Proto-Beltonic

Proto-Beltonic or Common Beltonic is the hypothesized common ancestor to the Beltonic languages, which include Beltonian, Wistarian and Lennodesian.

The language was spoken in southeastern Beltonia between 1000 BC and 500 AD, before spreading more widely across the region during the Beltonic Migration. Verifiable records of the language are limited to occasional inscriptions in Beltonian Runes and transcriptions by Greek and Roman writers. The primary means of reconstruction has been the comparative method.

Proto-Beltonic features nonconcatenative morphology; its roots are defined not as fixed syllables but by a fixed group of consonants that can have varying vowels between them. For example, the root *j-l-m gives rise to the words *jalám (to weave), *julám (past tense of to weave), *julúm (imperative mood of to weave) *jalím (weaver) and *juláma (woven cloth). However, the language also features words with concatenative morphology, suggesting that it was in a state of transition to the latter.

Notable differences between Proto-Beltonic and its successors are its sparse inventory of vowels and wider inventory of consonants, including some that appear to be unusual uvular or laryngeal consonants, though it lacks a contrast between voiced and voiceless stops. Proto-Beltonic is a highly inflected language, comparable to Old Beltonian and Classical Beltonian but more complex than any other descendants.

Vowels
Proto-Beltonic had three monophthongs and two diphthongs; some reconstructions count /ja/ and /wa/ as diphthongs. In addition, each vowel phoneme had both an emphasized form as a well as a standard form. It is unclear as to whether the emphasis came through a pitch accent, vowel length, simple emphasis or some other method, but the pitch accent is the most accepted theory. The emphasized and standard forms only contrasted in inflections based off the same root.

General features
The Proto-Beltonic roots came in three types: bilateral (2 consonants, 1 vowel), trilateral (3 consonants, 2 vowels) and quadrilateral (4 consonants, 3 vowels). It is possible that late Proto-Beltonian had quinqueliteral roots (5 consonants, 4 vowels) which for the most part behaved as a quadrilateral root with a prefix that was unaffected by the word's inflections. The majority of words came from trilateral roots, though some common words have bilateral roots. A root may include no actual consonant at the start or end, although some linguists like Smithson have suggested that these were glottal stops.

Proto-Beltonic had six or seven cases: ergative, copulative, absolutive, dative, locative, instrumental and vocative. The existence of a vocative case in Proto-Beltonic is disupted. If it did exist, as it did in early Beltonian and Wistarian, it would have mostly resembled the absolutive case. Only pronouns changed for all cases; nouns inflected for five sets of cases, while adjectives inflected for three.

Proto-Beltonic had ergative–absolutive alignment. The ergative and absolutive cases correspond to the nominative and accusative cases of languages with nominative–accusative alignment, with the exception that nouns that were the subject of an intransitive verb took the absolutive case. The copulative case is an unusual feature of the language, which corresponds to a noun and pronoun with the present tense of the copula and is also used in some tense formations. It appears to have been formed by the merger of absolutive nouns and pronouns with forms of a previous copula.