An Introduction To The Ancestral Consonant

At first glance, the Ancestral consonant system seems breathtakingly complex, with an unheard of number of complex consonants. Indeed, I have come to believe that the consonant system of pre-Ancestral (the original form of Ancestral) was an “open” system whose purpose (subject only to the limits of the human vocal system) was to symbolize in sound every meaningful aspect of the Ancestral world.

Appearances can be deceiving, and I gradually realized that the Ancestral consonant system was in reality far less complicated than I first thought. By the time Ancestral became a written language, its speakers had organized their consonants into ten distinct forms of articulation and ten distinct flows of articulation, tied together by that unique sound (or, more properly, absence of sound) we know as the glottal stop.

Each of these twenty forms and flows could expressed as a simple consonant with two realizations, yielding a rather large yet still quite manageable simple consonant inventory of forty consonants. Viewed this way, both the consonant and the vowel systems of Ancestral are no more complicated, for example, than those of Proto-Mayan.

Each of these twenty forms and flows could, in turn, be combined with any other (including itself) to create a complex consonant inventory of four hundred complex consonants and a complete consonant inventory of four hundred and forty simple and complex consonants.

Please note that I use the terms “form of articulation” and “flow of articulation” rather than the expected “place of articulation” and “manner of articulation” to emphasize the fact that the Ancestral alphabet, although in many ways similar to our modern International Phonetic Alphabet, had its own internal logic and reason for being. Its goal was to elegantly express the sounds of one language rather than ten thousand.

Of course, I have no way of knowing precisely how these Ancestral sounds were pronounced. My evidence is limited to the native name of each consonant and its development in Ancestral’s daughter languages.

The Ancestral Forms Of Articulation

My tentative reconstruction of Ancestral’s forms of articulation is as follows:

• ba “b, a voiced labial consonant, lip”
• pa “p, a voiceless labial consonant”
• da “d, a voiced dental consonant, tooth”
• ta “t, a voiceless dental consonant”
• ja “j, a voiced retroflex consonant, hard palate”
• ca “c, a voiceless retroflex consonant”
• ga “g, a voiced velar consonant, soft palate”
• ka “k, a voiceless velar consonant”
• va “v, a voiced uvular consonant, uvula”
• qa “q, a voiceless uvular consonant”

It is not clear to me if the only contrast between ba and pa, for example, was one of voice; in fact, the evidence suggests there was also a meaningful difference in form.

The Ancestral Flows of Articulation

My tentative reconstruction of Ancestral’s flows of articulation is as follows:

• wa “w, a w-like consonant”
• fa “f, an f-like consonant”
• ra “r, an r-like consonant”
• sa “s, an s-like consonant”
• la “l, an l-like consonant”
• za “z, a click-like consonant”
• ya “y, a y-like consonant”
• xa “x, a sh-like consonant”
• na “n, an n-like consonant”
• ha “h, an h-like consonant”

I am even less certain of the pronunciation of the flows of articulation. The Ancestral names of these sounds suggest that each had a “wind-like” quality. What does seem clear is that, unlike the International Phonetic Alphabet, Ancestral placed those classes of sounds we term nasals, fricatives, and approximants into a single group halfway between stops and vowels.

The Romanization of Ancestral

The speakers of Ancestral created two distinct writing systems, one pictographic and the other alphabetic. The former was used for “artistic” purposes (including the telling of stories), and the latter was used for “practical” purposes (including the teaching of children).

In creating an Ancestral romanization system, my goals were threefold. First, I wished to make good use of as many standard English letters as I could. Second, in my choice of these letters, I wished to suggest the approximate pronunciation of each sound wherever possible. Third, I wanted to capture the representational nature of the Ancestral alphabet, which beautifully expresses the form and flow of each consonant.

After a fair bit of trial and error, it dawned on me that, after mapping the five English vowel letters to the five Ancestral vowels, I could use ten of the remaining twenty-one letters to represent the places of articulation and ten more to represent the manners of articulation. It was then a simple matter to combine these two sets of letters into four-hundred pairs (or digraphs), each of which represents one of Ancestral’s four-hundred complex consonants.

