Literature talk:Schleicher's fable

Proto-Veraic is the ancestor of Verapamil and Diltiazem. It's part of the "CW complex" spoken in eastern Cuadhlabh.

It's inspired by Old Turkic.

Phonology

Proto-Veraic is reconstructed with the following consonants:

• The voiceless stops *p (labial), *t (dental), *c (palatal), *k (velar) and *kʷ (labialized velar). The Verapamil reflexes of these sounds are the fricatives f, s, hy, h and hw respectively. In Diltiazem, these sounds surface as voiceless aspirated stops, except for *c which becomes th /θ/.
• The voiced stops *b (labial), *d (dental), *j́ (palatal), *g (velar) and *gʷ (labialized velar), which become the stops p, t, ty, c and qu respectively in Verapamil. In Diltiazem, these sounds surface as voiced stops, except for *j́ which becomes kh /x/.
• The nasals *m and *n, and the sonorants *j, *l and *r, which are retained in Verapamil and Diltiazem, except for *j which becomes s in Diltiazem.
• *w and *ŋ, which become v resp. w in Verapamil and v resp. gh in Diltiazem (but /ŋ/ is retained before *k and *g).

These sounds aren't as certainly known:

• *ń, which becomes ny in Verapamil and z in Diltiazem.
• *ř, which becomes zh in Verapamil and sh /ʃ/ in Diltiazem.

Proto-Veraic, like most modern Veraic languages, had five vowels: *a, *e, *i, *o, *u; which can be short or long. Long vowels are written with a macron. There were also two diphthongs: *ai and *au.

Proto-Veraic allowed consonant clusters of up to three consonants before a vowel.

Grammar

Proto-Veraic morphosyntax was somewhat unusual by CW standards:

• unmarked OVS word order (not attested in any modern CW language),
• topic-comment syntax (as in Belen),
• no pro-drop,
• only three tenses (present, past and future),
• generally isolating (modern CW languages are either agglutinating, like Verapamil, or fusional, like Clofabosin).

However, Proto-Veraic also had some grammatical features common in CW languages such as:

• head-final syntax (e.g. postpositions, complementizers after the verb, adjectives and relative clauses before the noun),
• tense agreement,
• no grammatical gender.

Nouns

Proto-Veraic nouns had four cases: nominative, dative, ablative and locative, but no grammatical gender or number.

*tallo - tree
Nominative	*tallo
Dative	*tallōn
Locative	*tallod
Ablative	*tallōl

*ēruki - pot
Nominative	*ēruki
Dative	*ērukīn
Locative	*ērukid
Ablative	*ērukīl

Verbs

The bare verb stem was used for the present tense.

The future and past endings were *-bdi and *-ri respectively.

The auxiliary verb *iwa 'walk' was used for the progressive aspect; it turned into the Verapamil present tense suffix -ːva.

Derivational morphology

• *-ki, used for tools
  • *ēru 'to contain' (→ Verapamil éru) → *ēruki 'pot' (→ Verapamil érwi)
  • *wilte 'to fly' (→ Verapamil viltë) → *wilteki 'airplane' (→ Verapamil vilti)

Numbers

1. īr
2. gai
3. mīn
4. dān
5. mār
6. tī

The word for seven in Verapamil, atu comes from the verb *ad 'to continue'.

Higher numbers have not been reconstructed.