Khad languages

The Khad or Western languages, are a proposed subdivision of the Lámeyi languages which comprises several branches traditionally grouped into Central and Peripheral subgroups, the latter being entirely paraphyletic. The Khad languages constitute the largest and westernmost extant branch of the Lámeyi language family.

The common ancestor of all of the languages in this family is called Common Khad, which was spoken in approximately the late 6th century AC. A languages, called Las, used to be included into this group, but is nowadays considered to comprise its own branch.

The subclassification of the Khad languages varies among scholars. The generally accepted classification treat the four subbranches of Khad as follows:

• Central (Kyem-Khad)
  • Lowland (Gdangs)
  • Hill (Bsas)
  • High (Ím)
• Mountain (Tsed)
  • (Kryalpomg)
  • (Khulong)
• River (Tsampa)
• Nuli-Salbal
  • Salbal
  • Nuli

The more divergent languages are spoken in the north and east, likely due to language contact with the Thad languages. The divergence exhibited in the Khulong branch may also be due to a gradual language shift from an extinct Eastern language.

Features

Innovations specific to the Khad languages include:

• Loss of Proto-Lámeyi original pitch accent.
• Fronting and assibilation of the Proto-Lámeyi velars: *kʲ, *ḳʲ, *gʲ, *ŋʲ, *xʲ > *t͡ʃʰ, *t͡ʃ, *d͡ʒ, *n, *ʃ.
• Spirantization *p, *t, *k > *f, *tʰ, *kʰ, while *ṗ, *ṭ, *ḳ > *p, *t, *k. The opposite is true for the Thad branch. Uvular plosives remained unaffected.
• Fortition of the "strong" nasal series to voiced plosives: *mb, *nd, *ŋg *ɴɢ > *b, *d, *g *ɢ.
• Reduction of unstressed pretonic vowels to *ə.
• Collapse of Proto-Lámeyi "secondary" vowels to *ə.
• Monophthongisation of original Proto-Lámeyi diphthongs.
• Turning of the final sibilant fricative *s into non-sibilant fricative glottal *h (this may be a later change that spread among already distinct Khad branches).

From that point, the Common Khad phonology is rather accurately rendered by its native script. Some prefix letters became assimilated to the root sounds. The pretonic vowels had already collapsed to a single sound by that time, even though they were still represented with different symbols. Because of this fact, texts from that period show frequent confusion and hypercorrection. For instance, the word for “road” is written as lados and lodos in the same text. Later texts show ledoh and ldoh, also indicating the lenition of the final /s/ sound.

In Central Khad, new consonant clusters, that had appeared after vowel reduction and elision, were usually simplified. For instance, the name of the Suropong Valley would be pronounced [sʷə.ɺə.ˈpoŋ] in Early Central Khad, but it became srpong [ʂɔ́ŋ] in Shanyi. The process of cluster simplification, devoicing and tonogenesis had begun in the central dialects with some later peripheral branches preserving most words intact, while other languages not allowing any clusters at all. In the Gyu language (spelt Dguts), all consonant clusters disappeared completely, turning into such features as vowel mutation and tone (the name of the language itself is [gʲý].