Nevermind anything, this is what I've been thinking about recently so this is what you're going to get.

The Jalvic languages are a family of languages spoken in the West of some continent in my world which I can't provide any details for. Prominent features include a large ratio of POA to MOA contrasts for both consonants and vowels, a generally agglutinative morphology (although the degree of synthesis falls pretty low on the one end of the continuum, but I can't attach any geographic term to this end because I haven't the faintest idea) as well as, um, I don't know. As far as the conworld is concerned it is one of the older and bigger language familes, although it is not supposed to be incredibly monumental in either spread or age.

The (external) history of the Jalvic languages started back in my young and innocent days when I had freshly entered high school, and for the first time discovered Tolkien. I had at this point already a lot of Latin and Ancient Greek under my belt, and when I read about Quenya I was inspired to make my own language. This language, although its original form no longer exists, was named Jalvaan[snip] (a spur-of-the-moment decision that has annoyed me ever since; even in the original IE-clone conlang the phoneme <j>, i.e. /dʒ/, was rare — occurring, apart from the root in the language name, only in "classive" endings of masculine nouns).

A few years later (two, I believe) I discovered that there were other people who also made up languages, and I joined a conlanging board. The resulting influx of linguistic information caused me to make a lot of redesigns to the original language, many of which were, by all standards, incredibly inferior to the first version — it was a rip-off, yes, but at least a more-or-less competent one. The same cannot be said of my brief forays into polysynthesis.

Ptéésjaa cje̦critmünàppeásaccuurittútcölsit.
[ˈpçéːɕjaː cɛçɹʲitvʏ̃nàfpjǽɕəxcuːɾɪθˈtúxkøjɕiç]
Ptéés-jaa cje̦c-rit-mün-a.peás-a.cur-it-tút.cöl-sit
Cat-TOP.DL action.on.body-EVID.hearsay-about-speak.IMPV.PST-be.black.IMPV.PST-relativiser.simple-tail.DL-3P.DL
Two black cats were discussing their tails:

Even discounting the worst monstrosities, though, enough material has accumulated for me to say that at this point I'd be better off just working it all into a family instead of making some other conlang and sticking the same name onto it; not in the least because apart from the original language all redesigns (again, bar the worst monstrosities) have mostly followed the same patterns.

The Jalvic family can hence be visualized as a continuum where one end is represented by the (normalized) original language, which is vaguely European, and the other end by a later redesign that is not very much so.

	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar
Nasal	m		n		ŋ
Stop	p		t		k
Voiced Stop	b		d		ɡ
Fricative	f	θ	s	ʃ	x
Approximant	ʋ		r l	j

Revised Phonology of the Original Jalvaan

	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar
Nasal	m	n̪	n	ɳ	ɲ	ŋ
Stop	p	t̪	t	ʈ	c	k
Fricative	f	θ	s	ʂ	ɕ	x
Approximant	w	ð̠	r	ɻ	j	ɦ

Phonology of a redesign

Many of the redesigns (the most extreme one shown here) share similar features, also phonologically, so that making them into a family should not be too hard. It helps that I have little in the way of any kind of grammar for most of them, with the notable exception of the original language that has tables of conjugation, declension, pro-forms and a dictionary; all of these, however, will necessarily have to be subject to at least some mangling in order to fit a possible proto-language.

Next up: Thoughts on Proto-Jalvic and the need for a language that could provide "Jalvic" as an English name.