geographic isolation and influence of the standard language. Some dialects are mutually intelligible, whereas others are not, not unlike the situation of a typical dialect continuum. Several varieties still use different names for themselves: a relatively divergent far Eastern variety is called Khīmła [ˈkʰiː.wɑ], Southeastern dialects – Majäg [ˈma.jɛɣ], Southwestern – Gakhō Łatem [ɣa.ˈkʰy. ʟa.ˈteʊ]. Most dialects can be described as either "Western", "Eastern" or "Southern", which corresponds to three main islands. It is also important to draw a distinction between later dialects of the New Era (often called "New Meskangela"), the classical variety used as a written, but not a spoken language, and those that are extinct. Thus, it is convenient to classify these dialects as "Modern", "Middle" or "Classical", and "Old", alongside the classification, based on geograhic areas.

Writing system

“Mëskangelā” in the cursive script.

The Meskangela script was based on the Ancient Himalayan script. With time, it developed its distinctive style and characters, specifically vowel markers, which were seldom used in writing Old Meskangela. The later varieties adopted this script with minor modifications. The other main writing system used for Meskangela, mostly after the classical period, was a cursive script.

Consonants
	Aspirated			Unaspirated			Fricative			Voiced			Nasal			Lateral approximant	Glottal
	letter	sound	rom.	letter	sound	rom.	letter	sound	rom.	letter	sound	rom.	letter	sound	rom.	ལྷ​	—
Velar	ཁ	[kʰ]	kh	ཀ	[k]	k	ཨ​	[ɣ~∅], *[x]	g	​ག​	[ɣ]	g	​ང​	[ŋ]	ŋ	[ɬ]
Palatal	ཆ	[t͡ɕʰ]	ch	ཅ	[t͡ɕ]	c	​ས​​	[s]	s	​ཡ​	[j]	j	—			lh
Dental	ཁ	[tʰ]	th	ཀ	[t]	t	ཞ​	[θ]	z	ཨ​	[ð̞~ɹ]	d	​ན​	[n]	n	ལ	འ
Labial	ཕ​​	[pʰ]	ph	པ	[p]	p	ཧ​​​​	[h~ɦ], *[f]	h	བ​	[w]	w	​མ​	[m]	m	[l]	[a], *[aʱ]
Trill	རྷ​​​​	[r̥]	rh	ར	[r]	r	རྲ​​​	[d͡z]	ʒ	—						l	a
Vowels and semivowels
	vowel	sound	rom.	vowel	sound	rom.	vowel	sound	rom.	vowel	sound	rom.	vowel	sound	rom.	vowel	sound	rom.
Short vowels	◌ི	[i]	i	◌ུ	[u]	u	◌ེ	[e]	e	◌ོ	[o]	o	◌ཾ	[a]	a	◌	[ə]	ë
Long vowels	◌ཱི	[iː]	ī	◌ཱུ	[uː]	ū	◌ཻ	[eː]	ē	◌ཽ	[oː]	ō	◌ཱ	[aː]	ā	◌྅	[øː]	ö
Diphthongs	◌ྃ	[aɪ]	ai	◌ྂ	[aʊ]	au	◌ཿ	*[aʱ]	ā	◌ྸ	[˥]	◌́	◌ྱ	[ʲ]	y	◌ྭ	[ʷ]	w

The table above demonstrates all characters of the Meskangēl script and their classical pronunciation. Individual dialects may vary greatly over the way certain characters are pronounced, and some dialects do not use certain letters, while others still retain the Classical Meskangela spelling, even though the pronunciation is different. For example, the Eastern variety does not use "◌ྂ" (au), replacing it with "◌ཱུ" (ū) everywhere, and uses "ཨ" to represent [l], while the Southern variety does not use letters "ཨ" and "ཞ​", the tone symbol "◌ྸ" and the "◌ཿ " ending and ignore those characters while reading.

Phonology

Each dialect of Meskangela has its own distinctive pronunciation, and it would not be feasible here to go into all these properties. Classical Meskangela has 60 distinct phonemes, while Old Meskangela likely had up to 66 phonemes. All later dialects have smaller consonant inventories, but some have more vowel phonemes, than the Classical variety.

