Proto-Ash-Ish: Difference between revisions

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Ash developed poststopped nasals (which merged with the plain nasals, poststopping becoming an allophonic feature) and Ish developed a distinction between plain and aspirated or postfricated plosives.
Ash developed poststopped nasals (which merged with the plain nasals, poststopping becoming an allophonic feature) and Ish developed a distinction between plain and aspirated or postfricated plosives.


==Features==
==Grammar and features==
 
===Nouns===
 
PAI would have had some nominal morphology in the form of case endings inherited by the daughter branches only to be mostly lost or repurposed in various ways.
 
===Verbs===
 
Verb morphology seems to have been reduced mainly to auxiliaries while the main verb was quite invariant. These auxiliaries were inherited by Ash and Ish but treated somewhat differently. In Ash they became prefixes while in Ish they became nominal prepositions or verbal suffixes depending on analysis.
 
{| class="wikitable"
! PAI
! Ash
! Ish
|-
| {{ash|*qek}} (transitive verb, direct object)
| → {{ash|*qak}} → {{ash|ảh-}} (direct agency)
| → {{ash|*ekˣ}} → e(g), iq- {{ash|/e(k(ˣ))/}} (direct object)
|-
| {{ash|*qat}} (transitive verb, indirect object)
| → {{ash|*qat}} → {{ash|ảs-}} (inverse agency)
| → {{ash|*atˢ}} → a(d), at- {{ash|/a(t(ˢ))/}} (indirect object, passive)
|}
 
While these still serve somewhat similar functions in both languages, they work quite differently on a syntactic level.


===Deixis===
===Deixis===
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! Ish
! Ish
|-
|-
| {{ash|*ewe}}
| {{ash|*ewe}} "this"
| → {{ash|*i(j), *(i)ja-}} → {{ash|*i, *ja-}}
| → {{ash|*i(j), *(i)ja-}} → {{ash|*i, *ja-}}
| → {{ash|(iy)i /(e)ɰe/}}
| → {{ash|(iy)i /(e)ɰe/}}
|-
|-
| {{ash|*awa}}
| {{ash|*awa}} "that"
| → {{ash|*u(w), *(u)wa-}} → {{ash|*u, *wa-}}
| → {{ash|*u(w), *(u)wa-}} → {{ash|*u, *wa-}}
| → {{ash|(ow)o /(a)ɰa/}}
| → {{ash|(ow)o /(a)ɰa/}}
|}
|}
===Syntax===
Thanks to the grammatical cases word order was probably somewhat free in PAI, reflected by the resulting differences in word order in the daughter branches as they solidified their own word order in different ways as the case endings collapsed. Ash settled on auxiliary-noun-verb whereas Ish settled on verb-auxiliary-noun.
It is possible that Ash reflects the original trend and that Ish verb-auxiliary constructions were in fact compounds as noun-auxiliary forms would also develop, eroding the distinction between nouns and verbs apart from word order. Another fact in favour of this analysis is that Proto-Ash seems to have had verb ending derived from PAI {{ash|*-(a)r}} while Ish does not reflect this and may have attached roots directly to the auxiliaries, although the ending may also have been irregularly eroded in this weak position.
A sentence in PAI may thus have looked as follows:
{{gloss
|phrase={{ash|*qek te kaw-ar}}
|gloss=AUX.DIR water.PAT whirl-INF
|translation=stirs water
}}
An alternative form without the infinitive suffix may have led to the forms in Ish:
{{gloss
|phrase={{ash|*kaw qek te}}
|gloss=whirl AUX.DIR water.PAT
|translation=stirs water
}}


==Vocabulary==
==Vocabulary==
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