I’m quite pleased with the result. The odd man out in my scheme is the letter “m”, which I suppose I could have used to represent the glottal stop (at the cost of considerable confusion). Instead I chose to use the “+” symbol because of its resemblance to the actual Ancestral symbol.

The Ancestral Romanized Consonant Chart

The Ancestral Romanized Consonant Chart

The Phonemicization of Ancestral

Whatever the situation in pre-Ancestral, at the time Ancestral was first recorded in writing its complex consonants were treated as single phonemes rather than consonant clusters. I am in the process of reconstructing the approximate phonetic values of these phonemes, so the attached chart should be considered very tentative and subject to major revisions.

The Ancestral Phonemic Consonant Chart

The Ancestral Phonemic Consonant Chart

An Introduction To The Ancestral Vowel

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 Phonology Of The Ancestral Vowel

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

The Semantics Of The Ancestral Simple Vowel

The only remarkable thing about the Ancestral vowel was lexical, not phonological. Each of its 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.

Every Ancestral word had at least one of these five simple infixes, the quality of which indicated the specific “state” (literal or metaphorical) of that word.

• *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”

The Semantics of the Ancestral Complex Vowel

These five cardinal vowels could be combined into twenty-five complex infixes, each of which could serve, for example, as a beautifully compact tense-aspect marker.

• *ii “the distant future to the distant future”
• *ie “the distant future to the foreseeable future”
• *ia “the distant future to the present”
• *io “the distant future to the remembered past”
• *iu “the distant future to the distant past”
• *ei “the foreseeable future to the distant future”
• *ee “the foreseeable future to the foreseeable future”
• *ea “the foreseeable future to the present”
• *eo “the foreseeable future to the remembered past”
• *eu “the foreseeable future to the distant past”
• *ai “the present to the distant future”
• *ae “the present to the foreseeable future”
• *aa “the present to the present”
• *ao “the present to the remembered past”
• *au “the present to the distant past”
• *oi “the recent past to the distant future”
• *oe “the recent past to the foreseeable future”
• *oa “the recent past to the present”
• *oo “the recent past to the recent past”
• *ou “the recent past to the distant past”
• *ui “the distant past to the distant future”
• *ue “the distant past to the foreseeable future”
• *ua “the distant past to the present”
• *uo “the distant past to the recent past”
• *uu “the distant past to the distant past”

The Ancestral Indefinite Vowel

In addition to the five cardinal vowels, Ancestral had an indefinite vowel, expressed phonemically as schwa. Semantically, this vowel indicated the “state” of the referent was unknown or irrelevant. The schwa served as the “center” of the Ancestral vowel system, just as the glottal stop served as the center of its consonant system.

Vowel Harmony In Ancestral

As a peculiar result of its unique ablaut system, every Ancestral word could only contain one simple or complex vowel. For example, suvu and mautau were valid Ancestral words, but ksavi could only be a compound of the words ksa and vi. I term this phenomenon extreme vowel harmony.

An Introduction To The Ancestral Syllable

The Ancestral syllable was the building block of the Ancestral word. Because Ancestral did not permit closed syllables (consonants in syllable-final position) or consonant clusters (a string of two or more complex consonants), the phonotactics (the permissible sound patterns) of Ancestral were straightforward. Each Ancestral syllable could take one of these two shapes:

The Ancestral CV Syllable

Onset: any one simple or complex consonant
Nucleus: any one vowel
Coda: none

Word-initially, this was the only permitted syllable type; every Ancestral word began with a simple or complex consonant (or the glottal stop).

The Ancestral V Syllable

Onset: none
Nucleus: any one vowel
Coda: none

As the result of inflection, any vowel could occur in hiatus (directly adjacent to a vowel in another syllable) word-medially or word-finally. If two identical vowels occurred in hiatus, the result was one long vowel. This was the only source of heavy syllables in Ancestral.

The Ancestral Vocal Register

Each Ancestral syllable could be pronounced in one of five vocal registers for dramatic effect.

• Whispery
• Breathy
• Modal
• Creaky
• Silent

The Ancestral Tonal Register

Each Ancestral syllable could be pronounced in one of five tonal registers for musical effect.

• Highest
• High
• Mid
• Low
• Lowest