conlang.phundrak.com/docs/proto-nyqy/introduction.org

#+setupfile: ../headers

* Introduction
** Language Evolution
We are not sure which was the first language ever spoken in our world.
Was there even one primordial language, or were there several that
spontaneously appeared around our world here and there? We cannot know
for certain, this is too far back in our history. Some scientists
estimate the firsts of our kind to be gifted the ability to speak
lived some hundred of thousand of years back, maybe twice this period
even. There is absolutely no way to know what happened at that time
with non-physical activities, and we can only guess. We can better
guess how they lived, and how they died, than how they interacted with
each other, what was their social interaction like, and what were the
first words ever spoken on our planet. Maybe they began as grunts of
different pitches, with hand gestures, then two vowels became
distinct, a couple of consonants, and the first languages sprung from
that. This, we do not know, and this is not the subject of this book
anyways.

What we do know is, languages evolve as time passes. One language can
morph in the way it is pronounced, in the way some words are used, in
the way they are shaped by their position and role in the sentence, by
how they are organized with each other. A language spoken two
centuries back will sound like its decendent today, but with a
noticeable difference. Jumping a couple of centuries back, and we lost
some intelligibility, and some sentences sound alien to us. A
millenium back, and while the language resonates, we cannot understand
it anymore. Going the other way around, travelling to the future,
would have the same effect, except that we would not necessarily
follow only one language, but several, for in different places,
different changes would take place. As time goes by, these differences
become more and more proeminent, and what was once the same langage
becomes several dialects that become less and less similar to one
another, until we end up with several languages, sister between
themselves, daughters to the initial language.

** Relating Languages Between Themselves
We are not sure who first emited the theory of language evolution;
this has been lost to time during the great collapse two thousand
years back, and only a fraction of the knowledge from back then
survived the flow of time. We’re lucky even to know about this. It’s
the Professor Loqbrekh who, in 3489, first deciphered some books that
were found two decades prior, written in Énanonn. They described the
principle of language evolution, and how language families could be
reconstructed, how we could know languages are related, and a hint on
how mother languages we do not know could be reconstructed. The
principle on how historical linguistics are the following:

#+begin_quote
If two languages share a great number of coincidentally similar
features, especially in their grammar, so much so that it cannot be
explained by chance only, then these two languages are surely related.
#+end_quote

By this process, we can recreate family trees of languages. Some are
more closely related to one another than some other, which are more
distant. Sometimes, it is even unsure if a language is related to a
language tree; maybe the language simply borrowed a good amount of
vocabulary from another language that we either now of, or died since.

The best attested languages are the ones we have written record of. In
a sense, we are lucky: while we do know a vast majority of the written
documents prior to the great collapse were lost during this sad event,
we still have a good amount of them left in various languages we can
analyze, and we still find some that were lost before then and found
back again. The earliest written record we ever found was from the
Loho language, the oldest member of the Mojhal language tree attested;
the Mojhal tree has been itself linked to the Ñyqy tree some fifty
years ago by the Pr Khorlan (3598).

#+name: tree-language-family
#+begin_src dot :file proto-nyqy/nyqy-family-tree.png :results none :eval no-export
digraph d {
    graph[dpi=300,bgcolor="transparent"];
    node[shape=plaintext];
    ranksep=.75; size="7.5,7.5";

    {
        "-10000" -> "-8000" -> "-6000" -> "-5000" -> "-4500" ->
        "-4000" -> "-3500" -> "-2000" ->
        "-1000" -> "-500" -> present;
    }

    {
        rank=same;
        "-8000";
        protonyqy[label="Proto-Ñyqy\n6,000 to 10,000 years ago"];
    }

    {
        rank=same;
        "-5000";
        protoma[label="Proto-Mojhal-Andelian\n4,000 to 6,000 years ago"];
    }

    {
        rank=same;
        "-4500";
        prototiltinian[label="Proto-Tiltinian\nca. 4,500 years ago"];
        protoandelian[label="Proto-Andelian\nca. 4,000 to 5,000 years ago"];
    }

    {
        rank=same;
        "-4000";
        protomojhal[label="Proto-Mojhal\nca. 4,000 years ago"];
    }

    {
        rank=same;
        "-3500";
        loho[label="Loho\nca. 3,500 years ago"];
    }

    {
        rank=same;
        "-2000";
        oldpritian[label="Old Pritian\nca. 2,000 years ago"];
        "ne’ic"[label="Ñe’ic\nca. 2,500 years ago"];
    }

    {
        rank=same;
        "-1000";
        oryora[label="Old Ryora\nca. 1,300 years ago"];
        oenanonn[label="Old Énanonn\nca. 900 years ago"];
        omanniki[label="Old Manniki\nca. 1,200 years ago"];
        midpritian[label="Middle Pritian\n 1,100 years ago"];
    }

    {
        rank=same;
        "-500";
        oauc[label="Old Auc\n600 years ago"];
        mmanniki[label="Middle Manniki\nca. 400 years ago"];
    }

    {
        rank=same;
        present;
        enanonn[label="Énanonn"];
        ryora[label="Ryora"];
        auc[label="Auc"];
        manniki[label="Manniki"];
        pritian[label="Pritian"];
    }

    protonyqy -> protoma;
    protonyqy -> oldpritian;
    protonyqy -> prototiltinian;

    protoma -> protomojhal;
    protoma -> protoandelian;

    protomojhal -> loho;
    protomojhal -> "ne’ic";

