User:Praimhín/Tamizh

Tamizh is an Indo-European language spoken in [alternate history].

Plan

In the first stage, verbs develop aspect marking by suffixing -dheh3 and -bhuh2 (the first is perfective and the second imperfective, much like Welsh uses gwneud and bod).

In the second stage, the imperfective and perfective aspects turn into nonpast and past tenses, like what happened in Israeli Hebrew and Arabic. Erosion turns the suffixes into -v-/-pp-/-p- and -nt-/-tt-/-t- respectively (through Grimm-like sound changes: dh -> d -> t while old t -> þ; the nasal in -nt- comes from PIE verbs where -nu- is infixed in the present tense).

In the last stage, a new present tense is innovated from *kʷel 'to turn', which gets morphed into a suffix -kir- (by a somewhat Persian-like sound change: l -> r, rd/rt -> l. and old *rH and *lH -> zh) Meanwhile, the old nonpast is used for both the habitual present and the future tense. Verbs analogically level into 7 classes with variations.

The syntax gets more head-final and agglutinative as it evolves (and grammatical gender gets correlated with lexical gender), and the modern form is practically Altaic.

Phonology

Somewhere between Germanic and actual Tamil: p f t þ s k h kw hw m n ŋ l r zh y w a á e é i í o ó u ú ai ei eu au