Takkenit
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. It shows some features, found in distant languages like Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Yuralic or even Chukchi and Yukaghir to the far east of Siberia. Some linguists claim this to be relicts of a hypothetical proto-Nostratic unity, however this theory is still disputed.
| Takkenit language | |
|---|---|
| Takkenkikle | |
| Pronunciation | [/ˈtɑ.kːən.ˌkik̚.lə/] |
| Created by | Raistas |
| Setting | Almost real world |
Indo-Uralic
| |
General information
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.
External history
Once upon a time I happened to read an article about lexical similarities between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic and I asked myself, how that language could have sounded. It became a bit interesting to me, but there was just too little information on this topic. So I did my own research (maybe it should not be called a "research", but rather an extrapolation) and found just enough to create a daughter-language of a common ancestor of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic (which was not my goal at first, but why not?) and saw what it was like. It seems to me, that there to little evidence left indeed, so a proper reconstruction ca not be made: Proto-Indo-Uralic was spoken circa 10 000 BCE or even longer ago if it existed at all.
Internal history
The name Takkenkikle comes from takkune ("tribe", "people, related to each other") and kikle ("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.
Phonology
Orthography
Takkenit has never been a written language, its stories and songs were transfered orally from generation to generation until the extinction of the language. I use Latin script with some additional letters (ŋ and sometimes also ə) to fully cover the phonology of Takkenit, which is fairly simple.
Consonants
The Takkenit consonant inventory is very simple. The most interesting feature of it is a complete lack of any fricatives. Geminated consonants, which are represented with double letters (like tt, or kk) can be analyzed as a sequence of two same sounds. The consonants [n] and [t] are more often dental while [l] is more often alveolar and [r] is always alveolar, that's why t near [r] is also always alveolar, like in English, but near [n] it is always dental, like in Spanish or other non-Germanic languages. The [j] sound can palatalize a preceding consonant but this palatalization is not phonemic and occures only before this sound. If stop consonant is in a coda position (more often when it comes before another consonant from the next syllable, less often but also quite frequently at the end of words) then it is pronounced without any burst, meaning it is unreleased (in IPA denoted as [p̚], [t̚], [k̚]) For example even the language name has such a consonant: [ˈtɑ.kːən.ˌkik̚.lə].
| Labial | Denti-Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ŋ | |
| Plosive | p | t | k | |
| Approximant | (w) | l | j | w |
| Trill | r |
Vowels
The vowel inventory of Takkenit is even simpler than the consonant one containing only four phonemes, but the allophonic variation is much greater. Despite that, the phonology became even simpler near the time of language's extinction with all unstressed vowels merged into [ə] and vowel assimilation, which then gave new consonant alterations. This was due to increasing contacts with more technologically advanced mesolithic and neolithic tribes. The table below shows the middle stage of the language right before those contacts and language assimilation process in the period of its largest ammount of speakers.
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i | (ɨ)1 | u |
| Mid | (e)1 | ə | (ɤ)1 (o~ɔ)2 |
| Low | (æ~ɛ)2 | ɑ |
- 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.
- Can be found in South-East dialect as an archaic feature of older vowel harmony. However its vowel harmony is based on frontness and backness (like in modern Finnish, for examle), while the older one was based on vowel height. For example kemi [ˈke.mi] which means "blood" is komə [ˈko.mɤ] in this dialect. The word itself comes from *kɯmɨ. Or kikle [ˈkik̚.lə] ("speech") which is käkle [ˈkæk.le] in South-East and comes from *kekemən ("to make sounds", "to tweet").
Stress
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.
Phonotactics
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.
Morphophonology
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).
Morphology
Nouns
Takkenit nouns have the grammatical categories of number (singular, dual, plural), case (nominative, genitive, accusative, locative, ablative and vocative) and possessivity (non-possessive versus possessive forms). Yet because the language is active-stative rather that nominative-accusative, the nominative case is sometimes called the agentive, the accusative - the patientive and the locative - the indirect or oblique case (locative has also the function of dative and marks an indirect object of a sentence). If a clause has more that one word (such a in "a small bush") endings are attached only to the main word of a clause: kulu kenna ("small bush", nominative singular) and kulu kennim ("small bushes", accusative plural).
| Singular | Dual | Plural | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nominative | -Ø | -ki/-ka | -i-t |
| Genitive | -n | -ki-ŋ/-ka-ŋ | -i-nək |
| Accusative | -m | -ki-m/-ka-m | -i-m |
| Locative I | -ni/-na | -ki-ne/-ka-na | -i-ni/-i-na |
| Locative II | -n-ta | -ki-nti/-ka-nta | -i-nti/-i-nta |
| Ablative | -ta | -ki-ti/-ka-ta | -i-ti/-i-ta |
| Vocative | -e | — | — |
There are two locative cases in Takkenit. The locative I is used to describe place or position, while locative II is used, when the position changes or to describe direction of motion. Also this case is used as an indirect object marker in phrases like: "I gave a small fish to the woman" - Urkum imkəmkan ŋenanta, where "ŋenanta" means "to the woman".
The genitive case is used instead of accusative, when an absence of something is mentioned. For example, in kinjəri puŋkim (e) ("the dog has a tail") accusative ending is used to mark the direct object, but in kinjəri puŋkin ne ("the dog has no tail") genitive is used instead.
In order to mark possession, genitive case is used. But Takkenit does not have possessive pronouns like English "my" or "her". It uses special possessive endings instead, which are attached to a word after all of its suffixes. If a word already contains case or case and number endings, than they are slightly altered and put before and after a possessive ending. For instace, kinjərin ("of a dog"), kinjərimən ("of my dog") and kinjəritmitən ("of our dogs").
| Singular | Dual | Plural | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st singular | -m | -kə-m | -tə-m |
| 2nd singular | -t | -kə-t | -tə-t |
| 3rd singular | -te | -ik-te | -it-te |
| 1st dual | -muk | -ik-muk | -it-muk |
| 2nd dual | -tuk | -ik-tuk | -it-tuk |
| 3rd dual | -tek | -ik-tek | -it-tek |
| 1st plural | -mit | -ik-mit | -it-mit |
| 2nd plural | -tit | -ik-tit | -it-tit |
| 3rd plural | -tet | -ik-tet | -it-tet |
Verbs
Takkenit verbs are more complex than nouns, being rich in conjugation patterns and having different verb-forming suffixes. There is no such a category as tense in Takkenit verbs, but rather various aspects are used instead.