Proto-Ash

Proto-Ash is the reconstructed protolanguage of Ash, itself derived from Proto-Ash-Ish (henceforth referred to as PAI).

Phonology

The following vowels (with conventional romanisation rather than IPA) are reconstructed:

	Back	Front	Rounded
Short	*a	*i	*u
Long	*a:	*i:	*u:

The main consonant inventory:

	Labial	Coronal	Velar	Laryngeal
Oral	*p	*t	*k	*q
Nasal	*m	*n	*ŋ

Note:

• The "laryngeal" *q may have been a uvular plosive */q/, a glottal stop */ʔ/, a pharyngeal, or something else. In modern Ash it allophonically varies between [ɦ~ʔ~ħ].
• The nasals were likely poststopped or prestopped as they are in modern Ash and because they appear to derive at least in part from */NP/ clusters or prenasalised stops in PAI.
• The bilabial stop *p was likely derived from */kɰ/ clusters or labialised */k/ in PAI, as Ish seems to preserve this more conservative configuration.

Additionally the approximants might be viewed as allophones of the corresponding vowels:

	Labiovelar	Palatal
Approxmant	*w~u	*j~i

Proto-Ash does not appear to have had any particular form of stress but later in the development of Ash stress would shift to the last heavy syllable of a phonetic word, resulting in various reductions and elisions of unstressed vowels.

Grammar

Proto-Ash differentiated between nouns and verbs. Ablaut was common between forms.

Nouns

Nouns were inflected for grammatical case through suffixes derived from adpositions in PAI. For example the locative or relational *-n appears to be derived from the same PAI *ant as Ish's modern /at/, but whereas it became prepositional in Ish, it became postpositional and eventually a suffix in Proto-Ash.

Reconstructed case forms of *majk "fire":

Agentive	Subjective	Patientive	Oblique	Relational
*majk		*mika	*mika:	*mikan

Proto-Ash already appears to have observed animacy like modern Ash, by having no distinct agentive forms for inanimate nouns, e.g. *ti "water":

Subjective	Patientive	Oblique	Relational
*ti		*tja:	*tjan

Verbs

Verbs appear to have had little inflection except on auxiliaries. Reduplicated forms existed, such as *ku~kwa: "to cycle".

There were two primary auxiliary verbs, active *qa: and stative *a:, perhaps best translated as "do" (or "apply") and "be" respectively. These were often used with nouns and have led to many active and stative verbs in modern Ash as well.

Proto-Ash		Ash
*majk=a:	"is fire"	→ mea	"burns, feels, consists"
*mik-a=qa:	"applies fire"	→ nahga (*mi- → *nʲə- → *n-)	"burns, scorches"

Serial verb constructions with reduplication of *qa: seem to have developed in transitive phrases. The main verb phrase was preceded by the auxiliary phrase, the latter eventually becoming the various agency-marking prefixes in modern Ash. The auxiliary held the pronominal morphology in the form of suffixes or clitics, a feature which appears to date back to an earlier stage of the language, as the trend going into modern Ash was to put verbs after rather than before nominals.

Proto-Ash		Ash
*qa-qa mik-a=qa:	"applies fire to another"	→ ảdnahga	"burns it, scorches it"
*qa-ta mik-a=qa:	"applies fire to oneself"	→ ảsnahga	"is burned, is scorched"
*qa-ja/-wa mik-a=qa:	"applies fire to this/that one"	→ ảyınahga	"burns oneself, scorches oneself"

The exact forms of these suffixes are very tentative as they would become quite reduced. They might have had any vowel, or none at all. The suffix *-ta is probably also related to modern Ash's speaker's involvement marker -s and *-ja/-wa are quite clearly the same demonstratives as elsewhere.

Developments

Soon after this period of the language, Ash would have started to develop a greater focus on verbs than on nouns. Verbs developed more morphology from auxiliaries and the like while the already phonetically similar case endings collapsed, although remnants can be seen in modern cognates with additional suffixes.

Phonology

The biggest difference between the consonantal inventories of Proto-Ash and modern Ash is the development of affricates in the latter. These derive from clusters.

	Proto-Ash	Ash
t͡s	*tj	→ *tʲ → *tˢ → (d)s
t͡ɬ	*tw	→ *tʷ → *tˡ → (d)l

Inalienable prefix

The modern Ash prefix ın- is a result of rebracketing of the Proto-Ash relational case suffix *-n. While new constructions developed for locatives in general, this fossilised affix narrowed in meaning to refer only to an inalienable relationship between nouns.

Proto-Ash		Ash
*wa-n tu(=a:)	"(is) foot at that one"	→ ondoo	"that one's foot"

Locative verbs

Another remnant of the locative suffix is the vowel nasalisation on some of the locative verbs in modern Ash.

Proto-Ash		Ash
*tja-n=a:	"is in water"	→ sa͠a	"is in water/liquid"

Diachronics

Not every affix derives directly from the Proto-Ash period. There are for instance distinct layers of suffixes that show different levels of reduction depending on the timing of their grammaticalisation. Sometimes a single root is responsible for multiple suffixes.

Several important periods in the history of Ash can be used as milestones. An example is the development of the aforementioned nahga:

Proto-Ash	Old Ash	Middle Ash	Early Modern Ash	(Modern) Ash
*mik-a=qa:	→ *nʲì.ga.ʔá	→ *nək.ʔá, nəʔ.ká	→ *náh.kə	→ nahga

• Old Ash solidifies stress on the last heavy syllable and transforms many consonants through suprasegmentals.
• Middle Ash reduces and elides vowels, yielding near-modern forms but temporarily has a five-vowel system.
• By Early Modern Ash the stress shifts to the root syllable and vowels reduce back to three, resolving schwas to modern qualities.
• Modern Ash reduces some diphthongs from Early Modern Ash to monophthongs but creates new ones by eliding intervocalic consonants.