Linguistic and orthographic development
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A summary of the in-setting history of Proto-Archipelagic's development and the history of its writing system
This public article was written by [Deactivated User], and last updated on 5 Apr 2021, 00:10.
[comments] prarc This language is an artlang, making up part of a larger creative project.
Linguistic Development
Proto-Archipelagic is the earliest confidently reconstructable language within its family, arising from a creole with multiple inputs. The speakers of Archipelagic languages are descendants of slaves, displaced from their homeland and transported to an isolated archipelago, where they were left when the colony failed to turn a profit.
It is believed the input languages to the pidgin that arose were all part of the same language family, but they cannot be reconstructed. Tribal groups were deliberately broken up and scattered to minimize the organizational capacity of the enslaved people. This resulted in the extinction of the parent languages within a short period of time. While historical linguistics studies have theorized that there may be an uneven distribution of parent language contribution to the pidgin with certain closely-related languages predominating, it is impossible to say for certain.
Proto-Archipelagic developed into a full creole approximately contemporaneously with the departure of the slavers, leaving their former slaves stranded. Patterns of defacement of extremely early texts indicates that words and concepts possibly imported from the slavers' language were deliberately excised according to taboo. Comparison to surviving documents of the (now extinct) slavers' language indicates that Proto-Archipelagic retained a few words that were phonologically similar enough to an input language to escape notice.
Writing System
(Note- illustrations forthcoming)
Carved pictographic and logographic texts uncovered from the early Archipelagic period indicate that at least some speakers of Proto-Archipelagic had an understanding of writing technology which predated their enslavement. However, the graphs employed in these texts have many synonyms and are largely unrelated to those recovered from the ancestral homeland of the people, indicating that while they retained general knowledge of the concept, they were forbidden from writing during their enslavement.
Proto-Archipelagic glyphs were mostly carved left to right. When rebus writing is employed, the phonologic component is presented in a reduced form attached to a semantic determiner. These rebus phonograms contribute to the reconstruction of the language's phonology, providing clues to the pronunciation of at least the first syllable of many words.
Basic Grammar
These texts provide major supporting evidence for the grammatical forms of Proto-Archipelagic, including its systems of word order, case, and tense. The standard word order is SOV with dependent clauses rendered as OVS, though the language's case marking system permits relatively free word order. In fact, religious convention rendered written sentences where the subject is a god, spirit, or ancestor in OSV, due to a directional aspect of the glyphs. It is unclear whether this was strictly mirrored in the spoken language.
Six cases and four tenses are identifiable in written Proto-Archipelagic: Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Instrumental, Dative, and Vocative, and Distant Past, Recent Past, Present, and Future. While the early creole was highly analytic and its core helper words can be partially reconstructed, each case-marking postposition and tense-marking auxiliary verb quickly fused to create an inflected form, indicating that some substrate language communities may have survived and exerted grammatical influence on the creole, and most early descendants of Proto-Archipelagic are believed to be quite synthetic. The existence of other unmarked or syncretic cases is still debated. While there are reconstructed phonological forms for various suffixes that derive parts of speech from others, these derivations go unmarked in Proto-Archipelagic outside of scattered use of rebus writing to encode entire words.
When people, gods, spirits, ancestors, or certain animals are case-marked, they are sometimes rendered in pictogram with a modified form performing their role. For all other uses, reduced glyphs are appended to the entire noun phrase to indicate case, generally following the following forms:
Nominative: unmarked
Accusative: A circle or triangle, or placed in a cartouche topped with the same. These shapes are also used independently to indicate a generic object of a transitive verb, ex. "He cut something"
Genitive: A hand holding a generic object
Instrumental: A hand holding a stone tool
Dative: A pair of open hands, usually flanking the glyph
Vocative: eyes flanking or surrounding the glyph on three sides, either singly or in pairs. Which side does not receive eyes is not consistent, though whether this has semantic meaning is debated.
Tenses most consistently employ fire as a metaphor for relative time of action: ash for Distant Past, smoke for Recent Past, fire for Present, and firewood for Future. Aspect and Voice marking seems to be achieved with auxiliary verbs: perfective is marked with "to come", passive voice is marked with "to take". Imperative mood is indicated via a zig-zagging line on one to four sides of the verb glyph.
Personal pronouns are often rendered via genericized heads, adorned as appropriate for their social role. Five genders are recognized across Archipelagic cultures on a scale of most to least feminine, usually associated with phases of the moon. The precise marking for each gender varies, either with an appropriate moon phase on the cheek, or by a rendering of the body paint they would have worn when available. These moon symbols or paint designs act as further written shorthands for pronouns.
Person and case marking are partial and optional on verbs, with a nominative prefix and accusative suffix. These are rendered in text with shorthand pronouns attached to the verb glyph. This is one of the strongest indications of at least one formerly SVO parent language incorporated into Proto-Archipelagic, but it is unclear by how long this SVO word order predates Proto-Archipelagic.
Author's Note: More to come
The process of constructing Proto-Archipelagic and its writing system is ongoing. The logography is presently being constructed in Clip Studio Paint and FontCreator, with 80 semantic glyphs created thus far and assigned to custom ligatures, and grammatical/phonologic reduced forms are also in production. While the full visual flexibility of the writing system may not be possible to implement, the font should eventually be uploaded. The daughter languages of Proto-Archipelagic are also being charted out. In the meantime, tsa'iwis pakap topa'atsang! ✎ Edit Article ✖ Delete Article
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