Simātsan

Simatsan is a tutorial conlang spoken by a people living on an isolated tropical island.

## Phonology

Vowels
 **Mid** | e, eː(ē)
 **Low** |  | a, aː(ā)

## Phonotactics

The language is (C)V at first, but would then become (C)V(C), with any consonant ending a word, but only fricatives, affricates, and nasals can end syllables. Stress would still be on the antepenult by default, though the penult would be stressed if it was closed, and the final one would be stressed if it contains a long vowel and is closed.

## Sound changes

Originally, [h] is part of the phonological inventory, and [ʃ], [tʃ], [b], [d], and [g] were absent. But upon the transition from the proto-lang to the modern version, the following changes happen:

1. Vowels would be lost between unvoiced obstruents in unstressed syllables, resulting in consonant clusters, with only obstruents serving as codas.
2. [h] would be lost between vowels creating diphthongs like [ai] that would become [ay], [au] that would become [aw] and so forth.
3. The diphthong formation.
4. The voiceless stops would become voiced stops between vowels, resulting in [b], [d], and [g] getting in the phonology as allophones.
5. The clusters of voiceless stops would lead to the first in the pair being lost, leading to not only voiceless stops being in between vowels once more, but also the lengthening of the preceding vowel, and the voiced stops qualifying as distinct phonemes due to overlapping of sound distributions.
6. [h] would be lost in the remaining environments, leading to the lengthening of the preceding sound.
7. Vowels would also be lost between nasals and obstruents, leading to nasal assimilation, like [m] becoming [n] before alveolar obstruents, and [n] becoming [m] before labial obstruents and [ŋ] before velar sounds. [ŋ] would only be an allophone of [n].
8. The nasal assimilation.
9. Some consonants would become palatalized before the front vowels [i] and [e], leading to [k], [t], and [ts] becoming [ʃ] and [tʃ] before [j]. The [j] would be deleted, leading to the newly-emerged palatal consonants becoming phonemic.
10. Word-final short vowels, the shortening of word-final long vowels, and the simplification of word-final diphthongs like [aj] and [aw] becoming long vowels like [aː]. This would only occur except after consonant clusters, with word-final clusters non-existent. This would also alter the stress system.
11. Word-final stops are lost.

## Grammar

In the seventh video on Biblaridion's tutorial, the following cases were shown. There is not any declensions of any kind.

 Accusative
 Locative
 Ablative
 Genitive

The accusative evolved from "ua"(to go), the locative from "ko"(to sit), the ablative from "te"(from), and the genitive from "rano"(of, related to). The possessive pronoun would also be a prefix signifying agreement with the possessor.

The grammatical numbers would be different from the protolang, with the plural form evolving to a prefix and a dual prefix evolving from the word for "two".

Number
 Dual
 Plural

The words for "one" and "this", /ke/ and /no/, would start to serve double duty, becoming the indefinite and definite articles respectively.

Augmentatives and diminutives would exist, evolving from the words "mā"(big) and "tsi"(little) becoming prefixes, with "tsi" becoming "ch". The cultural metaphors would also be a factor, with the word for thornbush being used to signify annoyances for nuisances, with the augmentative applied to indicate a serious hardship.

At first, the tense and aspect forms would suffix, with the occurring sound changes leading to a verb paradigm. This, and a change of meanings, would lead to a system of just past(-ā), present(drop final vowel), and future(lengthen final vowel) system.

The word "tihi"(to stand) would become a copula, leading to the reemergence of a perfective and imperfective aspect. The present imperfective would become a habitual tense, the past perfective would become the perfect tense, and the future imperfective would be ditched, leading to another lack of aspectual distinctions, and full-on morphological tenses. The passive and causative would become suffixes.

(The word "kotsa"(to know, which could also mean "to be able to" or "can") would become a suffixes, leading to the emergence of an abilitative mood, "iti"(to need) could become an obligative suffix. Or so it would seem, though they'd only be for demonstration purposes and not occur in the sample language.)

The pronouns would become prefixes.

 1st person
 2nd person
 3rd person

Irregularies in verbs would occur with the loss of word-final stops, leading to vowel lengthening in the perfect and habitual tenses and a voiced stop in the past and future ones.

One thing to note, with the old word for "place", /kihu/, losing meaning and only appearing as a suffix for a place where verbs occur, the old word for "grove", /kuhāni/, which is now /kwān/, would become the new word for place.

The overall changes in the grammar would lead to the language being fusional.

## Grammar Changes

1. The tense auxiliaries fuse to the verb stems.
2. The copula becomes a suffix. (These two events would occur before the first sound change.)
3. The passive and causative become suffixes. (This occurring after the third sound change, but before the fourth one.)
4. The pronouns fuse to form person-agreement and the possession prefixes. (This occurring between sound changes 5 and 6.)
5. The postpositions evolve into case suffixes. (This occurring between sound changes 7 and 8.)

## Writing System

The eighth video on Biblaridion's tutorial would tell its viewers that some natural languages would go their entire lives without writing systems, so not all naturalistic conlangs for worldbuilding projects would have to have those. But if the viewers DOES decide to give their naturalistic language a writing system, then there would certain steps. For the sample language, the writing system would begin as a logography, with the speakers carving the glyphs into trees using flint or obsidian knives, resulting in the writing direction being from top-to-bottom.

Later on, the speakers could write the glyphs on palm leaves, the vein structure altering the style of the glyphs by making them more curvilinear. From there, the logographs would start to represent certain sounds, leading to the creation of a rebus principle, where the final glyph in a word hints at it's meaning, and how the word sounds are based on the preceding glyphs based on what the reader is inferring. Sometime later, the reader would use certain logographs to refer to certain sounds they make that are consonant-vowel pairs, or independent vowels. This and the rebus principle would later lead to the beginning of a syllabary. All of this would happen before the first sound change.

The moment the vowels are lost between voiceless stops, the readers would ignore the sound change, leading to historical spelling. Though later on, with the sound changes where [h] and the voiceless plosives are lost in coda position, and [h] is later lost in all environments, the symbols representing their syllable characters would be ditched. And with voiceless stops having become voiced, some glyphs would be modified with a diacritic on the right side of the voiceless glyphs to symbolize the syllable characters for the voiced stops. This would mark the first spelling reform. Another one would take place in which, as a result of the vowel loss, the glyphs for the syllables ending with [a] would get another diacritic on the left side to show that the consonant is not followed by a single vowel. The glyphs for the [h] syllables are kept to signify lengthening of the preceding vowel or consonant. The glyphs for the palatalized versions of existing sounds would not get their own glyphs, and only be represented by other ones.

Punctuation would exist. In the protoscript, upon the transition to a syllabary, words would be separated by spaces. A dot would be used to mark breaks, being the equivalent to the comma in modern Latin written languages. Two dots would emphasize a longer break, as in the end of sentences, leading to the equivalent to a period. The two dots, due to switching to palm leaves as the medium, would be written with a single stroke.

## Lexicon

### Nouns

tsul: liquid

rakkāsāl: foreigner, stranger

rakkachu: foreign land, unknown region

nāka: stuff

enhlunāk: life, vitality

enhluhles: creature, living thing

tsulnāk: water

tsules: drop, droplet

tsan: tongue(non-anotomical)