Vowels

The table below represents vowels of Classical Meskangela:

	Short			Long
	Front	Central	Back	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u	iː		uː
Close-mid	e		o	eː	ɵː	oː
Open-mid		ə	(ɔ)	aɪ		ɑʊ
Open	a			aː		ɑ(ː)

The vowel [ɔ] was an allophone of short /a/ in open syllables. Whether it contrasted with the open vowels remains a matter of debate, however, in most later dialects it became a separate phoneme. The same is true for [ɑ(ː)], the quality of which is not certain, because it did not merge with [ɔ] in the Eastern group, but likely was short. The exact quality of Meskangela diphthongs is uncertain as well, "ai" remains a diphthong only in the far Western dialects, where it is refected as [eɪ] or [ɛɪ], while "au" becomes [øʏ] in the Outer and [ɶ] in the Inner Western dialects, so it could have been slightly fronted or centralised in the proto-language.

The high long vowels are the most stable among the Meskangela dialects (with "ū" fronting to [y(ː)] only in the Inner Eastern variety), while the mid vowel group is the most variable. Eastern and Southern varieties exhibit metaphony affecting both short and long vowels to a different degree. The short vowels in the Southern dialect are frequently affected by syncope, thus creating new vowel contrasts.

Consonants

		Labial	Dental		Alveolar			Palatal	Velar			Glottal
			plain	labialised	plain	palatalised	labialised		plain	palatalised	labialised
Nasal		m	n	nʷ				ɲ	ŋ		ŋʷ
Plosive	aspirated	(pʰ)	tʰ	tʷʰ	t͡sʰ	t͡ɕʰ	t͡sʷʰ		kʰ	kʲʰ	kʷʰ
	tenuis	p	t	tʷ	t͡s	t͡ɕ	t͡sʷ		k	kʲ	kʷ
Fricative			θ		s	ɕ	sʷ					h~ɦ
Approximant	Voiceless				l̥	ʎ̥	l̥ʷ
	Voiced	w	ð̞	(d͡z)	l	ʎ	lʷ	j	ɣ̞	ɥ	ɣ̞ʷ
Trill	Voiceless				r̥	r̥ʲ	r̥ʷ
	Voiced				r	rʲ	rʷ

• The exact value of a phoneme, denoted with the character "རྲ" is uncertain. It was likely a voiced affricate /d͡z/ or a fricative /zʷ/ during the classical period. In later dialects it became [pʰ], [r], [θ] or [w].
• /pʰ/ was a marginal phoneme in Classical Meskangela, it became more common in the Western dialects and disappeared in Southern Meskangela.
• /ɥ/ was a separate phoneme in Old Meskangela and had remained distinct from /j/ at least by the early classical period. In dialects with metaphony it likely survived longer, resulting in the rounding of preceding vowels.
• The /s/ series likely had an aspirated allophone [sʰ] word-initially and between vowels. In the Eastern dialects it debuccalised to [ɦ] and had likely been pronounced this was already by the classical period.

The aspirated consonant series likely developed from certain consonant clusters in Proto-Meskangela. Classical Meskangela allows very few initial consonant clusters, which may be expained by their merging into single consonants, thus making the aspiration contrast phonemic. The Inner Eastern dialect later lost this distinction, instead adding a high tone contrast to following vowels. Although a full set of aspirated consonants is shown in the table above, it was likely that some of these phonemes were marginal, appearing only in few words or under exceptional conditions. Certain morphological alternations gave rise to a contrast between plain and aspirated series (as well as voiced-voiceless contrast in the approximant series), but most dialects lost this feature mostly due to later morphological levelling and analogy.

Palatalised and labialised consonsonants were separate phonemes in Classical Meskangela, but the Western dialects lost the former series and most Eastern and Southern dialects lost the latter. Dental and alveolar consonants likely both had palatalised counterparts, although these two series merged in Classical Meskangela. The Western dialects, however, retain the distinction: tik ("one") compared to Eastern and Classical acyik.

Prosody

Classical Meskangela is a pitch-accent language. Its prosodic system is characterized by free accent. In lexical words, only one syllable can be tonically prominent. A heavy syllable – that is, a syllable containing a long vowel, diphthong, or a sonorant coda – may have one of two tones, level tone (unmarked) or rising tone (marked). Light syllables (syllables with short vowels) can only be marked (having hugh tone) or unmarked (having low tone, which is considered neutral). Stress is fixed on the root syllable, but words having more than three syllable receive a secondary stress. Such words follow a trochaic pattern, for example: སིནྣཾནངཾཏཾ sinnanëŋata [sin.ˈna.nə.ˌŋa.ta] “I have been reading it”.

