The Ancestral Vowel

Introduction

In contrast to its unusually rich consonant system, the Ancestral vowel system is the picture of simplicity. It consists of the five most common vowels /i e a o u/, pronounced (I believe) in more or less the Spanish manner.

The truly remarkable thing about the Ancestral vowel is lexical, not phonological. Each vowel expresses one aspect of a single natural and metaphorical semantic sphere, namely “to be, to evolve, to grow, to live, to progress”. The nearest equivalents in today’s languages are (to my knowledge) the “sing, sang, sung” pattern of Modern English (an 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, and the demonstrative system of the Uto-Aztecan language Shoshoni.

The base vowel of every Ancestral word will have one of these five realizations, each of which indicates the specific “growth state” (literal or metaphorical) of that word.

The five cardinal vowels can be combined into twenty-five transfixes (the combination of an affix and a suffix), each of which can be used, for example, as a wonderfully compact tense marker.

Phonetic Analysis

• [i] high, front, unrounded vowel
• [e] mid, front, unrounded vowel
• [a] low, central vowel
• [o] mid, back, rounded vowel
• [u] high, back, rounded vowel

Phonemic Analysis

• /i/ high, front vowel
• /e/ mid, front vowel
• /a/ low, central vowel
• /o/ mid, back vowel
• /u/ high, back vowel

One Vowel Semantics

• /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

Two Vowel Semantics

• /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 forseeable future
• /u_a/ the distant past > the present
• /u_o/ the distant past > the recent past
• /u_u/ the distant past > the distant past

Two Vowel Chart