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Chlouvānem: Difference between revisions
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{{Chlouvānem sidebar}} | {{Chlouvānem sidebar}} | ||
==External | ==External history== | ||
''Chlouvānem'' is what I - ''[[User:Lili21|lilie21]]'' - consider my main conlang, as it is the spiritual descendant of all conlangs I've created focussing the most on. Actually my earliest conlangs were not really conlangs, just some strange-sounding, often natlang-mimicking relexes of Italian; it was only when I was 17 that I found myself randomly reading about Ancient Greek online and that ignited in me the flame of love for linguistics - after a few months, I discovered conlanging sites and started making conlangs that were actually something more worthy of the name of "conlang", i.e. made starting from even the slightest hint of linguistic knowledge, and therefore not a relex (by the way, the first conlang I did this way was ''Valdimelic'', which is in some way echoed in [[Qualdomelic]]). | ''Chlouvānem'' is what I - ''[[User:Lili21|lilie21]]'' - consider my main conlang, as it is the spiritual descendant of all conlangs I've created focussing the most on. Actually my earliest conlangs were not really conlangs, just some strange-sounding, often natlang-mimicking relexes of Italian; it was only when I was 17 that I found myself randomly reading about Ancient Greek online and that ignited in me the flame of love for linguistics - after a few months, I discovered conlanging sites and started making conlangs that were actually something more worthy of the name of "conlang", i.e. made starting from even the slightest hint of linguistic knowledge, and therefore not a relex (by the way, the first conlang I did this way was ''Valdimelic'', which is in some way echoed in [[Qualdomelic]]). | ||
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Chlouvānem is mainly thought for my conworld, but more than any other conlang of mine it is quite on the border between an art- and a heartlang. | Chlouvānem is mainly thought for my conworld, but more than any other conlang of mine it is quite on the border between an art- and a heartlang. | ||
==Internal history== | |||
The history of the Chlouvānem language itself is tightly linked with the one of the Ur-Chlouvānem (''odhāḍadumbhīn'') and Chlouvānem (''chlǣvānem'') peoples, and is usually divided in the following periods: | |||
* Proto-Lahob (''olahāvumi dhāḍa''; PLB for short) | |||
* Pre-Chlouvānem or Ur-Chlouvānem language (''ochlǣvānumi dhāḍa'') | |||
* Archaic Chlouvānem (''chlǣvānumi sārvire dhāḍa'') | |||
* Classical Chlouvānem (''chlǣvānumi lallapårṣire dhāḍa'') | |||
* Post-Classical (''chlǣvānumi paṣlallapårṣire dhāḍa'') and Modern (''~ amyærpārṇami ~'') Chlouvānem. | |||
===Proto-Lahob=== | |||
Chlouvānem and its daughter languages' nearest sibling languages are the other [[Lahob languages]], with a speaker count in the tens of thousands and spoken in the traditional villages of the indigenous peoples of a subpolar area in northwestern Márusúturon, straddling the Orcish Straits between 55º and 70ºN, nearly 10,000 km away from the attested Chlouvānem heartlands. The most recent common ancestor between Chlouvānem and these languages is known as Proto-Lahob (''olahāvumi dhāḍa''), and was spoken approximately 4000 to 3500 years before the present. The location where Proto-Lahob speakers probably lived is, for sure, neither the Chlouvānem heartlands nor the current territories of other Lahob peoples; instead, there are three hypothetical areas where it could have been spoken: | |||
on the western coast of the Skyrdegan Inner Sea, roughly between 40º and 45ºN (in modern day Oempras and Berkutave) – this hypothesis is usually given along with an earlier estimated date for the proto-language; | |||
in the Southern Ulšan Mountains, in present-day Kŭyŭgwažtov (nowadays not quite accepted as the other two); | |||
on the western coast of the High Ivulit, just opposite modern Qualdomailor. | |||
No matter which of these was the "birthplace" of Lahob peoples, the modern groups that survived are those that had migrated from the original homeland, as the spread of various other groups in the following millennia - Uyrǧan, Berko-Tarastian, Samaidulic, and most notably the Kenengyry much later - displaced and eventually assimilated the remnant groups<ref>Each of these peoples displaced the previous ones, resulting in this area of Calémere having today a dominance of Kenengyry languages, but with many minority languages in between, or of different families at its borders; the Uyrǧan family, for instance, is today composed of two sub-families 5000 km apart.</ref>. | |||
Reconstructed vocabulary and the current state of the Lahob peoples of the Far North makes us reconstruct the Proto-Lahob society as a non-urban civilization, possibly with rudimental agriculture only, with the only reconstructable "agricultural" terms being a root for "to plant, (cultivate?)" – ''*tɬewkj-'' – and a word for a cereal, likely "wheat" or "rye", ''*kawŋədot'' (most languages reflect it as the word for "rye", but Chlouvānem and the southernmost Core Lahob ones reflect it as "wheat"). The semi-nomadic lifestyle was prevalent, but population growth eventually proved enough to lead some tribes to migrate. Unsurprisingly, the geographical terms are consistent with a temperate, semi-arid location as those hypothesized; names of plants, trees, and animals are mostly only reconstructible from the Core Lahob languages, and if Chlouvānem has kept some they have mostly been generalized or shifted to similar elements in the Ur-Chlouvānem's new homeland. | |||
