Dzenic languages
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| Dzenic | |
|---|---|
| Nywic, Tywic | |
| Geographic distribution | Polykariote-Eukariote Limes |
| Linguistic classification | One of Sparkalia's primary language families. |
| Proto-language | Proto-Dzenic |
| Subdivisions | |
| ISO 639-5 | dze |
The Dzenic Languages, also known as Nywic or Tywic, are a language family native to the Dze species and the P.E.L. in where this race inhabits. Divided into 6 sub-branches, they comprise over 100 extant languages and several liturgical or extinct ones, the most famous of all being Old Dze and the other Old Liturgicals; these languages are all descended from an ancient, reconstructed, Proto-Dzenic language spoken in the early Paleolithic Age in the Leaf Lance Valley and the surrounding areas, associated mainly with the Leaf Lance Culture. By the time written records had begun however, the Dzenic Languages had expanded all across the P.E.L. and had branched out into several, liturgical, mutually un-intelligible variants. Written evidence in the form of the Old Liturgicals appears tens of thousands of years after the hypothesized era in which Proto-Dzenic emerged, with these languages being from the Late Chalcolithic Era.
However, due to the cultural conservativeness of the Dze, which extends to a linguistic conservativeness, the culture and religion, among other aspects, has been fairly easy to reconstruct. The Dzenic family is important to sparkalian linguistics, specially the field of historical linguistics, as it possesses the longest recorded history of any language family, as well as the largest linguistic cultural heritage of any race or civilization. The Dzenic languages are also not related to any other language family, being spoken exclusively by the Dze species.
Name
In current scholarship, the term "Dzenic" is the most widely used, as it comes from the Proto-Dzenic *d͡zɛ, meaning "stargazer", which is the most common endonym the species as a whole uses; however, terms like Nywic or Tywic, coming from the words for "people" and "person" respectively, have been proposed as alternative names, with the former being rarely used due to the Dze-Nywan branch already using the term for one of the sub-branches.
Classification
The Dzenic Languages are unique in that they originate from a species that is not related to humans and that arose in a very specific area, with the language being seemingly the one ancestral language for the whole species, which has led to the proposition that Dzenic, along with being renamed to either of the two proposals stated above, was not the only language spoken by the species, with Solarian linguists believing certain features of Proto-Dzenic, and specially of it's daughter languages, to come from various substrata rather than being native features; this is widely rejected nontheless due to archaeological and genetic evidence.
There are six main branches of the Dzenic Languages, listed below in alphabetical order:
- Chinuyan.
- Dze-Nywan (from Proto-Dze-Nywan, attested from the 40th Millenium BR onwards, earliest texts being from Old Dze.
- Ngighic.
- Thurian.
- Tsanic.
- Zungan.
Evolution
Proto-Dzenic
The reconstructed Proto-Dzenic language is the proposed common ancestor of all languages within the family. Since Prince Alexander's expedition to the lands of the Dze, the great amount of linguistic material given to him and the understanding of Solarian linguists of it allowed for a comprehensive and fairly accurate reconstruction of the original language spoken by the Dze species.
Like its daughter languages, Proto-Dzenic was a polysynthetic language, in where only certain noun and verb roots could exist in isolation as words, with a highly complex and diverse conjugation system in where up to ten different morphemes could be applied to create a "word-sentence". The basic roots have been determined to only be nouns and verbs due to the lack of specific conjugation for adjectives or numerals.
Diversification
The diversification of the parent language is un-attested, for no written records before Old Dze have been documented nor found. The timeline of their evolution, however, is fairly agreed upon by all camps and has remained fairly undisputed. Using a mathematical analysis borrowed from evolutionary biology, the following evolutionary tree has been proposed:
- Pre-Dze-Nywan (before 55,000 BR)
- Pre-Tsanic (before 50,000 BR)
- Pre-Chinuyan (before 48,000 BR)
- Pre-Thurian and Pre-Zungan (before 46,000 BR)
- Proto-Ngighic (before 43,000 BR)
Important languages for reconstruction
In reconstructing the ancestral Dze language, there have been several languages that have proven vital to the process. These are almost exclusively part of the Old Liturgicals, which were documented from 40,000 BR onwards, and, due to their conservative nature in some cases, some of the more recent and spoken languages (most notable, Alẋtśaqi) have also allowed to gain a more accurate picture of what the parent language was like.
Main primary sources:
- Old Dze, the most ancient and well-recorded of the liturgicals, as well as being one of the most phonetically and grammatically conservative languages in the family, its extensive poetic material and lack of ambiguity in the script allowed for a much more comprehensive descifring and later understanding.
Sound changes
As the Proto-Dzenic language broke, its sound system evolved in very divergent ways due to the abundance of sound changes that occured in correspondance to the disturbances of the Dze Cultural Hybernation Hypothesis.
Proto-Dzenic is reconstructed with a two-way distinction in plosives, and some fricatives, between plain and ejective as well as voiced plosives, having a total of 15 stops, with several languages expanding or slightly reducing this amount.
The most common example of this is the aspiration of stops and fricatives, evidenced most clearly in the Dze-Nywan branch with Old Dze through what is known as Erucius' Law.
- pɛh → pəh → pᵊh → pʰ
- tɛh → təh → tᵊh → tʰ
- kɛh → kəh → kᵊh → kʰ
- qɛh → qəh → qᵊh → qʰ
- ɬɛh → ɬəh → ɬᵊh → ɬʰ
