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Ewige
History
Ewige is one of many descendants of Ivugi, which was spoken circa 1000 AD in the Eurasian steppe in present-day Siberia. It has undergone many phonological and grammatical changes, evolving from a relatively isolating language to a highly agglutinative one with polypersonal inflection and an animate-inanimate distinction. Its syllable structure has grown more restrictive and it has lost its phonemic stress, but its vowel and consonant inventories have grown.
While it has historically been written in Cyrillic, the Ewige people were among the earliest adopters of the Latin script among Siberian peoples. However, many of their orthographical conventions, such as extensive use of the hacek, are Slavic in nature.
Phonological history
Ewige is characterized by the following phonological innovations from Ivugi:
- Creation of a new /e/ phoneme, formed from historical /i/ and /ɨ/ before voiceless fricatives and /r/, and historical /ɛ/ before alveolar consonants.
- Creation of a new /ʃ/ phoneme from /s/ in various positions: before /i/ or /j/ and after voiceless stops. Some instances of /t/ also become /ʃ/.
- Creation of a new /ʒ/ phoneme from /z/ in various positions: before /i/ or /j/ and after voiceless stops. Some instances of /j/ also became /ʒ/.
- The glottal stop /ʔ/ merging with the other three voiceless stops depending on the preceding vowel: /t/ after front vowels, /k/ after central vowels, and /p/ after back vowels.
- Creation of a new /m/ phoneme from intervocalic /b/ in unstressed syllables, plus /n/ and /ŋ/ before labials and unstressed /o/.
- Simplification of various labial-stop clusters: /kp/, /tp/, /rp/, /kb/, and /tb/ all become /p/, and /gb/, /db/, and /rb/ all become /b/.
- Shift of certain vowels' pronunciations when unstressed: /au/ and /o/ become [u], /ai/ merges with /i/, and /ɨ/ and /ɐ/ become [ə].
- Development of aspirated and breathy-voiced allophones of stops in stressed syllables.
- Loss of phonemic stress in favor of universal initial stress—except in some loanwords and compounds—causing /u/, /ə/, and the aspirated and breathy-voiced stops to all become phonemic.
- Merger of /ɸ/ into /β/, which then shifts its pronunciation to [w].
- Merger of /l/ into /ɾ/.
- Merger of /x/ and /ɣ/ into /r/ after stops.
- Chain shifts affecting most vowel monophthongs: /ɨ/ > /i/ > /e/ > /ɛ/ > /a/, and /ɐ/ > /ɑ/ > /ɔ/.
- Raising of the two diphthongs: /ai/ to [ei] and /au/ to [ou].
Grammatical history
It has also undergone the following grammatical innovations:
- Drastic simplification of noun pluralization: the majority of nouns now pluralize with -e or -de, although a few dozen irregular nouns remain as vestiges of Ivugi's complex ablaut-based system.
- Generalizing the Ivugi particle u, which was used before animate singular nouns in the accusative, to be a general affix for animate nouns. Explicitly animate pronouns and verb inflections would later develop based on it.
- Obligatory marking of inalienable possession on certain nouns, created from the Ivugi particle a ("of") fused with a pronoun.
- Expansion of Ivugi's simpler verb paradigm, in which all verbs had infinitives ending in -bi and inflected basically the same way, into a more complex paradigm with three conjugation classes: -me verbs, -be verbs, and -pe verbs. This process came about when clusters of various consonants and /b/ simplified in different ways.
- Polypersonal inflection on the verb: whereas Ivugi verbs did not indicate person in any form, Ewige verbs can inflect for both subject and object, both of which started as forms of the pronouns and then phonologically reduced.
- Simplification of the Ivugi syllable onset alternation process to a basic affix, -ro- before a consonant and -rov- before a vowel. This affix was then repurposed to form the subjunctive/conditional mood, which can be used in any of the three tenses: past, present, and future.
- Innovation of a new future tense inflection, -sto, from the Ivugi verb sída ("goes"/"is going").
Phonology
Consonants
| Labial | Alveolar | Palato-alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m /m/ | n /n/ | ň /ŋ/ | ||||
| Plosive | Voiceless | p /p/ | t /t/ | k /k/ | |||
| Voiced | b /b/ | d /d/ | g /g/ | ||||
| Aspirated | pʼ /pʰ/ | tʼ /tʰ/ | kʼ /kʰ/ | ||||
| Breathy-voiced | bʼ /bʱ/ | dʼ /dʱ/ | gʼ /gʱ/ | ||||
| Fricative | Voiceless | s /s/ | š /ʃ/ | ch /x/ | h /h/ | ||
| Voiced | z /z/ | ž /ʒ/ | gh /ɣ/ | ||||
| Approximant | v /w~ɹ/ | j /j/ | |||||
| Tap | r /ɾ/ | ||||||
| Trill | ř /r/ | ||||||
- After back vowels, palato-alveolar /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ are often realized as retroflex [ʂ] and [ʐ].
- The labio-velar approximant /w/ may be realized as alveolar [ɹ], especially intervocalically. By one analysis, this gives Ewige the rare distinction of possessing three rhotic consonants: /ɹ/, /ɾ/, and /r/.
Vowels
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i /i/ | u /u/ | |
| High-mid | é /e/ | ó /o/ | |
| Mid | y /ə/ | ||
| Low-mid | e /ɛ/ | o /ɔ/ | |
| Low | a /a/ | á /ɑ/ |
| Front | Back |
|---|---|
| ei /ei/ | ou /ou/ |
- The mid-central vowel represented here by a schwa, /ə/, can in reality be realized with a wide range of allophones depending on the following consonant. Speakers may possess any or all of these allophones, and younger speakers use them more than older speakers:
- [ɨ~i], before voiceless stops
- [əi~oi], before voiceless fricatives
- [ɜ~ɐ], before /ɾ/ and /r/ and in word-final position
- syllabification, before nasals, e.g. /ən/ [n̩]
Vocabulary
While most of Ewige's vocabulary is indigenous, it has borrowed a large number of terms from nearby languages of the Eurasian steppe, particularly Russian, Kazakh, and Mongolian.
Dialectology
Grammar
Nouns
Ewige nouns are inflected for several grammatical categories:
| Gender/Definiteness |
∅- (inanimate, indefinite) |
|---|---|
| Noun stem | (any noun) |
| Number |
-∅ (singular) |
| Inalienable possession |
-(j)yr (my) |
Verbs
Ewige verbs fall into three different conjugation classes: -me verbs, -be verbs, and -pe verbs. This table lists the affixes that each form takes to mark subject, object, and tense-aspect-mood.
| -me | -be | -pe | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subject | "I" | é(j)- | ||
| "you" | dy(j) | |||
| "he/she" | i(j)- | |||
| "it" | o(j)- | |||
| "we" | érr(é)- | |||
| "you all" | da(j)- | |||
| "they" | né(j)- | |||
| Irrealis | -ro(v)- | |||
| Verb root | (any verb) | |||
| Tense, Aspect, Mood | Infinitive | -mé | -bé | -pé |
| Past | -dó | -nó | -tó | |
| Present | -my | -(r)o | -py | |
| Future | -dzo | -sto | ||
| Imperative | -y (if followed by an object suffix), -∅ (otherwise) | |||
| Object | "me" | -r | ||
| "you" | -d | |||
| "him/her" | -š | |||
| "it" | -t | |||
| "us" | -n | |||
| "you all" | -darr | |||
| "them" | -ni | |||
- The irrealis mood, which is used to indicate the subjunctive or conditional, can only be used with the basic tenses: past, present, and future.