    "ne’ic" -> oenanonn -> enanonn;
    "ne’ic" -> omanniki -> mmanniki -> manniki;

    protoandelian -> oryora -> ryora;
    protoandelian -> oauc -> auc;

    oldpritian -> midpritian -> pritian;
}
#+end_src

#+html: <ImgFigure src="/img/proto-nyqy/nyqy-family-tree.png" alt="Ñyqy Family Tree">Ñyqy Family Tree</ImgFigure>

** Principles of Historical Linguistics
So, how does historical linguistics work? How does one know what the
mother language of a bunch of other languages is? In historical
linguistics, we study the similarities between languages and their
features. If a feature is obviously common, there is a good chance it
is inherited from a common ancestor. The same goes for words, we
generally take the average of several words, we estimate what their
ancestor word was like, and we estimate what sound change made these
words evolve the way they did. If this sound change consistently works
almost always, we know we hit right: sound changes are very regular,
and exceptions are very rare. And this is how we can reconstruct a
mother language that was lost to time thanks to its existing daughter
languages.

But as we go back in time, it becomes harder and harder to get
reliable data. Through evolution, some information is lost --- maybe
there once was an inflectional system that was lost in all daughter
languages, and reconstructing that is nigh impossible. And since no
reconstruction can be attested, we need a way to distinguish these
from attested forms of words. This is why attested words are simply
written like “this”, while reconstructed words are written with a
preceding star like “{{{recon(this)}}}”. Sometimes, to distinguish both from
the text, you will see the word of interest be written either in *bold*
or /italics/. This bears no difference in meaning.

** On Proto-Languages
As we go back in time, there is a point at which we have to stop: we
no longer find any related language to our current family, or we can’t
find enough evidence that one of them is part of the family and if
they are related, they are very distantly related. This language we
cannot go beyond is called a proto-language, and it is the mother
language of the current language family tree. In our case, the
Proto-Ñyqy language, spoken by the Ñyqy people, is the mother language
of the Ñyqy language family tree and the ancestor of the more widely
known Mojhal languages.

There is something I want to insist on very clearly: a proto-language
is not a “prototype” language as we might think at first --- it is not
an imperfect, inferior language that still needs some iterations
before becoming a full-fledged language. It has been proven multiple
times multiple times around the world, despite the best efforts of the
researchers of a certain empire, that all languages are equally
complex regardless of ethnicity, education, time, and place. Languages
that are often described as “primitive” are either called so as a way
to indicate they are ancient, and therefore close to a proto-language,
or they are described so by people trying to belittle people based on
incorrect belief that some ethnicities are somehow greater or better
than others. This as well has been proven multiple times that this is
not true. A proto-language bore as much complexity as any of the
languages currently spoken around the world, and a primitive language
in linguistic terms is a language close in time to these
proto-languages, such as the Proto-Mojhal language (which is also in
turn the proto-language of the Mojhal tree). The only reason these
languages might seem simpler is because we do not know them and cannot
know them in their entierty, so of course some features are missing
from it, but they were surely there.

Note that “Proto-Ñyqy” is the usual and most widely accepted spelling
of the name of the language and culture, but other spellings are
accepted such as “Proto Ñy Qy”, “Proto Ñy Ħy”, “Proto Ḿy Qy”, or
“Proto Ḿy Ħy”, each with their equivalent with one word only after the
“Proto” part. As we’ll see later in [[file:phonology.md#consonants][Phonology: Consonants]], the actual
pronunciation of consonants is extremely uncertain, and each one of
these orthographies are based on one of the possible pronunciations of
the term {{{recon(ñyqy)}}}. In this book, we’ll use the so called
“coronal-only” orthography, unless mentionned otherwise. Some people
also have the very bad habit of dubbing this language and culture as
simply “Ñyqy” (or one of its variants), but this is very wrong, as the
term “Ñyqy” designates the whole familiy of languages and cultures
that come from the Proto-Ñyqy people. The Tiltinian languages are as
much Tiltinian as they are Ñyqy languages, but that does not mean they
are the same as the Proto-Ñyqy language, even if they are relatively
close in terms of time. When speaking about something that is “Ñyqy”,
we are generally speaking about daughter languages and cultures and
not about the Proto-Ñyqy language and culture itself.

Note also we usually write this language with groups of morphemes,
such as a noun group, as one word like we do with {{{recon(ñyqy)}}}.
However, when needed we might separate the morphemes by a dash, such
as in {{{recon(ñy-qy)}}}.

** Reconstructing the Culture Associated to the Language
While the comparative method described in [[file:introduction.md#principles-of-historical-linguistics][Principles of Historical
Linguistics]] work on languages, we also have good reasons to believe
they also work of culture: if elements of different cultures that
share a language from the same family also share similar cultural
elements, we have good reasons to believe these elements were
inherited from an earlier stage of a common culture. This is an entire
field of research in its own right, of course, but linguistics also
come in handy when trying to figure out the culture of the Ñyqy
people: the presence of certain words can indicate the presence of
what they meant, while the impossibility of recreating a word at this
stage of the language might indicate it only appeared in later stages
of its evolution, and it only influenced parts of the decendents of
the culture and language. For instance, the lack of word for “honey”
in Proto-Ñyqy but the ability to reconstruct a separate word for both
the northern and southern branches strongly suggests both branches
discovered honey only after the Proto-Ñyqy language split up into
different languages, and its people in different groups, while the
easy reconstruction of {{{recon(mygú)}}} signifying /monkey/ strongly suggests
both branches knew about this animal well before these two groups
split up. More on their culture in [[file:culture-and-people.md][Culture and People]].