| Zod |
|Period||c. 500 YP|
|Spoken in||Šišin mountains|
|Classification|| Talo-Edastean |
|Basic word order||SVO, VS|
Zod is an isolate member of the Talo-Edastean languages, comprising an independent branch within the family, and rather alien in character from the other branches. It was spoken by perhaps ten thousand people in a group of isolated valleys in a remote region of the Šišin mountains, northwest of the Bwimbai passes. The Zod were discovered early in the fifth century YP by Dāiadak explorers, and the following sketch dates to this era. The Zod language is notable in Akana linguistics for having one of the most complex and pervasive sound harmony systems attested. It is a member of the Qedik linguistic area.
- 1 Phonology
- 2 Morphology
- The palatal series is, more specifically, alveolo-palatal - including ń, although the IPA lacks a specific symbol for alveolo-palatal nasals, so the simple palatal nasal symbol is used.
- The radical series is usually epiglottal or pharyngeal, but uvular realizations are retained in one dialect, and may freely alternate in some speakers.
More than half of Zod consonants and all its vowels show alternation according to two strong harmonic patterns, with two additional harmonies occurring less consistently. The primary harmony is the broad/slender distinction, while the others are subharmonies operating within the boundaries it defines.
Broad and Slender
Although i-affection is a common phenomenon cross-linguistically, Zod takes it to a level rarely attested. I-affected words are called slender, and unaffected words are called broad. This i-affection is best treated as an underlying and suprasegmental feature, as many instances of the sounds that originally triggered it have since been lost to sound changes.
the morpheme level
Individual morphemes are the carriers of the feature; each morpheme in the language has either the feature [broad] or the feature [slender]. Roughly three quarters of the known word roots of Zod are broad, although running text is often dominated by slender words, due to the action of affixes.
the word level
I-harmony applies consistently at the word level: no matter how many morphemes appear in it, a given word will be entirely broad or entirely slender. The presence of any [slender] morpheme in a word causes any [broad] morphemes in the word to undergo slendering, which will be described in more detail below, but to summarize: broad vowels change to their slender counterparts, velar consonants become palatal, and radical consonants become velar.
the phrase level
On an inconsistent basis, the [slender] feature can sometimes expand to the phrase level. This is not a well-installed feature of Zod and will be ignored for the remainder of this sketch as nonstandard.
The harmonic pattern is such that we must treat broad and slender words as constructed from separate phoneme inventories, as follows.
|Broad Consonants||Slender Consonants|
|Broad Vowels||Slender Vowels|
The second important sound harmony in Zod is between sibilants - defined here as all coronal and palatal fricatives and affricates.
Unlike broad words, slender words permit both the coronal and palatal series of sibilants. But these display palatalization harmony: if any palatal sibilant (ć, ź or ś) occurs in the word, all other sibilants in the same word become palatal too. With sporadic exceptions, this applies even across polysyllabic distances, but only at the word level.
Further subharmonies can be found in Zod, but they are of less consequence than I-harmony or sibilant harmony.
- Non-labial nasals in slender words can harmonize with palatal nasals: ŋ and n can become ń when another ń is nearby. This behavior is far from consistent, and completely absent in many speakers. Among those who have nasal harmony, it varies by speaker and register in how distant a palatal sound can trigger the harmony, and whether it is triggered only by palatal nasals or by all palatal sounds.
- In broad words, radical sounds can trigger radicalization of nearby velar sounds: for instance, expected k realized as q when another q occurs in the next syllable, or the prior one. Like nasal harmony this behavior is variable and inconsistent in application.
- A few speakers appear to palatalize all consonants in slender words - here meaning to coarticulate them with a palatal approximant, not move them to a palatal primary articulation. Nasal harmony is not clearly a distinct process from this.
None of these additional subharmonies are strong rules, and the Zod themselves consider them to be "lazy" or nonstandard speech, when they are noticed at all. Therefore this sketch will ignore these behaviors hereafter and discuss the language in terms of its basic forms, as though they were subject only to I-harmony and sibilant harmony.
When a broad morpheme is made slender by another, it normally undergoes substantial changes, as more than half of Zod segments alternate under the harmonies. Some morphemes are relatively unaffected while others can become almost unrecognizable.
The primary consonant alternations are between palatals and velars, between velars and radicals, and between coronal and palatal sibilants. Other coronals occasionally alternate with palatals as well, in irregular words. But labial consonants, and r, are immune - that is, they never alternate between broad and slender morphemes. Z is also immune to the general alternation, except that it is subject to sibilant harmony.
The regular pattern for slenderization is as follows. Note that broad words become slender only by the addition of a slender affix; these are not shown below, for the sake of clarity.
