Old Arquehite

Arkwéh Khel

### **THIS PAGE NEEDS A REWORK**

**Old Arquehite** (oarq. *Arkwéh Khel*) or **Common Tussanic** (from oarq. *tussân* "those who speak") was a language spoken by the Arquehites during the Awakening Era, after they had invaded Arqueh and expanded their influence throughout western Sorod, conquering and assimilating native tribes. It arose as a koiné language derived from a group of archaic dialects, which themselves had evolved from Proto-Tussanic, alongside the Bahlaci language, spoken further inland by the nomadic tribes of the Mashat Desert. It was established as a *lingua franca* of Arqueh thanks to the conquests of Sárkan I. and his descendants, as well as the development of primitive pictographic writing, in the Early Teinun Period (9th century ATA).

## Phonology

Old Arquehite was characterized by the **lack of phonemic voicing** (so any consonant could be voiceless or voiced) and a system of **lexical pitch accent**. Moreover, the earliest forms of Old Arquehite showed large dialectal variation when it came to the language's phonological system (due to its mixed origin), especially among the southeastern tribes - for example, the Proto-Tussanic phoneme /ɬ/ was completely absent from most varieties (notably, all Laitan dialects), but still widely used in others (eg. the Paari Dialect), even after the language's standarization.

### Consonants

The inventory of Common Tussanic consonants was made distinctive by a three-way contrast of tenuis, aspirated and ejective plosives, extensive labialization, a lack of any alveolar sibilants and inclusion of some rather unique phonemes.

### Vowels

The vocalic system of Old Arquehite was comprised of **four long vowels** and **two short vowels**, known also as **full** and **reduced**, as well as **three diphthongs**. Full vowels and diphthongs could carry high or low tone, while reduced vowels were always atonal.

 Mid
 Open
 Diphthong

### Pitch Accent

Old Arquehite inherited a system of **lexical pitch accent** from Proto-Tussanic in a much better condition than Bahlaci. It manifested most clearly in native words with full vowels or diphthongs, where one of them could be pronunced with higher pitch than the others, as in *laikw**é**h* [lajgʷé:h], while for words with reduced vowels only this distinction was not phonemic and distribution of pitch and its effects differed between dialects.

### Phonotactics

Common Tussanic syllable structure was rather strict, allowing no initial or final consonant clusters and highly limiting the number of available codas. It could be summarized as **(C)V(Q)**, where C = any consonant, V = any vowel or diphthong, Q = nasals and /h ʃ r l/. Additionally, most phonemes in clusters couldn't follow other consonants of the same manner, except geminated sonorants and fricatives, thus *phalma*, *kwíssu* and *wersâr* were valid words, but *\*iŋmu*, \**takpe* or \**kihsul* were not. Nasals assimilated to the following consonant's place of articulation, while the glottal stop manifested only between vowels.

### Allophony

There were numerous allophonic processes in Old Arquehite, the distribution of which differed between dialects. Common ones included frication of aspirated plosives, velarization of /l/ and /r/ in word-final positions and changes in voicing of consonants depending on the environment (eg. voiced intervocalically, voiceless elsewhere). Some phonemes also experienced free variation, such as /ʃ/ being realized as [s], [ɕ], or even [x], and /k' kʷ'/ as [q qʷ].

## Orthography

### Native Writing Systems

The first attested Old Arquehite texts were written using a rudimentary pictographic system consisiting of hundreds or thousands of different symbols, which were carved in stone or embossed on metal plates. Many of such pictographs were later assigned to commonly used classifiers and adapted as phonograms, representing syllables somewhat phonetically (eg. *masâtes* "nomad" written as <ma-ɬa-ts>) This system, employing 144 unique signs, was able to roughly transcribe all possible syllables, but many contrasting phonemes would have been represented the same way, thus making the writing system's usage rather ambiguous in some instances (eg. *kan* "warrior" and *kkúŋ* "bell" were both rendered as <kn>).

### Romanization

Most phoneme representations in the official romanization of Old Arquehite follow the conventions of the IPA, with minor changes for ease of typing and the language's aesthetic. For consonants, these changes include: /ʃ/ and /j/ written as
 and <y>; aspirated plosives and ejectives marked by <h> and a doubled letter (eg. /t'/ <tt>, /pʰ/ <ph>); glottal stop left unwritten or as <'> when necessary; labiovelars marked by <w> following the base letter. Romanization of vowels, meanwhile, makes use of four letters with certain diacritics added - thus, /i: e: o: ɑ: ei ai au/ are represented as <i ê u â ei ai au> when low-pitched, and as <í é ú á eí aí aú> when high-pitched, while /ə a/ are always written as <e a>.

## Morphology

The main word classes in Old Arquehite were: nouns, pronouns, classifiers, determiners (including numerals and quantifiers), adverbs and verbs. Adjectives did not contribute a distinct part of speech, their meaning being expressed by verbs instead. Common Tussanic made frequent and heavy use of noun-incorporation, compounding, reduplication and repeated derivation through affixes or changes in pitch.