Taqva-miir

Taqva-miir is a conlang created by Biblaridion to demonstrate a process for his Conlang Case Study series.

## Real World Context

To boost video production, he thought about demonstrating his process of creating natlangs for conworld. His goals for this are naturalism, a usage of auxiliaries similar to Basque, a vowel-harmony system, and non-concatenative morphology.

## Sound Changes from the Protolang

1. Alveolars and velar stops palatalize before front vowels and [j].
2. [i] and [u] become [e] and [o] following back consonants.
3. Vowels are lost between voiceless obstruents.
4. [k] becomes [q] when preceding the voiceless pharyngeal fricative.
5. [ɢ] and [g] merge with [ɣ].
6. The glottal consonants and the voiced velar and pharyngeal fricatives are lost, lengthening the sound they came after.
7. Weak consonants are lost between vowels, leading to several diphthongs.
8. The remaining velar and pharyngeal fricatives weaken to [h], which fortifies to [x] in coda position.
9. [h] is lost following obstruents, lengthening them.
10. [i] and [u] become [j] and [w] when bordering another vowel.
11. The diphthongs [oe], [eo], [uo], [eu], [io], and [oi] all become [ø].
13. The diphthongs [iu] and [ui] become [y].
14. [u] shifts to [y] following palatals.
15. The alveolars and [k] become their corresponding palatals before front vowels.
16. Two stops clustering causes the second stop to geminate.
17. Vowels are lost between voiceless obstruents and sonorants/resonants.
18. [ɲ] and [ʎ] merge with [n] and [l] respectively in clusters that don't involve other palatals.
19. Nasal assimilation arises before stops.
20. [ʎ] merges with [j].
21. The palatal stops become [j] between vowels and at the end of words.
22. The palatal occlusives and obstruents merge with the alveolar ones.
23. Nasals become geminated by preceding stops.
24. The front vowels in stressed syllables raise the previous vowel.
25. Metathesis occurs for the obstruents.
26. Another round of metathesis occurs for stops and liquids.
27. Diphthongs become long monophthongs before codas.
28. Clusters that begin and end words are broken up, [a] and [e] being the epenthetic vowels.
29. [y], [ø], [i], and [e] become [u], [o], [ɨ], and [a] before [q].
30. Unstressed rounded vowels lose their rounding.
31. Stressed low rounded vowels cause following low vowels to round, spreading the trait in both directions, though the high vowels block the emerging harmony.
32. [u] becomes [ɨ].
33. [e] becomes the schwa in unstressed syllables, and [i] in stressed ones.
34. [ɨ] merges with the schwa.
35. Short vowels are lost at the end of words while long vowels in the same type of area are shortened. Word-final clusters are still non-existent.
36. Sound change 23 reoccurs.
37. [s] shifts to [z] between voiced segments.
38. [z] merges with [r].
39. The remaining voiced stops become their corresponding fricatives between vowels.
40. [w] becomes [v] when following an obstruent.
41. Liquids dissimilate, except in stressed syllables: rV(C)r > rV(C)l

## Phonology and Phonotactics

The consonant inventory...

The vowel system utilizes vowel harmony based on rounding.

The rounding harmony, though, is limited to the mid and low vowels on this table, with all high vowels blocking it. The schwa is split between the two high and low sets. There's also long and short variance of each. The vowel inventory could likely have been improved.

(Could this table be simplified?)

 **Rounded** | a

The syllable structure is CVC, where the only clusters allowed are the following:

* obstruent + resonant
* resonant + obstruent
* fricative + voiceless stop

Stress would be the same as Latin and Nekāchti, being on the antepenult by default, but falling on the penult if it contains a long vowel or is closed. Deviations would be marked with an acute or a double acute(for the vowels marked with a diaeresis).

## Grammar Changes from the Protolang

1. Reflexives evolve.
2. Applicatives evolve, this occurring before the alveolars and velar stops are palatalized.
3. Subject pronouns become prefixes, this occurring after the high vowels become the mid-ones following pharyngeals and uvulars.
4. Classifiers become suffixes.
5. Case markers become suffixes.
6. Converbs evolve, this happening before the vowels are lost between voiceless obstruents.
7. After the vowel loss between sonorants and obstruents, the dual and singulative evolve.

## Grammar

Consonant gradation is utilized alongside umlauts and infixes for non-concatenative morphology.

The language uses a singular, dual, and plural distinction that also utilizes an inverse number marker.

Inverse marker: ???

Case marking would exist in a way that "I am eating an apple." would be I-NOM 1sg-COP.IMPFV apple-ACC eat-IMPFV, while "An apple is being eaten by me." would be Apple-NOM 3sg-COP.IMPFV me-OBL PASS-eat-IMPFV.

It can mix with the grammatical number system.

Lexical verbs are intended to end in participles, with auxilaries including the tense/aspect/mood information to define them. During the transition from the protolang to the modern version, the copula mixed with the infinitive participle was used for the continuous aspect, another for the perfect, and another for the future. Two converbs exist for the perfective and imperfective. They would be involved in the overriding of the protolang's tense system with a new one. At least those are the original plans.

In later points, a new system would be settled upon, with the aspects having evolved from converbs forged via the case suffixes.

Valency would be complex.

Principal Parts:

1st. \*stem\*-

2nd.

3rd.

Mediopassive: detransitive + Dative
Antipassive: detransitive + Genitive

 **Plural/Formal** | qAS-
 **Polite** | tUm-
 **Passive** | hA(t)-

Stems can be either long or short. Also, modal suffixes exist.

So do evidential suffixes.

Relative clauses are a thing, as Taqva-miir allows for some subjects and objects to be relativized.

Possession in Taqva-miir mimics the system native to Ainu.