Takkenit: Difference between revisions

Takkenit language or Takkenkikle [ˈtɑ.kːən.ˌkik̚.lə] - is a language, spoken in a mesolithic Eastern European plains (circa 5000-7000 BCE) on the territories of modern Northern Ukraine and Western Belarus in the basin of the Prypjať river (Ukrainian: [ˈprɪ.pjɑtʲ], Belarussian: [ˈprɨ.pʲat͡sʲ]). It shows some features, found in distant languages like Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic or even Chukchi and Yukaghir to the far east of Siberia. Some linguists claim this to be relics of a hypothetical proto-Nostratic unity, however this theory is still disputed.

Takkenit is an agglutinative language, which was typical for the region it came from at those times. It shows many lexican parallels with steppe languages to the south-east, which means, its homeland was somewhere to the east of the Caspian sea having been much larger that it is now and covering plains of a modern Volga river basin.

The name Takkenkikle comes from ''takkune'' ("tribe", "people, related to each other", hence ''takkeni'' - "that belongs to the tribe") and kikle ("to speek", "speech", "language"), so it translates as people's language. Its homeland is claimed to be Central Asian steppe between the Caspian sea and the Aral sea, which was forming, but hasn't become a single body of water yet. During 7000 BCE the earliest forms of the Takkenit language became distinct and Takkenit people separated from neighbouring tribes and moved westward to the sea. There is no consensus, why exactly the migration happened, but the most prominant factor was definitely climate change which brought less rains and caused animals to migrate further north.

Soon the people left northern shores of the Caspian sea and by the 6500 BCE reached the territory of forests and swamps in Eastern Europe, rich in food and materials for daily life. During this time different tribes and even villages were speaking slightly different dialects, which started diverging more and more, creating a dialectal continuum. But due to a semi-nomadic lifestyle contacts between people remained pretty high and thus their dialects did not become too distinct to be unintelligible.

By 5000 BCE Takkenit tribes became surrounded by various linguistically diverse peoples, most of which migrated from the south. The climate was already warm enough to establish agriculture and soon neolithic tribes from Anatolia and Balkans started spreading and assimilating indigenous people due to greater numbers and technological advantages. Takkenit people slowly intermixed with its neighbours and shifted to their languages leaving only a bunch of substrate words and place names. Those new cultures would be quite advanced and prosperous for a long time until about 3000-2800 BCE, when they were also assimilated by the Corded Ware and Yamna people from the east.

#These sounds are allophones of /ə/. When under stress it is pronounced [e], in words with high vowels it is [ɨ] or [ɤ] and near [ɑ] it remains [ə]. The pronunciation vary greatly between different tribes, showing some kinds of vowel harmony, which was present earlier but broke soon.

The stress is not phonemic in Takkenit, at least in its middle and late stages. It has a trochaic system, where the main stress is always on the first syllable of the word and secondary ones are put one every odd-numbered syllables exept for the last one, which is always unstressed. Similar system is in Finnic and Samic languages and was also present in Proto-Uralic. An early pre-ablaut stage of Proto-Indo-European could also have such a system. Because of this and also due to some other features, like absence of consonant cluster inside a syllable, the Takkenit speech is very fast with words blending with one another, which can create a misunderstanding or confusion in someone, who do not speak the language perfectly. Some words can even change their shape in fast speech and such words can also be incorporated into action verbs.

The Takkenit language has a somewhat restricted ammount of syllables, meaning it allowes only CV and CVC, where C is any consonant and V is any vowel. Vowel-initial syllables (V and VC) are rare and are allowed only word initially. No consonant clusters are allowed within a single syllable, which also means no initial or final consonant clusters. However if a last syllable contains /ə/ as a nucleus (such as in genitive plural ending ''-nək'') the vowel can be dropped in the fast speech (so the ending will become ''-nk''). The hiatus (sequence of two vowels) is also not allowed. All of these rules make Takkenit words sound a bit similar, so many of them has suffixes attached. This not only makes a more specific meaning but also helps to differentiate words that otherwise would sound the same. For example ''murken'' can mean "to kill an animal prey", "to hit an animal" or "to gather woodsticks". That's why ''murəkken'' is used for the first meaning, ''murkəten'' - for the second and ''murakten'' - for the third.

When attaching various suffixes or endings to a word, many consonant clusters would appear. In these cases an epenthetic vowel (mostly e /ə/) is inserted between, for instance "I'm catching (successfully)", which would be [ˈkɑ.kə.ˌtːɤ.mi] phonologically and kak-tt-m-i morphologically. If two vowels would appear side by side, the previous one is simply elided (''kulu'' ("small", singular) would give ''kulit'' ("small", plural) and not *''kuluit'').

:Imtamam kekpettunket [_VP['''_Vthey are chasing'''][_Dgame]]- they are chasing game.

There are different kinds of sentences, though Takkenit sentences tend to be simple and short. Most of them contain just a single word, like: ''tekujami'' "I run", or ''rawputteka'' "I love you". Other are more complicated, like: ''Kinjeri ketleninta puwunni keukumankile jukumankile'' "I heared the dog barked and howled at the cat in the forest". This sentence is simple in Takkenit, since it has one independent clause which contains one subject, ''kinjeri'' "dog", and one predicate, ''ketleninta keukumankile jukumankile'' "barked and howled at the cat as I heard it", ''puwunni'' "in the forest" and ''ketleninta'' "at the cat" are prepositional phrases. A compound sentence should be composed of at least two independent clauses, which is not common in Takkenit, since most compound sentences in English would be sayed with different simple sentences in Takkenit. The example can be: ''Kuŋka kintejkette, tumpujkeljatet''. "The moon was shining, everyone appeared happy". The last two examples show, that Takkenit has the SOV word order with the verb usually being the final word in the sentence.

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==Other resources==

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