Proto-Isle

Because Proto-Isle isn’t fully understood by the Realm, this section is written objectively.

Proto-Isle is the common ancestor of the Isle’s many languages today. Proto-Isle is most useful to our lore concerns as a source of many of of the common patterns and elements that can be found spread across the contemporary Isle languages.

Phonology

Proto-Realm had a robust consonantal phonology which has mostly been reduced over time in its descendants; some families are more conservative than others in this regard. One major point of distinction was in the stop series, which had four major variations per point of articulation: plain («p»), voiceless aspirated («ph»), voiced («b»), and voiced aspirated («bh»). Proto-Isle also distinguished five major points of articulation: labial, dento-alveolar, retroflex, palatal, and velar. Proto-Realm also featured a phonemic glottal stop (’) and two rhotics, a dental and a retroflex.

For vowels, Proto-Isle had a straightforward and typical five-vowel inventory. The complexity of Proto-Isle’s vocal phonology is mostly related to tone and length distinctions. Proto-Isle had several phonetic tones, much like Chinese. It also featured a long/short distinction.

Proto-Isle syllables tended to be relatively simple constructions. The most complicated structures are (C)V((C)C) syllables, in which the first consonant of the coda must be a liquid.

Morphology

Proto-Isle was mostly isolating, with complicated syntactical rules governing the placement of words relative to one another. An extensive system of argument-function clitics theoretically allowed for great word order variation, but most Proto-Isle tended to SOV or SVO orders.

Writing

Proto-Isle was not a written language. Some truly ancient divinities and old heavenly archives have depictions of Proto-Isle written using the Old Realm script; these writings are inconsistent, each transcriber seemingly developing their own system to represent the Proto-Isle sound. In the end, it was a spoken language, and no real record of it remains.

Future linguists in Creation may eventually reconstruct it similarly to how contemporary real-world linguists have reconstructed Proto-Indo-European.