Notably, a few Proto-Lahob loanwords are found in Proto-Samaidulic and Proto-Fargulyn, which means they often have cognates in other major languages such as [[Skyrdagor]], [[Brono-Fathanic]], or [[Qualdomelic]]. The main Lahob ethnonym, *ɬakʰober ("group, tribe, villabe", Chl. ''chlågbhah'' "tribe"), for example, is also found in Proto-Fargulyn as *laq'obɨr, and has reached modern Skyrdagor as ''lokjur'' "farmstead". These borrowings are often cited as a point towards placement of the Lahob homeland by the High Ivulit, as the homelands of both Proto-Samaidulic and Proto-Fargulyn are also hypothesized to be in the area (even if they are also contested). | |||
===Ur-Chlouvānem=== | |||
''Pre-Chlouvānem'', ''Proto-Chlouvānem'', or ''Ur-Chlouvānem'' (''ochlǣvānumi dhāḍa'') is the term for the unattested stage of Chlouvānem in the millennium between the end of the common Proto-Lahob period and either the settlement in the Inland Jade Coast, in the lands ultimately drained by Lake Lūlunīkam, or the first attestation of the existence of the Chlouvānem people, in a [[Lällshag]] inscription dated around 3850~3900, approximately 200 years before the lifetime of the Chlamiṣvatrā and a bit less than half a millennium before the founding of the Inquisition. | |||
The trek of the Ur-Chlouvānem across Márusúturon was likely carried out by a series of tribes, some of whose likely settled in places along the route; the long route most likely passed through Tiṃhayāla Pass, between present-day Maišikota and Nēlithādya, which is one of the most important passes of the whole continent, a relatively low crossing between the plains of Līnajotia and, therefore, the Little Ivulit, and the upper reaches of the Nīmbaṇḍhāra, leading to the whole Great Chlouvānem Plain. Therefore, the long trek of the Ur-Chlouvānem was, except for this pass, mainly in flat territory, facilitating their migration. | |||
Linguistically, Ur-Chlouvānem was very conservative, retaining most traits of Proto-Lahob morphology. However, it did develop some traits unique to Chlouvānem, not present in the Core Lahob languages: | |||
* the loss of gender agreement, with gapped relative clauses replacing adjective+noun constructions; | |||
* the cliticization of some verbal forms, leading to the development of most verbal modifiers, including the interior/exterior verb forms and evidentials; | |||
* the topic-comment syntax. | |||
Grammatically, ablaut became less pronounced, as the ablaut class of nouns and all ablauting verbal classes except for class 2 became mostly unproductive (with a few exceptions).<br/> | |||
Phonetically, Ur-Chlouvānem retained most consonant phonemes of Proto-Lahob, losing one point of articulation for stops (the labiovelar) but gaining a new one (the retroflex). At least one phoneme, the glottal stop, was introduced through borrowings. Vowels saw more changes, with Proto-Lahob *a *ā and *o *ō merging into /ä/, as well as peculiar developments for vowels, leading to the emergence of front rounded vowels in the Ur-Chlouvānem stage which, however, became unrounded well before the earliest attestations, like PLB ''*hōwrar'' "summer" → UrChl. *[høʏ̯ʀaχ] → Chl. ''heirah'' "year"; these are not to be confused with the attested front rounded vowels, which are a later development, in non-Standard, Classical-era dialects, such as Lūlunīkami ''fülde'', ''fǖldöy'' [ɸyɴ̆de] [ɸyːɴ̆døʏ̯] for standard ''ħulde'', ''ħildoe'' ("to play", "game") ← PLB ''*pʰɨʕəd-ke'', ''*pʰɨːʕədõ''. | |||
Lexically, Ur-Chlouvānem borrowed a lot of word roots from other, otherwise unattested languages: while the grammar of Chlouvānem is unmistakeably Lahob, a lot of its vocabulary isn't, and a large number of its roots (about 25%) has not been traced to either Proto-Lahob or to any known language of the new homeland. Note, though, that this does not mean they are certainly from other languages: they may be Lahob words lacking a cognate in any surviving Core Lahob language, or borrowings from a minor language of their migration destination not attested otherwise. Such vocabulary is found in every semantic field, including animals (''yoñšam'' "donkey"; ''snīdbhas'' "bull") and general natural things or cultural products (''brāṣṭhis'' "stream", ''gurḍhyam'' "flute"), but often clearly related to an agrarian society (''nakthum'' "storage", ''vyaṣojrā'' "plough"). | |||
===Archaic and Classical Chlouvānem=== | |||
Archaic Chlouvānem (''chlǣvānumi sārvire dhāḍa'') is the language that emerged from the métis people that formed in the inland Jade Coast in the second half of the 4th millennium through intermixing of the Ur-Chlouvānem with local peoples. In the space of a few centuries, various peoples with different origins came to form a rather culturally homogeneous mass that was further united by the birth of a common religion – the [[Verse:Yunyalīlta|Yunyalīlta]] – among them, and by the founding of their first states under the impulse of the Inquisition. Most anthropologists of Calémere are concord in considering that the Lahob heritage of the Chlouvānem is mostly limited to their language, with nearly every other aspect of their culture, and most of their genetic stock, being markedly different from the surviving Core Lahob peoples. | |||
Nearly all of the Chlouvānem vocabulary for their homeland is non-Lahob in origin, with, however, some notable Lahob words in what concerns religion: ''yunya'', for example, is an inherited Lahob word (PLB ''*šjunjo''), and the compound ''lillamurḍhyā'' is entirely made of Lahob roots (the compound itself was made in Lūlunīkami, not in the dialect that became Standard Chlouvānem). | |||
==Variants== | ==Variants== | ||