User:Ceige/Ceuja

Ceutch language
Léban Goceuja, Ceuja
Pronunciation	[/ˈleβan goˈθeuxa, ˈθeuxa/]
Created by	Ceige
Language family	Indo-European Germanic Ceutch language
Early forms	Proto-Indo-European Proto-Germanic

Ceuja, or the Ceutch language, (also known as Thutch; Léban Goceuja and Ceuja in Ceuja itself) is a Germanic language best characterised as Proto-Germanic with Spanish sound changes (via relevant Western Romance and Iberian sound changes) applied.

Name

The name Ceuja comes from Proto-Germanic *þiudiskaz, and is thus cognate to Deutsch, the endonym of the German language. It is often elongated to Goceuja, related to the rare translation of Gothia in Gothic, 𐌲𐌿𐍄𐌸𐌹𐌿𐌳𐌰 (gutþiuda). The association of Ceuja with the Goths does not necessarily refer to actual historical Goths so much as the medieval label given to Germanic peoples in general.

Real world development

Around June 2013, a Germanic conlang with a naïve interpretation of French sound changes applied to it was sketched up and called Jaillais (located currently on Google Sites). Later on, resources on the Phonological history of French, the History of the Spanish language and the History of Romanian (amongst many others) were encountered, highlighting some of the deficiencies of Jaillais.

For a while, no further development on Jaillais was made, but casual sketches with both more and less authentic Romance sound changes applied to the Germanic languages were made over the years. In the end, Spanish-inspired sound changes won out, as, next to French, Spanish has some of the stranger sound changes in the Romance language family, making it easier to obscure the original Proto-Germanic roots.

Over time, other conlangers developed better fleshed-out French-inspired mixed Romance-Germanic conlangs, and so Jaillais has been left unfinished to avoid crowding that creative space.

In December 2019, 6 and a half years after Jaillais, an absurdist, untranslated text was left in a conlanging group on Facebook with the intent of it being deciphered; this text demonstrated an earlier stage of Ceuja.

History of sound changes

Proto-Ceuja

This stage describes the state of Proto-Germanic after some initial sound changes have been applied to make the language more amenable to Latinate sound changes.

Three main processes define this period:

• Loss of vowel length distinctions
• Loss of nasalisation in vowels (and nasals before fricatives)
• Reanalysis of inflectional endings

Loss of vowel length distinctions

This process took place by replacing length distinctions with height distinctions instead. This mirrors the sound changes in late Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin.

PGmc vowel	Early Proto-Ceuja	Late Proto-Ceuja	Latin Equivalents
*ū	u:	u	ū
*u	ʊ	o	u, ō
*ō	ɔ:	ɔ	o
*ô	ɔ::	ɔ, a	see more info
*ī	i:	i	ī
*i	ɪ	e	i
*ē₂	e:	e	ē
*e	e~ɛ	e	ē
*ē	ɛ:	ɛ	e
*ê	ɛ::	ɛ	see more info
*a	a		a, ā

Reanalysis of inflectional endings

The main results of this process include:

• *-ą neuter nouns collapsing into *-az masculine nouns,
• merger of the accusative and nominative cases, leading to singular *-a and plural *-az for a-stem nouns (from *-az/-ą, and *-ōz/-anz), and singular *-i and plural -iz for i-stem nouns (from *-iz/-į, and *-īz/-inz),
• haphazard expansion of an-stem nominative *-ô (e.g. sahsô) into *-an- as per the above merger of the accusative and nominative, but in such a way that doublets are created, e.g. *sahsanu and *sahsō (Ceuja sajano, sajo).

Old Ceuja

Old Ceuja is characterised by:

• an initial wave of palatalisation for velars and dentals caused by front vowels and /j/,
• a reduction of consonant clusters involving plosives, resulting in a second wave of palatalisation,
• Romance vowel metaphony (cf Germanic umlaut) caused by the second wave of palatalisation,
• lenition of some intervocalic plosives.

