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 [[w:Polesia|Polissia]] region in Northern Ukraine and Western Belarus in the basin of the [[w:Pripyat River|Prypjať river]] (Ukrainian: [ˈprɪ.pjɑtʲ], Belarussian: [ˈprɨ.pʲat͡sʲ]). It shows some features, found in distant languages like [[w:Proto-Indo-European language|Proto-Indo-European]] and [[w:Proto-Uralic language|Proto-Uralic]] or even [[w:Yukaghir languages|Yukaghir]] to the far east of Siberia. Some linguists claim this to be relics of a hypothetical [[w:Nostratic languages|Nostratic]] unity, however this theory is still disputed.

Takkenit is an [[w:Agglutinative language|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 [[w:Caspian Sea|Caspian Sea]] having been much larger that it is now and covering lowlands of a modern [[w:Volga River|Volga river]] basin. It is hard to estimate the total number of speakers, but it probably wasn't different from other prehistoric languages (no more than 5 000 native speakers considering the climate in that area and a stage of technological development - Takkenit people were hunter-gatherers and fishers, so their population density was relatively low).

The name Takkenkikle comes from ''takkune'' ("tribe", "people, related to each other", hence ''takkeni'' - "that belongs to the tribe") and kikle ("to speak", "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 the 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 [[w:Cucuteni–Trypillia culture|Trypillians]] - the neolithic tribes from Balkans - started spreading and assimilating indigenous people due to greater numbers and technological advantages. Takkenit people slowly intermixed with their 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 [[w:Corded Ware culture|Corded Ware]] and [[w:Yamna culture|Yamna]] people from the east.

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 on every odd-numbered syllables except for the last one, which is always unstressed. Similar system can be found in Finnic and Samic languages and was also present in Proto-Uralic. An early pre-ablaut stage of Proto-Indo-European could also have had such a system. Because of this and also due to some other features, like absence of consonant clusters 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 they can also be incorporated into action verbs, which is represented in writing.

 

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 to one another, so many of them have suffixes attached. This not only creates a more specific meaning but also helps to differentiate words that otherwise would sound the alike. 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 (usually "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'').