Proto-Flewtish
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| Proto-Flewtish | |
|---|---|
| Created by | – |
| Native to | Possibly Northeast Eurasia |
Language Isolate
| |
Proto-Flewtish is the reconstructed common ancestor to all the Flewtish dialects today, spoken somewhere in the southeast of Russia and northern parts Mongolia, all the way to Kamchatka. Since Flewtish is made up of a number of dialects with regional variations, the reconstruction is done by comparing the dialectal "extremes" within the spoken area, usually Kvuppeg Fletwish in Eastern Finland and Chukwan Flewtish near the Ukhta river. It is hypothesized to have been spoken between 4000 to 2000BC, when the first migrations to northwest Eurasia began.
Phonology
Proto-Flewtish is generally agreed to have had the following consonants in it, with the exception of the velar fricatives which may've been introduced later from aspirated stops, similar to Greek and other languages. The language possibly didn't differentiate between aspirated and non-aspirated consonants directly; Rather, consonants became aspirated only when they weren't within a consonant cluster and were followed by back or mid vowels.
Consonants
| Labial | Alveolar | Palat. | Velar | Uvular | Glot. | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| unv. | vce. | unv. | vce. | vce. | unv. | vce. | unv. | vce. | unv. | |
| Nasal | *m | *n | *ɲ *ŋ | |||||||
| Ejectives | *p’ | |||||||||
| Stops | *p *pʰ | *b *bʰ | *t *tʰ | *d *dʰ | *k *kʰ | *g *gʰ | *q | *ʔ | ||
| Fricatives | *f | *v | *s | *z | *j | *x | *ɣ | *h | ||
| Liquids | *l | |||||||||
Vowels
Vowels, on the other hand, are more complicated: There are 8 vowels reconstructed within Proto-Flewtish, but Modern Flewtish only has 6 (And some dialects have a schwa as well). In addition, the phonotactics of Proto-Flewtish indicate that nasal vowels did exist at some point, but were lost early in the first migrations.
| Front | Center | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| rnd/unr. | unr. | unr. | |
| Close | *y *yː *i *iː | *u uː | |
| Mid | *e *eː | *ə *əː | *o *oː |
| Open | *a *aː |
Stress
Proto-Flewtish was either a tonal (Each syllable had a specific tone) or a pitch accent (Change in the pitch of a syllable was used to indicate stress), like Modern Flewtish. The former is less likely as no traces of it remain in the language apart from vowel length.
Vocabulary
A series of words have been reconstructed through verified cognates in most Flewtish dialects. The IPA is used to denote the phonemic values of these words. The double "greater than" signs mean the meaning hasn't changed. Finally, the words take a hyphen in the end, to indicate that they are usually used with another morpheme (As Flewtish is a polysynthetic language):
| Proto-Flewtish | Modern Flewtish descendants | English meaning |
|---|---|---|
| *kwə | gwo, -gwo (>>) | Indicating 1st person |
| *sy | tu, -tu (>>) | Indicating 2nd person |
| uvok, -(j)üg (>>) | Indicating 3rd person | |
| *aɣmoː | aŋɣo- (To restock) | To collect, to amass |
| *əɣhop- | eğōp- (>>) | Water |
| *emhôp- | eɱō- (Conscience) | Thought |
| *kʱəm- | ɣem- (Sea) | Body of water |
| *awɘtʰ- | aveð- (>>) | Fire |
| *gyməp | ege (>>) | Near(by) |
| *senh- | seň- (To see) | Eye |
| *tʰem- | eđm- (>>) | Day |
| *edʰxmo- | eðmog- (>>) | Cold |
| *kloŋ- | glugn- (>>, language) | Tongue |
| *ndipʰ- | diṕ- (>>) | To give |