Palatalisation of velars and dentals

Palatalisation of velars occurred when velars came before front vowels, producing *ts (c) and *dj (j), and palatalisation of /t/ occurred when it was found before *-jV-, as in Vulgar Latin, producing *ts as well.

In addition, PGmc *þ merged into *ts (via laminalisation).

Examples:

• *skēpą → *estsɛ́pa, *tsɛ́pa (Mod. cieba /ˈθjeβa/)
• *gebaną → *djebana (Mod. geban /ˈxeβan/)
• but *kāsijaz → *kasja (Mod. queja /ˈkexa/)

Consonant cluster reduction

Clusters with plosives, when reduced into a single consonant, tend to preserve the final consonant over the initial one.

Medial clusters were reduced as follows:

Old Cluster	Early Medial step	Late Medial step	Final stage
kt, lt	jt	tj	t͡ʃ ⟨ch⟩, triggering metaphony
ll	jl	lj	lj ⟨ll⟩, triggering metaphony
nn	nj		nj ⟨ñ⟩
ks	sk ~ js	sk ~ sj	ʃ ⟨x⟩
pt	wtt		wtt ⟨ut⟩ (a later change)

Initial clusters were reduced as follows:

Old Cluster	Early Medial step	Late Medial step	Final stage
pl, kl	Clj		lj ⟨ll⟩, dialectally t͡ʃ ⟨ch⟩
bl, gl	l:		l	l ⟨l⟩
sts	ts		ts ⟨c, z⟩
ks	sk ~ js	sk ~ sj	ʃ ⟨x⟩
pt	wtt		wtt ⟨ut⟩ (a later change)

Metaphony

Accompanying the palataisation was a sound change that raised vowels occuring before a palatalised consonant, particularly *ts and *dj from prior *tj and *dj, and the second wave of palatalisation where velars and laterals were turned into palatalising glides. Note that the palatalisation of /nn/ does not trigger metaphony except for some dialectal variation.

This was fairly linear, as demonstrated below:

Normal vowel	With palatal metaphony	Example
o !! u !! *folla → *fojla → *fulja (Mod. hulla)
ɔ	o, u
e	i	*lexta → *lejta → *litja (Mod. licha)
ɛ	e, i
a	e	*kasja → *kesja (Mod. queja), *tsaxta → *tsajta → *tsetja (Mod. cecha)

Metaphony could also occur when intervocalic */g/ was reduced to /j/ (cf. leer in Spanish)

Phonology

The phonology of Ceuja is not unlike that of a somewhat artificial and sanitised form of European Spanish. For more context, see Spanish phonology on Wikipedia.

Debuccalisation

The main changes concern the voiced fricatives and /ʝ/.

In Modern Spanish dialects, the voiced fricatives are often pronounced debuccalised between vowels and other voiced sounds. In addition, ⟨y ~ ll⟩ (from *j and *lj respectively, now /ʝ/) is pronounced more closed. In practice, this results in ⟨b, d, g, ll~y⟩ all having similar phonation.

In Ceuja, the voiced fricatives and ⟨y ~ ll⟩ are all generally pronounced as actual voiced fricatives in the medial position. More debuccalised pronunciations are allowed, but not considered necessary for sounding "native".

Phonemes	Cueja initially	Ceuja medially	Ceuja devoiced	Spanish equivalents
b	b	β	f	b β̞ ɸ̞
d	d̪	ð	θ	d̪ ð̞ θ̞
g	g	ɣ	x	g ɣ̞ x̞
y, ll	(d)ʒ	ʒ	ʃ	ɟʝ ʝ̞ *ç̞

This trend against debuccalisation can be seen in the treatment of fricatives before plosives, with many modern Spanish dialects debuccalising these fricatives to a breathy sound, something not as common in Ceuja (but still acceptable).

Orthography

The main difference in orthography with Spanish is the use of ⟨y⟩ to represent tonic /i/. For example, ⟨týe⟩ instead of *⟨tíe⟩, but ⟨cieba⟩ instead of *⟨cyeba⟩.