Introduction
In contrast to its unusually rich consonant system, the Ancestral vowel system was the picture of simplicity. It consisted of the five most common vowels /i e a o u/, pronounced (I believe) in more or less the Spanish manner.
The only remarkable thing about the Ancestral vowel was lexical, not phonological. Each of these five cardinal vowels expressed one aspect of a single semantic sphere, namely the natural and metaphorical meanings of the verb “to live” e.g. “to be, to change, to grow, to progress”. To my knowledge, the nearest equivalents in today’s languages are the “sing, sang, sung” pattern of Modern English (a beautiful artefact of the Proto-Indo-European ablaut system), the vocalic transfix of the typical Semitic triliteral root, the sound-symbolic vowel hierarchies of the Tai language Zhuang, the onomatopoeic vocabulary of Japanese, the demonstrative system of the Uto-Aztecan language Shoshoni, and the semantic clines of the Tierra del Fuegan language Yagán.
The base vowel of every Ancestral word had one of these five realizations, each of which indicated the specific “state” (literal or metaphorical) of that word.
The Phonology of the Ancestral Vowel
- */i/ high, front, unrounded vowel
- */e/ mid, front, unrounded vowel
- */a/ low, central vowel
- */o/ mid, back, rounded vowel
- */u/] high, back, rounded vowel
The Semantics of the Ancestral Vowel
- */i/ the unforeseeable future, far ahead, the dreamtime, the mythological future
- */e/ the foreseeable future, ahead, young, growing, waxing, living
- */a/ the present, here, now, peaking, mature, climax
- */o/ the remembered past, behind, old, fading, waning, dying
- */u/ the unremembered past, far behind, the dreamtime, the mythological past
These five cardinal vowels could be combined into twenty-five transfixes (the combination of an infix and a suffix), each of which could be used, for example, as a beautifully compact tense marker.
The Semantics of the Ancestral Vocalic Transfix
- */i_i/ the distant future > the distant future
- */i_e/ the distant future > the foreseeable future
- */i_a/ the distant future > the present
- */i_o/ the distant future > the remembered past
- */i_u/ the distant future > the distant past
- */e_i/ the foreseeable future > the distant future
- */e_e/ the foreseeable future > the foreseeable future
- */e_a/ the foreseeable future > the present
- */e_o/ the foreseeable future > the remembered past
- */e_u/ the foreseeable future > the distant past
- */a_i/ the present > the distant future
- */a_e/ the present> the foreseeable future
- */a_a/ the present > the present
- */a_o/ the present > the remembered past
- */a_u/ the present > the distant past
- */o_i/ the recent past > the distant future
- */o_e/ the recent past > the foreseeable future
- */o_a/ the recent past > the present
- */o_o/ the recent past > the recent past
- */o_u/ the recent past > the distant past
- */u_i/ the distant past > the distant future
- */u_e/ the distant past > the foreseeable future
- */u_a/ the distant past > the present
- */u_o/ the distant past > the recent past
- */u_u/ the distant past > the distant past
