Borrowings from Old Rhanakya to Old Zaginai: view article

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Borrowings from Old Rhanakya to Old Zaginai

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General statements about how Old Rhanakya words were borrowed into Old Zaginai

This public article was written by [Deactivated User], and last updated on 22 Jun 2018, 01:16.

[comments] zgnzgmrhnhistoryloanwordloanwordsgrammarphoneticsphonologyvocabulary Zalintang Family (2 articles)

1. Borrowings from Old Rhanakya to Old Zaginai

2. Pre-Proto-Zalintang Particles/Nominal Structure

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It is fairly well-known that a few decades after the Akali Republic fell, Rhana (the northernmost region of the Céakali) was invaded by Pasan armies, as a sort of crusade in the name of spreading the Emisian religion. The brutal violence inflicted by the invading Pasans (particularly against Tesán, which are regarded as abominations and systematically killed at birth in regions which follow the Emisian religion) produced a huge flood of refugees. Small numbers fled to Pashko (mostly grassland, to the south and east of the Akate) and to the Akate itself, but the majority of those who escaped ended up in the Lintang. Some communities there still speak a dialect of

Rhanakya, but most ended up speaking

Zaginai, and they had a significant effect on the Zaginai language. This effect shows up in three notable ways: grammar, phonetics, and vocabulary. Here we will touch on the first, but most effort will be devoted to the second two and the interactions between them.
The most notable effect of Old Rhanakya on Zaginai grammar is the use of case-marking. Old Zaginai had three cases, Ergative Absolutive and Oblique (the same as modern

Zagimaal), but speakers of Old Rhanakya often used the Ergative and Absolutive cases like the Agentive and Patientive cases which appear in Rhanakya; this usage spread, and is standard in Modern Zaginai. The other grammatical change is the resurgence of evidentials. Old Zaginai still had evidentials, but they were rarely used; speakers of Old Rhanakya used them extensively and have even borrowed in or helped innovate new ones. As such, Modern Zaginai has several evidentials which it uses extensively, whereas Modern Zagimaal has totally lost its evidentials except in a few ossified phrases.
While the grammatical influence of Old Rhanakya on Zaginai should not be overlooked, it is not nearly as impressive as the phonological influence. Old Zaginai had phonemes which looked much more similar to Zagimaal (and indeed, almost identical to Proto-Ginan), with no voicing distinction in its fricatives, and a three-way aspirate-plain-voiced contrast in its stops. To some degree, the changes that came after may have already been coming about; but the Rhanakya speakers often used unvoiced fricatives rather than aspirates and voiced fricatives rather than voiced stops. Originally they may have been partially distinct loanword-phonemes (as we will discuss later), but eventually this became total, leaving Modern Zaginai with no contrasts in the phonation of its stops.
To properly consider how words were borrowed from Old Rhanakya to Old Zaginai, we need to understand the phonetics of both languages. Phoneme charts are below.

Old Rhanakya

	Labial Plain	Labial Palatal	Dental Plain	Dental Palatal	Alveolar Plain	Alveolar Palatal	Retroflex Plain	Retroflex Palatal	Velar Labial	Velar Plain	Uvular Labial	Uvular Plain	Glottal
Stop	p	pʲ			t	tʲ			kʷ	k	qʷ	q	c
Ejective	p'	pʲ'			t'	tʲ'			kʷ'	k'	qʷ'	q'
Unvoiced Fricative	f	fʲ	þ	þʲ	s	sʲ	ʂ	ʂʲ	xʷ	x	χʷ	χ
Voiced Fricative	v	vʲ	ð	ðʲ					ɣʷ	ɣ
Nasal	m	mʲ			n	nʲ			ŋʷ	ŋ
Voiced Approximant					l	lʲ	r	rʲ	w	ɰ
Unoiced Approximant					lh	lhʲ	rh	rhʲ

	Front		Back
	Short	Long	Short	Long
High	i	i:	u	u:
Low	e	e:	a	a:
Diphthong	ai		au

Old Zaginai

	Labial	Coronal	Dorsal	Glottal
Aspirate	pʰ	tʰ	kʰ
Unvoiced Stop	p	t	k	c
Voiced Stop	b	d	g
Pseudoaffricate	ps	ts	ks
Fricative		s
Voiced Trill		r	R
Unvoiced Trill		rh	Rh
Voiced Lateral		l
Unvoiced Lateral		lh

	Front		Back
	Short	Long	Short	Long
High	i	i:	u	u:
Low			a	a:
Diphthong	ai		au

The sheer difference in the number of consonant phonemes should be immediately apparent. Old Rhanakya had 51 consonants; Old Zaginai had only 20. This leaves a large number of consonants that need to be approximated.
Beyond the obvious consonants (/p/ was borrowed as /p/, etc), we have several categories that need to be considered. Firstly, Rhanakya's coarticulations; these are simply ignored, and thus /p/ and /pʲ/ are both borrowed as /p/, and /k/ and /kʷ/ were both borrowed as /k/. Secondly, ejectives; these were borrowed as aspirates. Thirdly, uvulars; these were borrowed as velars. /e/ and /e:/ were borrowed as /i/ and /i:/. Then /w/ and /ɰ/; these were inconsistent. They were sometimes borrowed as /R/, sometimes /ɣ/, and sometimes /u/.
In that last statement, it may have been noticed that the target phoneme in Old Zaginai was sometimes /ɣ/, which is odd, because /ɣ/ was not a phoneme in Zaginai. The truth is that /ɣ/ was borrowed into Zaginai, both from Rhanakya and Akalix; indeed, /f/ /v/ /þ/ /ð/ /x/ /ɣ/ /ŋ/ all existed as somewhat marginal phonemes, making the above table not technically complete. /ŋ/ has remained as a simple borrowed phoneme, but the other six are somewhat complicated. It was the case that /pʰ/ /b/ /tʰ/ /d/ /kʰ/ /g/ had free-variation allophones [f] [v] [þ] [ð] [x] [ɣ], while /f/ /v/ /þ/ /ð/ /x/ /ɣ/ had no allophones; as such, [b] was always from /b/, but [v] could be from /b/ or /v/. This was put into the orthography (and was written about at the time), but they have merged to simply be fricatives (with stop allophones) in the modern language.
From this, we now know that Rhanakya fricatives were borrowed as fricatives (with the uvular being borrowed as a velar and the retroflex as an alveolar), and the velar nasal was borrowed as a velar nasal.

Approximately 1/4 of Modern Zaginai vocabulary comes from Rhanakya. This vocabulary exists in a variety of registers, without one underlying theme. It is generally fully integrated into Zaginai morphology; being that both languages are Zalintang languages, their morphological patterns were similar enough that simply using the Zaginai suffixes rather than the Rhanakya suffixes was standard. As such, a word like /k'aina/ became /kʰainu/ (became, in the modern language, /xainu/), swapping the Rhanakya -a for the Zaginai -u.

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