Ćín

General Information
Proto-Ćín, [tʃin], as the name suggests, is the proposed parent language of the Ćín language family. It is believed to have been spoken around 13,000 years ago in the *Ćinel (Chinel, [tʃinel]) valley. It was first discovered by Calistos Malia ([kalɪsθos mãlja]) in 6253 and has been developed by linguists over the past 150 years. The Ćín language family is currently spoken by around 11.5 billion language speakers today and consists of about 25% of the world's languages, though it makes up about 63% of all language speakers due to how widespread those languages are. The reconstruction here is the most widely accepted.

TBD

Hopefully this is a thorough overview of the language (there's more in the phonology section then ever before :).


 * While I don't have examples up yet, I will put them up when the language is developed enough.

Consonants
Proto-Ćín's 23 consonants are listed below. The orthography is written next to them in bold. There are relatively few consonants in Proto-Ćín. 1It is believed that [f] and [v] are allophones in colloquial speech, however, recoverd documents suggested that the official prounciation was closer to [v] than [f]


 * Palatal consonants can't end words, nor can they be follwed by /i/, another palatal consonants, /jV, jV:, wV, or wV:/.


 * n becomes palatal before a /jV or jV:/ diphthong and the cluster becomes /ɲV ~ nʲV/ (a long vowel is shortened).

Sound Strength
Consonants fell into three sound categories: strong, weak, and soft.

Strong sounds: Weak sounds:  Soft sounds: Vowels were shortened before weak and soft sounds.

Consonant clusters
Permitted consonant clusters were determined by sound strengh. A consonant cluster could only consist of a weak sound and a strong sound, a strong sound and a soft sound, or a weak sound and a soft sound. Note that not all clusters of these consonants were allowed.

A cluster of three consonants was permitted as long as at least one consonant is weak.

Vowels
Proto-Ćín's 17 vowels are listed below along with the accepted dipthongs (V is a vowel). As with consonants, the orthography is written next to them in bold.
 * [e, ɛ, and a] become [ẽ, ɛ̃, and ã] before /m and n/.

Vowel Strength
Like consonants, vowels have strengths.

Strong vowels: 

Weak vowels: 

Syllable
Syllables in Proto-Ćín are simple and are listed below

(C)V/C̣(C) - Consonants sometimes stood as a syllabe nucleus

This leads to a possible syllables (once again, these are just hypothetical syllables, not actual words)

V Syllable

Clani - ['klan.i]

CV Syllable

Şatəl - ['ʃa.təl]

CVC Syllable

At̆el - ['a.tʲel]

C̣ syllable

lownis - ['lɔw.ṇ.is]

Stress
Stress in Proto-Ćín is very simple and extremely regular; it always falls on the first syllable.

Sandhi
While not extremely prevalent or complicaated, sandhi did occur at word boundries between a final vowel and a, á, or i. This resulting in a liquid being placed between the two words, j for between a final vowel and a, w between a final vowel and á, and l between a final vowel and i. Despite the fact it is written on the first word, it is pronunced with the second world. While it did not serve a grammatical function, it did generate irregularities in daughter languages.

Word Construction/Parts of Speech/Grammar Overview
Proto-Ćín (PC) had a very fixed word structure. The lexical meaning of any word is given by its root. This meaning can be modified with prefixes, e.g. *cán meant hand but *décán meant fingers (from *dést + cán). Suffixes provided grammatical meaning and always allowed a word to switch parts of speech.

There were 5 main parts of speech in PC: nouns, verbs, adjuncts, adpositions, and conjuctions. Nouns and verbs were the main parts of speech and almost adjuncts, with a few exceptions, were derived from nouns and adjectives. It was always possible to turn nouns, verbs, and adjuncts into a different part of speech and, while not all words were built in this way, a large number of words were.

Thus *-cVn- was a root, *cán- was the noun, *cím- (to build) was the verb, *cán-il (hand-like) was the nominal adjective, *cín-éd (built) was the verbal adjective, and *cím-íd was the theoretical adverb. Similarly, *dé-cVn- was a root, *dé-cán was the noun, *dé-cím (to give) was the verb, *dé-cán-il (finger-like) was the nominal adjective, *dé-cín-éd (given) was the verbal adjective, and *dé-cím-íd was the theoretical adverb.

PC often used a combination of vowel mutation (ablaut) and suffixing to indicate grammatical meaning. For example, examine the thematic noun endings *-ā, *-és, *-ēz representing the nominative singular definite, nominative singular, indefinite, and nominative plural endings.

It is unknown why, but it appears that nouns had separate definite and idefinite singular forms, but one plural form. In descendant langauges, the definite/indefinite forms became articles and the plural forms split into singular and plural forms.

Adjuncts were split into two categories: adjectives and adverbs. While nouns and verbs had independent roots, adjuncts were almost always derived from a noun or a verb. Adjectives could be derived from a noun or a verb, whereas adverbs were only ever derived from a verb. There are only a few exceptions to his rule the adjectives *aclé and *déscé (meaning good and bad) and the adverbs  *íclé, *díscé, *pacid, *d́omíd, and *ṕíbed (meaning few, many, and only). While not directly derived from verbs in PC, *aclé appears like it could be derived from *autalte, proposed predecessor of *sucétí "to be"

Adpositions were normally placed after their head, but could be placed as a prefix to modify the meaning of a noun.

Sound Changes in the Çin language family
Proto - Çin to Proto-Shalax ['ʃa:l.aks]

ɑ -> a /_

i:, y: -> i: /_

y -> ɪ / _

aɪ -> i: /_

eʊ -> e: /#_

e ʊ -> u: /_#

wV -> V: /_

tʃ -> ʃ /_a, a:,  ɛ,  ɛ:

d ʒ ->  ʒ/_a, a:,  ɛ,  ɛ:

v ~ f -> v /_i, i:, e, e:, u, u:,  ɔ

v ~ f -> f /_

CʲV -> CjV: /_

p, t, c -> b, d, g /_a,  ɛ, a:,  ɛ:

b, d, g -> bl, d ʒ,  ɲ/_i, i:, e, e:

s -> ç /_i, i:, e, e:

z -> s/_i, i:, e, e:

CC̣ -> CəC/_