<!>Methinat Scratchpad (2015-09-21 07:48:34)
Methinat Scratchpad
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? KathTheDragon Beware the Dragon
posts: 92
, Baroness, United Kingdom
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Heh, the merger of a and o comes up pretty soon after this. And the loss of labialisation was pretty recent. On the laryngeals, they merge into ʔ (probably via h before s debuccalised). They still colour vowels as normal (so h₁e, h₂e, h₃e > ʔe, ʔa, ʔo). They are lost immediately after this phase (in the normal way, with compensatory lengthening after vowels, simple loss otherwise).

Thanks! I've done several PIElangs now and then, but I've never quite been happy with how they've turned out. This time, though, it actually looks like a real language. Sound changes are here, though I'll be fiddling with them slightly, particularly some of the later changes. Note also that not everything is marked there, such as the minor assimilation sc > śc, or the (very early) shift Dʰ > Ð. Grammar-wise, it gets less conservative over time.
At this point, the only major changes are a switch to VSO order (due to contact with Egyptian (or, due to the rules of the conworld, a language identical to Egyptian)). Eventually, the inherited aspect system gets reanalysed into a tense system, with aorist > preterite, ousting the inherited tense system. An amusing side-effect is that all preterites end up as root formations, while presents are all characterised. The middles survive, but are functionally reanalysed into an oppositional intransitive (built to aorist stems, with either e-grade or zero-grade of the root) and a passive (built to present stems). Tenses in the old middles are handled by the inherited -r suffix.
In nouns, the dative and locative merge soon after this stage, partly motivated by the homophony of the dative and instrumental singulars. The locative in -i is productive up to this point, with the old endingless locative only surviving in adverbs, as does the allative, which is lost as a productive case. The stress system is largely simplified into static and mobile stress (though thematics retain barytone and oxytone). Static stress becomes greatly unproductive in nouns that don't ablaut fairly late, with thematics only just starting to adopt mobile stress in the modern language (partially helped by an old class of thematic nouns with inherited mobile stress, which in origin are nouns whose stems end in a laryngeal).