Proto Csillan

"C:"

General information
Proto-Čeuɲ ('tʃewɲ) is the ancestor of language family spoken by the Čis ('tʃis)- a humanoid blue-skinned race inhabiting the planet Csilla ('ksil.la) in the Unknown Regions- the most famous of which is Grand Admiral Ťran (θran). The language was first mentioned in the book Survivor's Quest written by Timothy Zahn as "Cheunh." Proto-Čeuɲ was spoken circa 14,000 BBY, before the Čis developed spaceflight technology. Note Zahn used spellings Cheunh, Chiss and Thrawn in place of Čeuɲ, Čis and Ťran. The vast majority of this information is to some extent dubious.

In case you're wandering what various Star Wars authors have developed for Cheunh, here's what Wookieepedia has on it:

Cheunh was the official language of the Chiss. It was adopted across Csilla early in Chiss history. Cheunh was a complex, dense tongue that used comparatively few core words and an involved syntax to express ideas; more complicated ideas were expressed by combining related words into a larger whole.

The written form of Cheunh was represented ideographically, and the agglutinative features of the spoken language were reflected in the written form, which combined simpler ideograms to present more complex ideas. The Chiss found the complex nature of their tongue to be a source of pride.

As Humans did not share the same vocal abilities as the Chiss, it was difficult for other species to pronounce it correctly, even after long periods of study. It followed a logical pattern, though, and could be understood after some study.

The Chiss also used Minnisiat as a lingua franca to trade in the space around their frontiers.

Known Words/Roots In other words, this should have been a candidate for Blob's recent worst conlang contest. Let's count up some of the worst sins they've committed: throwing about random apostrophes, post-vocalic aitches, defined as being "alien" and "unpronounceable" while having no phonetic features you couldn't find in any terrestrial language, and overall anglicized pronunciation. I won't even mention just how stupid the pohskaphforian/pohskapforian distinction is. Yes, languages do tend to have some quirky words like that, but they're never going to be five syllables long!
 * Ch'tra - Go
 * Crahsystor - Commander
 * K'rell - Corellia (Note: It is highly probable that this and the word below are simply the pronunciations used by Mitth'raw'nuruodo in 27 BBY due to his unfamiliarity at the time with Basic, and not actual Cheunh words.)
 * K'rell'n - Corellian (See above)
 * Ktah - A curse word
 * Pohskapforian (aspirated p in second syllable) - Merchant trader
 * Pohskapforian (unaspirated p in second syllable) - Fishing boat
 * Stae - Near (pronounced: "stee")
 * Visvia - Unit of measurement (Visvia:kilometer ratio around 5:8)

Since the Čis my favorite species from Star Wars (and Ťran my favorite overall character) I decided to do them some justice by giving them realistic languages (since saying that one language is uniformly spoken over several light years and has remained unchanged over several millenia is just...no).

OK, back to the language itself. Proto-Čeuɲ is a dominantly fusional nominative-accusative, featuring vowel-ablaut in addition to prefixes and suffixes.

Consonants
The nature of the phonemes ɣ-ɰ is highly debated. The descendants of these phonemes vary immensely, from an alveolar trill to an back open unrounded vowel. The most likely and generally accepted theory is that sometime before 14,000 BBY (3,000 TS)* there were two separate phonemes that corresponded to their appropriate series; a voiced velar plosive g and a voiced velar approximant ɰ - by the time of the Proto-Čeuɲ split they merged into one phoneme, usually a voiced velar fricative ɣ. The linguist who researched and theorized most about this "gamma merger" (as he was known to call it) was Roalu, thus it is often called Roalu's Law. The precise phonetic shifts from pre-proto-Čeuɲ to proto-Čeuɲ as described by him are given below.

g > ɣ between vowels and diphthongs

g > d word-initially before i

g > b word initially before o

g > gz elsewhere

ɰ > w after vowels and before o

ɰ > ɣ elsewhere

The ɲ -ŋ split is a similar story; some languages attest the first variant, but the majority attest the latter. Some languages even attest a palatal c in addition to the velar k, but this was likely a later development and was not a distinguishing factor before the split (i.e. languages that attest palatal ɲ only attest c when it is clearly the process of palatalization or do not attest it at all.)

* Thailir Stivî, "before the kingdom" in Ancient High Čeuɲ, the typical Čis dating system.

Vowels
The slashes show possible variation among the phonetic values of the vowels. At this point it is impossible to reconstruct when each value occurred.

The acceptable diphthongs include aj, ej, oj, uj, iw, ew, uw and aw. Vowels can also be lengthened, though it is unknown if length affected vowel quality at this point.

Ablaut
Vowel ablaut was a significant feature in Proto-Čeuɲ. Each vowel had five grades, basic, high, open, consonant and zero. The Clgrade is for whenever the base vowel is long (whereas a normal C is used whenever the vowel is short), and Cwand Cjgrades are added on to the C and Clgrades whenever the vowel is in a diphthong with w and j respectively.

Consonant Mutation
Consonant mutation is almost as important as vowel ablaut in morphology. There are three grades, basic, lenis/fortis, and syllabic.

Phonotactics
Roots follow a very simple phonology of C1VC2S, where C1is any consonant, V is any short or long vowel or diphthong, C2is any consonant other than an affricate, and S is any short vowel (not a diphthong). Derived forms of the root often produce consonant clusters, see the adjectives section for more details.

Nouns
Nouns decline to case (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, locative and allative) and number (singular, paucal and plural).

