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 ergative-absolutive, featuring vowel-ablaut in addition to prefixes and suffixes.

Consonants
Note- the phonemes b and bz are attested very rarely and are likely allophones of p and ps, however no rules to explain where p and ps voice to b and bz can be reconstructed with given evidence.

The nature of the phonemes ɣ-ɰ is highly debated. Historically, they appear to have been analyzed as the same phoneme- however, sometimes their attested forms suggest a voiced fricative, other times a voiced velar approximant. 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 descendants of this phoneme vary immensely, from an alveolar trill to an back open unrounded vowel. The linguist who researched and theorized most about this "gamma merger" (as he was known to call it) was Rualo, thus it is often called Rualo'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

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. For the zero grade, a following m, n and l syllabify, all labial consonant syllabify to 'm, dental to 'n (except for s and z which go to 'l), velar to 'ŋ (except ɣ which goes to u) and the glide j and w to i and o respectively.

Phonotactics
Reconstructed words have been organized to follow a specific set of rules deducted from present patterns, given below. Since conlang wikia has an aneurysm whenever I use a combining diacritic, an apostrophe is used whenever m/n/ŋ/l is syllabic: i.e. lwom (one syllable) means a member of the Čis species, 'lwom (two syllables) means inaction.
 * All root words are monosyllabic, morphology (derivational or otherwise) adds syllables.
 * Geminates do not occur.
 * Initial constructions include C, Cl, Cw, Cj, Cɣ and m/n/ŋ/lC followed by any vowel/diphthong.
 * Medial constructions include the same except the m/n/ŋ/l is no longer syllabic, as it follows a vowel
 * Final constructions include any vowel with any or no consonant.
 * Root nouns may contain no consonant clusters, but clusters are almost always created in their derived forms

Nouns
Nouns decline to case (absolutive, ergative, 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

* tsaw- one

* mjek- two

* kwoɣ- three

* ljif- four

* sej- five

* bzon- six

* dal- seven

* gzat- eight

* waŋ- nine

* kif- ten

* kifetsaw- eleven (kif + tsaw)

* mjekokif- twenty (mjek * kif)

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 absolutive, 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.

Person
Every verb comes from a noun- the noun itself (usually with one of the prefixes discussed later) can be used as a gerund or infinitive. The root vowel (the first one in the word) reduces to zero grade, rendering the first consonant a non-syllabic version of its syllabic counterpart and removing any consonant after the first consonant located in the original first syllable, and one of the prefixes discussed later is added on to the beginning, filling in the syllable.

This is a lot to take in, so lets see how it applies to an actual word.