Erucius' Law

Erucius' Law (also known as the Dze-Nywan Aspiration Constant) is a set of sound laws describing the appearance of aspirated stops and fricatives in the Dze-Nywan languages as they diverged from their parent language. First put forward by the law's namesake, Marcus Erucius, and later popularized by himself and his colleague, Flavius Triccius; the law establishes a set of regular correspondances between various Dze-Nywan Languages and their phonological evolution.

History

Erucius' Law is one of the first official sound laws established in sparkalian linguistics, the first for Dzenic languages specifically, and has allowed for the development of historical phonology as a separate branch of linguistics and of historical linguistics to be more precise. The law was established after Erucius noticed that, among the Old Liturgicals, the languages of the Dze-Nywan branch seemed to be the ones that had gone under the least amount of change and noticed the correspondance between Dze-Nywan pʰ and words with a vowel before a x or h sound and after a plosive or fricative, like [pax] being cognate to [pʰa].

Overview

Erucius' Law consists of a chain link of sound changes, with two variants, that occured between Proto-Dzenic, Proto-Dze-Nywan and closely descended languages like Old Dze, with the Core Dze and Nywan branches undertaking the same process after their divergence, reconstructed as follows:

1. Proto-Dzenic vowels before an h sound and after a plosive or lateral fricative are un-stressed.
2. Proto-Dze-Nywan un-stressed vowels become Epithenic or, more rarely, switch places due to a Paragogic effect.
3. Proto-Dze and Proto-Nywan's epithenic vowels dissapear and aspirate the preciding stop or fricative.

This chain of changes can be abstractally depicted as the following:

• pɛh → pəh → pᵊh → pʰ
• tɛh → təh → tᵊh → tʰ
• kɛh → kəh → kᵊh → kʰ
• qɛh → qəh → qᵊh → qʰ
• ɬɛh → ɬəh → ɬᵊh → ɬʰ

An example of a paragogic change was with the Proto-Dzenic word *kahɬɛh "to spin", this word would evolve in Proto-Dze-Nywan *kᵊhaɬᵊh and then as [kʰaɬʰ] in Old Dze, the first vowel having switched places with the glottal sibilant.

Further changes

Although Erucius' original law only covered stops and the voiceless lateral fricative due to the fact that only Old Dze had been translated and only partially, it was later discovered with the acquisition of more material that other fricatives went a similar process in the both Core Dze and Nywan languages; this proved that Old Dze was, in fact, a daughter language of Proto-Dze-Nywan and not Proto-Dze, being the sibling of the latter or even an earlier form of such, preserved in writing.

This chain of changes can be abstractally depicted as the following:

• sɛh → səh → sᵊh → sʰ
• çɛh → çəh → çᵊh → çʰ
• xɛh → xəh → xᵊh → xʰ
• χɛh → χəh → χᵊh → χʰ