Khunul

Old Dze
Dzeŋuq
Pronunciation	['d͡zeŋuq]
Region	Eastern Range
Ethnicity	Dze
Era	Earliest attestations around 40.000 BR, evolved into the Core Dze languages by 10.000 BR
Language family	Dzenic Languages Eastern Dzenic Old Dze
Writing system	Dze Hieroglyphs
Official status
Official language in	The Dze Confederation
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–

Old Dze (Old Dze: Dzeŋuq ['d͡zeŋuq]) is a classical language, spoken by the people of the Moonblade Culture and the Flower Stirrup Culture, which belongs to the Eastern branch of the Dzenic Languages. Belonging to a collective of 10 or so languages known as the Old Liturgicals, it is the language as it was spoken prior to it's evolution into Proto-Dze.

Archaeology

The first indications of the existance of Old Dze lie in the Dze Hieroglyphic script made by the Moonblade Culture around 40.000 BR until about 10.000 BR, a period of time in where the language changed very little if at all. The conservative nature of this language and the rest of the Liturgicals gave rise to the Dze Disturbance Bloom Hypothesis, which proposes that the language and culture of a Dze will only change after repetitive and forced changes to their way of life. The archaeological record of this language spans over 20.000 years and it is always within the estimated urheimat of the Moonblade Culture, with evidence of the language in other Dze cultures being scant or non-existant.

Decipherement

The Old Dze language was first encountered by scientific expeditions from Santi Rasta and Nova Solarius in 1611 and 1608 respectively and, due to the extreme isolation the Dze live in, it only began to be deciphered afterwards of 1612 with the return of Prince Alexander's expedition to the Dze Confederation in 1611, in where he brought several papers of Old Dze texts for Solarian linguists to decipher.

Etymology and Nomenclature

The endonym of the language, or at least the most well known, is "Dzeŋuq", which translates to "stargazer language/tongue". The Moonblade Tablets, and even cave art from the Leaf Lance Culture, reveal an affinity of the Dze towards astronomy and the study of stars and the movements of they, the planets, the moons and the galactic disk. Although a shared cultural trait of all Dze, the field of astronomy itself was more common in the Moonblade Culture and thus the endonym was more prevalent there, whereas in other regions the Dze inhabited they called themselves differently.

History

Old Dze was spoken primarily in the Leaf Lance Valley and the adjacent lands, such as the Eastfjords and the Oriental Steppes; although previously thought to be the ancestor of all Dzenic Languages, it was recently proved that it was but one of many Chalcolithic languages that proliferated through the lands of the Dze, specifically belonging to the branch called "Eastern/Proper/Core Dzenic", being the easternmost of the liturgicals to enter the scene and one with the earliest written evidence, with the hieroglyphic script being fully used by the Moonblade culture by as soon as a century after the first confirmed true written tablet's carbon dating.

Origin and development

Old Dze belongs to the Dzenic family of languages, of which it is the oldest documented member of the Old Liturgicals, the collection of 10 Chalcolithic Dze languages that arose from Proto-Dzenic. A member of the Eastern Dzenic branch, it is by far the most conservative of all languages in phonology and grammar compared to Proto-Dzenic, mainly with the retention of the three-way distinction between plain, aspirated and ejective consonants, and the close to null grammatical changes from that era, to the point that it was thought to be the actual common ancestor of the Dzenic languages. The Old Dze language was isolated from the rest of the Eastern Dzenic languages due to the remoteness of the place their speakers inhabited and later on due to isolationism of it's own speakers until the Kraterolithic era.

Influence

Old Dze is notorious for being the main language of the tribe that would give rise to the First Dze Confederation and a predominant liturgical language afterwards, also being the official language of the current confederation; being the oldest of the Liturgicals it is also the language with the largest collection of texts, steles and manuscripts, with a rich tradition of theological and historical works, with over 10 million extant inscriptions.

Being nurtured by several traditions of Tẋeẋuq, serving as its main form of written language, it was able to live as a classical tongue until the modern day; as well as being the lingua franca for much of the eastern Dze tribes and, more recently, at a national level.

Modern Dze languages

The relation of Old Dze to the more recent Dze languages is unclear, however it has been determined that Old Dze is either the root Proto-language or a literary off-shoot from the main proto-language.

Geographic distribution

The range of Old Dze inscriptions span much of the Chalcolithic and Kraterolithic ranges of the Dze as a species, however, some inscriptions outside the Polykariote-Eukariote Limes have been found in the form of fragmented texts, implying either failed attempts at expansion of the acquisition of such through trade, the reason remains so far unknown.

Phonology

Old Dze features a larger phonetic inventory than its ancestor, Proto-Dzenic, however it also maintains several archaic phonemes, like the voiced affricates and the palatal consonants, mostly assimilated or lost in other languages. It is also famous for the addition of aspirated stops and fricatives, though it seems that, unlike it's descendants, the process wasn't complete in the fricatives, with only the voiceless lateral fricative being aspirated.

Consonants

Old Dze is most notorious for a very rich inventory of nasals and stops, distinguishing voiced and voicelessness and having phonemic ejectives and aspirated variants, with fricatives being more simplistic in most cases, however allophonic ejectiveness and aspiration has been noted in certain processes.

There are 39 consonants in Old Dze:

		Bilabial	Alveolar			Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
			plain	sibilant	lateral
Nasal	voiced	m	n				ŋ
	voiceless	m̥	n̥				ŋ̊
Stop	voiced			dz	dɮ
	voiceless	p	t	ts	tɬ	c	k	q	ʔ
	aspirated	pʰ	tʰ	tsʰ	tɬʰ	cʰ	kʰ	qʰ
	ejective	pʼ	tʼ	tsʼ	tɬʼ	cʼ	kʼ	qʼ
Fricative	voiceless			s	ɬ	ç	x	χ	h
	aspirated				ɬʰ
	ejective				ɬʼ
	voiced				ɮ
Approximant						j	w

Vowels

Old Dze has comparatively conservative vowels for a Dzenic language, only having lowered the Close-mid back vowel into a Near-open one, with distinction between long and short vowels, which is mostly used to differentiate suffixes from words. There are 12 vowels in Old Dze:

	Front		Central		Back
	short	long	short	long	short	long
Close	i	iː	ɨ	ɨː	u	uː
Close-mid	e	eː
Near-open					ɔ	ɔː
Open	a	aː