Proto-Ketan
| Proto-Ketan | |
|---|---|
| PK | |
| Created by | – |
| Setting | planet Keta |
| Era | ~3000 years ago |
Aiwanic languages
| |
Early forms | Proto-Aiwanic
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | none |
Proto-Ketan is the comparatively reconstructed ancestor of all Ketan languages. It reflects a late variety of Meinqələr Kvetain, one of the Klesuic languages, part of the broader Aiwanic family.
An eqivalent to Proto-Ketan had a small corpus of written texts. This has however had the drawback of leading many scholars to rely excessively on these written records instead of reconstructing the actual proto-language primarily based on evidence from the Ketan languages.
Proto-Ketan was not actually spoken in any particular time or place, containing different features from different dialects and even time periods, as it was likely not a uniform language, but a group of mutually intelligible dialects, spoken across the continent. Meinqələr Kvetain, on the other hand, was the primary liturgical language of Qēnaktes ("made by the praised") - the old religion of the Ketan people, even though most of texts witten in this language did not survive up to the present day.
History
The Kvetain language, in its variants, was the lingua franca of old Keta. In the early 1st millennium after the founding of the first Ketan settlements, Meinqələr Kvetain migrated to the South and Southeast, emerging as a language of high culture and of local ruling elites in these regions. Soon distinct dialects began developing in those regions. Kvetain is traceable all the way to the founding of the second Ketan colony almost three thousand years ago in a form of a collection of texts known as Qēnəttais ("words of the praised"). It's difficult to tell for how long Kvetain remained the spoken language, but it's quite likely Proto-Ketan began splitting already during that early period. Approximately 1500 years later Kvetain had stopped being used altogether and almost no written records from that period can be found, indicating a gradual decline of the written language all over the continent. In the Virja and Eana regions a cetrain form of Kvetain had still likely been used occasionally, though it no longer was the language of the elite, being replaced by the standard Virjan and Old Ejalan respectively. In the East, however, most people were illiterate and usually only knew their native language.
With the creation of the Oares Empire, the Ejalan language became the new lingua franca in the East, while the Virjan language had (and still has) a strong position in the West. In the far east the language called Phomˀald became the standard of the Makai Union, but it was only spoken by noble families who had much more access to the rest of the continent. There is an extensive overlap in the vocabulary, phonetics and other aspects of these languages with Proto-Ketan, but it is neither universal nor identical across the languages. They likely emerged from a synthesis of the ancient Kvetain language with various regional dialects. The grammatical structure of these languages does not preserve the original Kvetain state with Phomˀald probably being the most divergent.
Phonology
Proto-Ketan shares many phonological features with Meinqələr Kvetain, although it possesses a smaller inventory of distinct phonemes. From example, two series of plosives can be reconstructed for Proto-Ketan (likely voiced and voiceless), while it is know that Kvetain had three series of those consonants. Another distinctive development of Proto-Ketan is vowel merger: *ə, *ei and *e were no longer distinct, as well as *ai and *a. The precise quality of those phonemes is unknown (*ei and *ai could have already been monophthongs in Kvetain). It also developed a new phoneme *ǫ of an unknown quality, which did not survive in any modern languages.
Vowels
| Front | Central | Back | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| short | long | short | long | short | long | |
| Close | i | iː | u | uː | ||
| Mid | e | eː | ǫ | o | oː | |
| Open | a | aː | ɒ | ɒː | ||
- Long vowels are marked by a macron above a vowel. The vowel [ɒ] is written as "å" and [ɒː] is written as "ḁ̄" with a ring below to avoid overlaying. The quality of "ǫ" is unknown, but it was likely a mid vowel. Originally it could only be long, but later the short counterpart was innovated and used in a few analogically generated morphological categories. for that reason "ǭ" is often used too distinguish these sounds.
Proto-Ketan vowels could be either long or short. Unlike in many modern languages, a sequence of two vowels was not permitted in Proto-Ketan. There were no diphthongs either.
Consonants
| Labial | Denti-Alveolar | Palatal* | Velar | Uvular | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | labial | ||||||
| Nasal | m | n | ŋ | ||||
| Plosive | voiceless | p | t | c [t͡ʃ~c] | k | kʷ | q |
| voiced | b [b~β] | d [d~ð] | g [g~ɣ] | ||||
| Fricative | f | θ, s, ł [ɬ] | š [ʃ] | ||||
| Approximant | w | ɾ | j | ||||
| Lateral Approximant | l | ʟ | |||||
The western, and the eastern dialects had a historic confusion between "r" and "l". The written systems that followed central and southern dialects preserved the distinction, . However, the northwestern dialect only had "l", while the eastern dialect probably only had "r". Because of these inconsistencies, often words with both variants were adopted, resulting in doublets that are occasionally semantically differentiated, for example, in Ejale there are two words: eone ("place", from the original *baranis) and alane ("city", from *baranis, but with the *r>*l change). Regarding the existence of palatal plosives and approximants, the pronunciation is a matter of debate. Only *j can be reconstructed precisely, while *c could have been a postalveolar affricate instead. Occasionally reconstructed phonemes *lj and *nj weren't likely a distinct palatal consonants, but sequences of two consonants.