Proto-Antarctican

The Proto-Antarctican language evolved in the generations after the colonisation of the Antarctican continent. Later on, it evolved into the Antarctican language. It was influenced by a large variety of languages spoken in areas where the colonisers hailed from (Spanish and Portuguese from South America, English from Australia, and Japanese, Taiwanese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Khmer, Thai, Burmese and Indonesian from East / SE Asia).

Phonology

Consonants

The consonant inventory is broadly similar to that of Antarctican. The most striking difference is the lack of lateral obstruents, and with a set of palatalised alveolar consonants instead (which indeed did become lateral consonants later). There are no velar and palatal nasals at all, however the pre-stopped nasals are in existence. There are also no ejectives.

Proto-Antarctican Consonants

		Bilabial		Alveolar		Palatal	Velar	Glottal / Placeless
		plain	palatalised	plain	palatalised
Nasals	plain	m	mʲ	n	nʲ
	pre-stopped	pm	pmʲ	tn	tnʲ
Stops
	voiceless	p	pʲ	t	tʲ	c	k	ʔ
	voiced	b	bʲ	d	dʲ	ɟ	g
Fricatives
	voiceless	f	fʲ	s	sʲ	ç	x
	voiced			z	zʲ
Approximants		w	ɥ	ɫ	ʎ	j

Vowels

Proto-Antarctican has a simpler inventory of vowels than Antarctican. It is worth noting here that, as yet, the language has no phonation distinctions on vowels.

Monophthongs

	Front		Central		Back
	Short	Long	Short	Long	Short	Long
High	i	iː			u	uː
Mid	e	eː		əː	o	oː
Low			a	aː

Diphthongs

Proto-Antarctican also had 8 diphthongs /ei ai oi ui iu eu au ou/. All of these contrasted for length as well.

Nasal Vowels

All monophthongs and diphthongs in Proto-Antarctican had an phonemic contrast between oral vowels and nasal vowels.

Phonotactics

In contrast to the smaller amount of phonemes of Proto-Antarctican compared to Antarctican, Proto-Antarctican permitted a much larger array of syllable structures.

In general, the range of permitted syllable shapes was C V (O), where O is an obstruent (fricative or oral stop). However, the first syllable of a word could begin with up to two consonants i.e. the range of permitted syllable shapes here was (C) C V (O).

There were also restrictions on consonant clusters. Not only did they have to be homorganic for voicing (i.e. clusters like /tb/ and /zk/ were not permitted, but /tp/, /db/, /zg/ and /sk/ were), but they also had to be homorganic for palatalisation (i.e. clusters like /spʲ/ were not permitted, but /sʲpʲ/ and /sp/ were).

Also, consonant clusters could only consist of obstruents, not sonorants. So clusters like /nt/ were not permitted.

For the purposes of Proto-Antarctican phonology, pre-stopped nasals count as sonorants and not as obstruents. Hence they could not be part of consonant clusters or form the coda of the last syllable of a word.

Consonant Gemination

There was a phonemic gemination contrast in obstruents. This could occur regardless of whether they were voiced or voiceless. However, there were a few restrictions on where such geminated consonants could occur:

• They either had to occur between two vowels, or at the end of words. So /takː/ and /takːa/ were permitted, but not /tːak/, /takːta/ or /taktːa/.
• They could not occur after a nasal vowel or diphthong, but could occur before them. So /takːã/ and /takːai/ ware permitted, but not /tãkːa/ or /taikːa/.
• They could never occur after a long vowel. So words like /taːkːa/ were not permitted.
• It was quite rare for them to occur before a long vowel either, but not impossible.
• It was rare for a word to have more than one geminated consonant (in contrast to long vowels, where there were many words which contained multiples of them).

Stress

Stress in Proto-Antarctican was predictable, falling on the first heavy syllable of a word (one followed by a geminated consonant or a pre-stopped nasal, or one containing a long vowel, a diphthong, a nasal vowel or a coda consonant). If a word contained no heavy syllables, then stress would fall on the second syllable.