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 pre- or post-stopped 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.
Nouns
Nouns were inflected for grammatical case through suffixes derived from adpositions in PAI. For example the locative or relational *-n appears to 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, stative *a: and active *qa:, 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: | "there is fire" | → mea | "burns, feels, consists" |
| *mika=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, which appears to date back to an earlier stage of the language, as the trend going into modern Ash was to put the verb at the end.
| Proto-Ash | Ash | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| *qa-qa mika=qa: | "applies fire to another" | → ảdnahga | "burns it, scorches it" |
| *qa-ta mika=qa: | "applies fire to oneself" | → ảsnahga | "is burned, is scorched" |
| *qa-ja/-wa mika=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 very 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 *-wa/-ya are quite clearly the same demonstratives as elsewhere.