Ɣeta-, ɣetu-, ɣetaw- (man) the three words are the basic, high and open grade forms of the noun (which are sometimes necessary to be listed in the lexicon since sound changes in pre-proto-Čeuɲ made some of the forms irregular, e.g the high-grade form of *loɣe is *loji, and the open-grade form of *koje is *koɣa.) The pattern for declension can be better explained with the following chart (note B, H, O & Z stand for basic, high, open and zero grade.) Some consonant mutations to note:
 * The paucal morpheme -s changes to -z after b, d, z and ɣ.
 * F, s, z, and ɣ turn into p, t, d and g when -s/z is added
 * When -j is added to i, it becomes -ej

Number
These words decline the same as nouns do and are, according to most philological evidence, are placed after the noun or pronoun they modify

* tsawe- one

* meko- two

* kojɣu- three

* līfa- four

* seju- five

* bzono- six

* dalo- seven

* gzati- eight

* waŋe- nine

* kifo- ten

* kifotsawe- eleven (kifo + tsawe)

* mekokifo- twenty (meko * kifo)

Pronouns
Two systems of pronouns have been reconstructed. The most accepted theory is that one was emphatic and the other unstressed, though the descendants often used them as suppletive forms, e.g. emphatic in nominative, genitive and locative, unstressed in all others.

The emphatic pronouns are maɣe, telo, and psiku for I, you and he/she/it respectively. They decline like average nouns.

The unstressed pronouns are tak, kos, and zem. They decline irregularly. In addition to the personal pronouns their is also the distal demonstrative *ksino and medial demonstrative *ŋalu. There were also the adverb *kje (there) and fim (here), from whence several pronouns were derived in the descendant languages. Interrogative pronouns only included *naku (what, who), which was the source of all other interrogative phrases (i.e. ŋo nakuj? (for what?) is the source for why? in most languages.) The pronoun *jālo served as the relative pronoun.

Adjectives
Adjectives and verbs derive from a special stem form of the noun: the first consonant becomes its syllabic counterpart and the first vowel becomes its consonant counterpart. If the vowel is a long vowel, However, if the syllabic counterpart of the consonant is 'm, 'n, 'ŋ or 'l, then it and the consonant derived from the vowel metathesize (niɣe (dog) > j'nɣe (of dogs, canine), not 'njɣe). This stem is referred to as the Nulca Stem (often shortened N-stem), as Csillan philoligist Ther-Nulca was the first to explain its relation to the noun.

If the result of the Nulca stem should be an illegal cluster such as ow, ij, l'l, m'm, n'n, or ŋ'ŋ, it dissimilates to ej, aw, el, om, in and aɲ respectively.

Thus the previously encountered *ɣeta-, *ɣetu-, *ɣetaw- becomes *ūlta-, *ūltu-, *ūltaw-. Basic adjectives take this form, and there are some adjectives that lack a nominal "root" (such as *ewɣu-, *ewɣuj-, *ewwo- green) and, as far as we know, are actually adjectival roots.

Adjectives decline much differently than nouns, as demonstrated below. No morphological comparative or superlative can be reconstructed. Most languages attest some form of the word *gziɲe (greatest amount, most) plus the genitive for the superlative degree. The comparative similarly was *wuzo (more) plus the genitive.

Verbs
Verbs are formed by adding certain prefixes to the N-stem, derived from basic nouns.
 * *won- (from *wona, an action), meaning "do X" thus *teko (food) > *elko (culinary) > *wonelko (eat)
 * *kuz- (from *kuzi, a recipient), meaning "be X'ed" thus gzelu (strike, wound) > ūllu (striking, wounding) > kuzūllu (be struck)
 * *lēn- (from *lēnu, a being), meaning "be X" thus *ojɣe (tall) > *nelojɣe
 * *ɣuwt- (from *ɣuwe, entitlement), meaning "have X" thus *lota (knowledge) > *w'lta (wise, smart) > *ɣuwtw'lta (understand)
 * *jiwz (from *jiwzu, demand, impetus), meaning "cause OBJ to do X" kawo (life) > aŋwo (alive) > jiwzaɲwo (give birth)

Person
Most likely, Proto Čeuɲ verbs did not conjugate for person or number, however most descendants did develop such a distinction. In Proto Čeuɲ, the pronoun was required to distinguish who does the action. However, verbs do conjugate to number based on how their n-stem adjective declines.

Aspect
The perfective aspect (single or complete action) is the basic form. The progressive (ongoing or habitual action) aspect was formed by changing the first consonant of the verb's prefix to its lenis/fortis form and adding -z at the end of the verb (note the similarity to the locative case ending, which also comes from the pronoun *uz, at, in, on or among.)

Tense
The future tense is formed by giving the allative form of the n-stem, and the past tense with the genitive.

Mood
The indicative mood is the basic form of the word. The subjunctive (used in counterfactuals, abilitives, and possibly indirect phrases, as well as polite commands) was formed by giving the zero grade of the vowel/diphthong and prefixing *ka- (from *kaɣu, chance). The volitional mood (used for desired events, hortatives, and more assertive commands) was formed with open grade of the vowel in the prefix.

Gerunds and Infinitives
In order to make a verb into its nominal equivalent, the suffix -ŋgzu is added to the verb. Semantically, this filled the role of both a gerund and an infinitive. Adding the worn-down suffix -ɣu to the progressive stem gave the newly formed noun the meaning "habitual doer of X." Thus wonōka (walk) becomes wonōkazɣu (walker, hiker, nomad, traveler.)

Participles
Though normal adjectives were far more common, participles could be used in order to express a more verbal meaning. Two suffixes could be added on to the same stem as the gerund/infinitive, -lko for an active meaning and -nta for a passive meaning. For the progressive aspect, add the suffixes -ɣo and -da, worn down versions of each previous ending respectively.

Lexicon
Proto Čeuɲ/Lexicon