- vowel harmony: o, a, æ, e become u, u, e, e. Example: dæs → des
- velars become palatal: k, g, x, ŋ, γ become ć, ź, ś, ń, and y. Example: foko → fuću
- radicals become velar: q, h become k, x. Example: γaqa → yuku
- sibilant harmony: s, c, z become ś, ć, ź, if and only if some other ć, ź, or ś appears in the word. Example: sæ → se, but sæx → śeś
However, a number of common roots and affixes are irregularly slendered. These are artifacts of the diachronic path by which the broad/slender distinction evolved, which was much more complex than the heavily analogized regular pattern. Most irregular slenders are irregular in one or more of the following ways:
- velars failing to palatalize. Example: kan → kun
- γ becoming ź instead of y. Example: γeda → źedu
- a, æ becoming e, i instead of u, e. Example: -badak (suffix) → -beduć
- unexpected palatalization of coronals or radicals. Example: deŋ → źeń
- other unexpected alternations. Example: h → ń in ætahog, which slenders to eteńuź
Note that in cases where a morpheme consists only of immune consonants and no other vowels than e, or else it is zero, its broad/slender status cannot be told at a glance.
Other phonological rules
Consonant clusters may have at most two consonants in sequence, except when the third consonant is r. Clusters obey two assimilation rules, for obstruent voicing and for point of articulation. POA assimilation is regressive: sonorants (approximants and nasals) assimilate to the point of articulation of a following obstruent. But the voicing rule is progressive: obstruents are voiced if a prior obstruent is, voiceless if it isn't, and are unaffected by prior sonorants. Implosives behave as voiced obstruents in this regard, in either position in the cluster. That is, they behave as though they are primarily a "voiced" series, with implosion a secondary feature of voiced stops. (Nevertheless, the degree of implosion in these consonants is quite marked.)
The syllable structure of Zod can be described as (C)(r)V(C), except that when two vowels come into contact, the first is elided.
Zod is usually described as having a predictable, rather than a contrastive, pitch-accent system. The accent is consistently found on the first syllable of the stem of every content word. This accent is realized with chiefly by a marked peak in pitch, coincident with a more careful articulation. The pitches of surrounding syllables are not tightly controlled, so long as the pitch of the accented syllable is notably higher.
Zod morphosyntax has been less thoroughly studied than its phonological system; except for a few areas of interest, only a general syntactic overview and the most important morphological tables are available at this time.
Notation note: While most affixes are marked with the usual hyphen (-) to indicate their direction of attachment, those which trigger slendering use a plus sign (+) instead. This is necessary because not all broad and slender morphemes can be told apart with a glance.
Zod nouns inflect with a small set of prefixes that operate mostly in the categories of grammatical number and quantification, although one is a possessive instead. The prefixes are mutually exclusive, and nouns do not change form in any other regard.
- Where two forms appear, the first prefix appears before vowels, and the second, before consonants.
- All prefixes undergo the regular alternation when attached to a slender word.
- Nouns beginning in h or x lose these sounds and are treated as vowel-initial, after the ć+, ŋ-, mah- and az- prefixes.
|Ø-||unmarked||æpes, "fish"||mæqat, "brother(s)"||hade, "salt"|
|ć+, ći+||singulative||ćepeś, "(one) fish"||ćimekut, "(one) brother"||ćude, "(one) (piece of) salt"|
|ŋ-, ŋa-||paucal||ŋæpes, "a few fish"||ŋamæqat, "a few brothers"||ŋade, "a few (pieces of) salt"|
|mah-||partitive||mahæpes, "some of the fish"||mahmæqat, "some of the brothers"||mahade, "some of the salt"|
|az-||exhaustive plural||azæpes, "all the fish"||azmæqat, "all the brothers"||azade, "all the salt"|
|Ø+, o-||possessive||epes, "of the fish"||omæqat, "of the brother(s)"||ohade, "of the salt"|
Additionally, reduplication can be used to impart a distributive sense to some of these forms. For example, æpes æpes means "many fish; fish all over", while ćepeś ćepeś means "many types of fish", and mahæpes mahæpes can sometimes be used to mean "some of each kind of fish".
The personal pronouns of Zod encode person, number, and case, with secondary distinctions for childhood in the second and third persons, and for gender and distance in the third person.
Zod verbs inflect for tense, and to agree with the sentence subject in person and number. There is also a passive voice, and several forms that operate as infinitives and complementizers.
Tense and subject agreement are partially fused into a single set of verb suffixes. Two tenses are distinguised, past and non-past. The suffixes also agree with the subject for two grammatical numbers and three persons, a much more basic distinction set than is available in the pronouns.
There are two closely related conjugations: the set of suffixes used after single consonants, called the C-conjugation, and the set used after vowels, called the V-conjugation. In the V-conjugation, suffixes beginning with vowels override the verb's final vowel; in the C-conjugation the suffixes are simply appended.
Following are the verb suffixes. Because some of them are irregularly slendered, the full paradigm is listed for both broad and slender verbs.
|conj.||broad, nonpast||broad, past||slender, nonpast||slender, past|
Following are four fully conjugated example verbs: astrak, "to lose (something)"; xunćiś, "to breathe"; pæsta, "to attack"; and śimbe, "to strike"
|conj.||broad, nonpast||broad, past||slender, nonpast||slender, past|
The passive suffix, like the conjugation suffixes, has several allomorphs depending on the word's status as broad or slender, and whether it ends in a vowel. The suffix is always followed by conjugation suffixes, as appropriate.
|-ći-||xunćiśći||"be breathed (in)"|
Note that the passive suffix switches all verbs from the C conjugation to the V, and vice versa.
Additionally, the -r- allomorph triggers deletion of the prior vowel whenever a vowel-initial suffix follows: pæstrak, "they are attacked".