The pitch accent remained contrastive in most dialects of Meskangela, as it was in the Classical language: ཅྱེལཾན​ cyelan [ˈt͡ɕe.lan] “to spread” ཅྱཱེལཾན​ cyélan [ˈt͡ɕe˥.lan] “to scold”, which also contrasts with ཅྱཻལ cyēl [t͡ɕeːl] “front”. The Southern dialects lost the pitch accent completely: both words became ཅེལེ cele [ˈt͡ʃe.lə] (however, the former is not used without a fused prefix གཆེལེ gchele [ˈt͡ʃʰe.lə] “to spread” which was an intransitive verb “to spread out”, but became ambitransitive – a characteristic feature of the Southern dialects).

Syllable structure

The typical Proto-Meskangela root syllable consisted of the following structural elements: an onset consisting of a root initial consonant C_i, optionally followed by a liquid L or semivowel glide G (either "j" or "w"); and a vocalic nucleus consisting minimally of a simple vowel V, followed by a final consonant C_f. The semivowels could also occur postvocalically, forming falling diphthongs in "-w" and "-j", thus belonging to the inventory of C_f. Unlike word roots, prefixes and suffixes followed a different pattern, consisting of a single consonant followed by a vowel PV_p or SV_s (in case of prefixes and suffixes respectively). Only root vowels could carry vowel length (:) and tone (t), the latter being a consonantal feature at the Proto-Meskangela stage. There was no contrast between zero-initial *VC and glottal-initial *ʔVC, in such cases the second variant is reconstructed with C_i being an obligatory element. of the root syllable. Two non-syllabic suffixes are reconstructible for Proto-Meskangela, *-s and *-n. When added they could have resulted in a forbidden postvocalic sequence of two consonants ( e.g. -C_fs or C_fn). For these specific instances the suffixes are instead reconstructed as ə_sS with "ə" being a short semi-syllabic element that disappeared in Classical Meskangela and later dialects. In other cases, where a single final consonant suffix is expected, a "hollow" consonant is reconstructed (which in some cases gives rise to tone H_t, or disappear without a trace H₀), as in *rjaH₀ən “to laugh”. In Classical Meskangela the suffix became phonetically identical the C_f, becoming a part of the root ( e.g. gësata ← *gVsaH₀t-ʔa “he/she kills”. Thus a potential fully inflected word consists of the following elements:

PVp—Ci—L—G—V(:)—Cf/H0/t—SVs—(əsS)

A word could have more than one suffix and prefix. In Classical Meskangela this system was altered, allowing open root syllables, as well as consonant clusters within syllables, where the first element was "s" followed by a consonant, usually an aspirated plosive, which could precede the third element "l". Individual consonants could be geminated depending on their position in the string of morphemes. The semivowel phonologically had become a part of the initial consonant or cluster by the classical period, but in the model it is still convenient to analyse it as a separate element. Certain suffixes underwent syncope of their reduced vowels, thus allowing more consonant clusters outside the root. Thus, during the classical period the inflected word typically followed this structure:

PVp—(s)Ci(:)—(l)—G—V(:/t)—Cf(:)—(Vs1)—S(:)(Vs2)

Later dialects generally follow the model above, modifying some individual elements, such as adding more permissible clusters, or merging the clusters into single consonants, thus retaining all the elements only nominally. This is especially true for the Southern dialects, most of which became fairly analytic and lost most of their suffixes and prefixes in the process, as well as tone and contrastive vowel length.

Grammar

In this subsection only the grammar of Classical Meskangela is discussed, considering the amount of variation among different dialect groups and uncertainty of the Old Meskangela morphological structure. Classical Meskangela as well as most of its dialects are agglutinative, but the individual morphological elements are not easily segmentable, due in large part to the presence of portmanteaux morphemes and allomorphy.

Although attempts have been made to reconstruct a quasi-regular “ablaut” system for Proto-Meskangela, the vowel gradation in the Classical Meskangela variety is sporadic and irregular, especially in case of open-syllable roots. Some verb conjugational pattern may be attributed to the Proto-Meskangela affixes that later merged with the verb stem, such as the "a-ö" alternation, which often shows up in the derivational morphology of Meskangela. Pairs, such as, khitan “to rub” and khutan “to scratch”, rum “darkness” and rim “evening” are relatively common with back vowels often representing a more "internalised" process or abstract phenomenon, than their front counterparts which are more concrete and "external". Certain prefixes have active and passive counterparts, such as si- (active transitive) and su- (mediopassive): sinnaŋan “to read (something)” and sunnaŋan “to read (in general)/ to be read” (hence Western sunnaŋ “book”, but Eastern abirai from bërayan “to write”).