Gaptan

General information
Gaptan is an extinct language, spoken somewhere between 1200BC and 400BC. Its name derives from the name of the texts which formerly made up the majority of its attested corpus: the Gaptas (religious poems). It is a language isolate (that is, it lacks known relatives) but otherwise has living descendants. The sound system of Gaptan isn't attested in almost any native source as the language itself is written using a logographic orthography; a few of the Gaptas had, after being passed down orally, been written down in non-logographic scripts (primarily Brahmi, Aramaic, several others, though one otherwise unattested Gapta had been written down in both the Śāradā and the Tocharian script) before the language was forgotten and native readings suppressed ancient traditions. Besides its native script, Gaptan was also written in the Zhou bronze script; it can thus also be written with the modern Chinese script (even though it is anachronistic to do so). This page introduces Gaptan grammatical terms both in an English version and a Chinese counterpart where attested.



Basically, Gaptan is a conlang I started working on in the late summer of 2014. It is supposed to be a language isolate with many parallels to Old Chinese as reconstructed Baxter and Sagart in 2014 and thus assumes the Baxter-Sagart 2014 Old Chinese model. The assumption is that it developed in a vaguely undisclosed location, somewhat implied to be east of Xwairizəm of the Avestas but west of Shāng and Zhōu China. This might put it roughly in the Tarim basin but I've left the exact location up to the imagination of the readers. As it is at the crossroads of peoples and cultures, Gaptan is unique in that it got written down in a handful of scripts which, through their combined strengths and weaknesses, attest near-perfectly its convoluted sound system.

Phonology
As Gaptan morphemes are most frequently monosyllabic, we can describe word shapes by analysing syllable structures. Gaptan had three types of syllables:
 * Open (敞) syllables, lacking a final consonant
 * Closed (閉) syllables, with a final consonant
 * Light (閉輕) syllables, without a pre-initial consonant
 * Heavy (閉重) syllables, with a pre-initial consonant

A morpheme can at most be two syllables; the main syllable of the morpheme can be of any type but, in a disyllabic word, can be preceded only by an open syllable. Morphemes with two closed syllables are always considered compounds even if such an analysis has to involve two cranberry morphemes.

Consonants
Due to the diversity of the scripts used to write it by native speakers of various languages, Gaptan phonology is remarkably well preserved even though lacking in detail. Consonants were grouped based on their position in the word: they could either be pre-initials, initials or finals.

The three classes of consonants differ significantly; the largest is the initial set, followed by the set of finals and then the pre-initials. Some pre-initials must precede some specific initials; these pre-initials are called reliant (恃) as they rely on a specific initial and their independent counterparts are in turn called released (放).

Gaptan had between 59 and 64 initials. The margin of uncertainty exists due to orthographical and phonological artefacts of the language and its various writing systems. It also had either 23 or 24 finals as there exists a marginal minority of texts that distinguishes two finals that are otherwise merged in other sources. It also had 16 pre-initials.

The Gaptan initials are grouped in a table resembling many Chinese initial groupings:

Even though some initials are more frequent behind some vowels than before others, there is no restriction as to the distribution of initials. The initials in brackets are uncertain: they definitely are attested in sound lists and tables yet almost never occur in native texts. They might either have been merged by the time of the composition/writing down or may have been distinguished but otherwise are unrecorded.

Gaptan finals are likewise organised into a table:

The final /-ɳ/ seems to have merged with /-n/ early on and is rarely distinguished in writing. This might be an artefact of the orthographies but unlikely so as it's not distinguished even in Brahmi scripts.

The pre-initials in Gaptan are categorised into two groups: tenuis and palatal. Their layout is:

There is no indication that the plosive pre-initials ever included retroflex or uvular plosives; they might have been lost too early on or never have even been developed.

Vowels
There are six vowel phonemes in Gaptan. Their phonetic realisation varies significantly based on the surrounding consonants.

Gaptan is a tonal language: all open syllables carry either the rising (上) or the falling (去) tone. Closed syllables do not carry any tone; this phenomenon is systematically called the checked or entering tone (入). Vowels in Gaptan are also sometimes referred to as medials or middles due to their position in the syllable.

Allophony
Comparing the Chinese, Tocharian and Brahmi sources reveals much about the phonetic nature of Gaptan vowels. Comparing the transcription of words shows that where one script merges what the others split there's some allophony involved. There are a few simple rules to allophony: Also, there is a general tendency for /ɨ/ to become [ə] in closed syllables and for /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ to centralise somewhat to [ɜ] and [ɞ].
 * 1) Vowels round next to labials
 * 2) Vowels backen next to uvulars
 * 3) Vowels front next to palatals

Orthography
Gaptan was written down in a variety of scripts. Most texts were written down in both the Chinese script and the native Gaptan script - otherwise heavily inspired by its Chinese counterpart - but there also exist a few attestations in other scripts. Due to the nature of the Chinese script, it was used in one of two ways, either as a logography used to write out Gaptan morphemes or as a transcription system using Chinese characters to determine the sound value of each word. Most non-Chinese representations are written in abugidas and a small amount in the Aramaic abjad.

Chinese
As Gaptan was spoken and later transmitted in an area with considerable Chinese influence, it is natural that some of its texts first got translated to Chinese and then transcribed using the Chinese Zhou bronzeware script and later using Qin script styles. Over time, the Chinese scribes gave way to foreigners that were unfamiliar with Chinese who kept using the script while adapting it to fit the language they were writing better.