Proto-Oronaic: Difference between revisions

Unlike Proto-Indo-European or Proto-Uralic, Proto-Oronaic had tones, similar to [[w:Yeniseian languages|Yeniseian languages]] or to Mandarin Chinese. However, there was no contrastive stress as in Indo-European; usually only the first syllable of the root was invariably stressed, while unstressed syllables underwent reduction and later elision in Hirtian or consonant alterations in Alpian and Carpathian. Four tones can be reconstructed in some words. These are the rising tone , marked with an acute accent (á), falling tone, marked with a grave accent (à), low-rising, or falling-rising tone, marked with a caron (ǎ), and an abrupt, or high-falling tone, marked with a circumflex (â or àˀ). The default or neutral tone is not marked. Most word reconstructions do not use any diacritics to mark tones as the exact tones are unknown, since no modern descendants are tonal, except for some Hirtian dialects, which distinguish high and non-high pitch accent, but it is mostly an innovation. There were some tone alterations as well, for example: ''*köȍˀcü'' "the moon", which gave ''keahci'' in West Carpathian and ''сю’ə'' (''śu’ə'') in Hirtya, had a falling or a high-falling tone, but ''*köőˀ-tä̌gə₁'' "moonlight" resulted in ''kiättäi'' ("shining") in West Carpathian and ''сюо’т'' (''śuo’т'') in Hirtya.

==Grammar==

Morphologically Proto-Oronaic was a [[w:Polysynthetism|polysynthetic language]]. Despite most of its descendants having nominative-accusative alignment, Proto-Oronaic belonged to an [[w:Active–stative language|active-stative]] type of languages, since like modern Hirtya it sometimes marked a subject of an intransitive clause the same way as a subject of a transitive clause, and other time - as a direct object of it. The marking was probably based on a different degree of volition (as in Hirtya). Alpian languages had preserved some traces of it, but nowadays it is obsolete.