An Introduction To The Ancestral Sound
At first glance, the phonology of Ancestral seems quite complicated. Indeed, I have come to believe that the sound system of its immediate predecessor (the hypothetical language I call Pre-Ancestral) was an open one whose purpose (subject only to the limitations of the human vocal tract) was to symbolize in speech every meaningful aspect of the Ancestral world.
But appearances can be deceiving. By the time the Ancestral alphabet was created, its speech community had distilled these sounds into five sets of five consonants and three sets of three vowels, yielding a simple sound inventory of twenty-five consonants and nine vowels.
The illusion of greater complexity arises from two factors.
First, each of these twenty-five consonants could, in turn, be combined with any other (including itself) to form a complex consonant.
Second, Ancestral levelled its two diphthongs into two additional vowels.
Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing the precise pronunciation of any of these sounds. Our evidence is limited to Ancestral’s frequent use of onomatopoeia, the subsequent development of its sounds in its daughter languages, and the featural nature of its alphabet. The challenge is akin to the attempt to reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese, where we know the shape of each character but not its exact sound.
So feel free to pronounce these sounds however you like, within reason. If it makes you feel better, I’m sure my own pronunciation of Ancestral is atrocious.
An Introduction To The Ancestral Consonant
Please note that I use the terms “forms, flows, and flavors of articulation” rather than the more common “places, manners, and types of articulation” to emphasize the fact that Ancestral’s featural alphabet had its own raison d’être. Unlike the International Phonetic Alphabet, but like Hangul, its goal was to systematically and succinctly express the sounds of one particular language.
The Ancestral Forms Of Articulation
My tentative reconstruction of Ancestral’s five sharp forms of articulation is as follows:
- p a fortis labial obstruent
- t a fortis dental obstruent
- c a fortis palatal obstruent
- q a fortis velar obstruent
- Q a fortis uvular obstruent
My tentative reconstruction of Ancestral’s five soft forms of articulation is as follows:
- b a lenis labial obstruent
- d a lenis dental obstruent
- j a lenis palatal obstruent
- g a lenis velar obstruent
- G a lenis uvular obstruent
The Ancestral Flows Of Articulation
My tentative reconstruction of Ancestral’s five sharp flows of articulation is as follows:
- f a fortis labial continuant
- s a fortis dental continuant
- z a fortis palatal continuant
- x a fortis velar continuant
- X a fortis uvular continuant
My tentative reconstruction of Ancestral’s five soft flows of articulation is as follows:
- w a lenis labial continuant
- l a lenis dental continuant
- y a lenis palatal continuant
- r a lenis velar continuant
- R a lenis uvular continuant
The Ancestral Flavors Of Articulation
My tentative reconstruction of Ancestral’s five flavors of articulation is as follows:
- h an oral phonant
- n a nasal phonant
- k a glottal phonant
- v an egressive phonant
- V an ingressive phonant
Please note: the distinctions between Ancestral’s flavors of articulation appear to mirror those between various types of airstream mechanism.
An Introduction To The Ancestral Vowel
Ancestral’s five cardinal vowels consisted of i, e, a, o, and u, pronounced (I suspect) 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
An Introduction To The Ancestral Syllable
The Ancestral syllable was the essential building block of the Ancestral word. Because Ancestral did not permit closed syllables (with the above-mentioned exception of onomatopoeia), the permissible sound patterns of Ancestral were straightforward.
Each Ancestral syllable could only 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 (with the sole exception of the utterance marker) began with a simple or complex consonant.
The Ancestral V Syllable
Onset: none
Nucleus: any one vowel
Coda: none
As the result of inflection, any vowel could occur in hiatus, either word-medially or word-finally. If two identical vowels occurred in hiatus, the result was a special category of reduplication: one long vowel. This was Ancestral’s only source of heavy syllables.
Note: Ancestral did not permit diphthongs per se. The sounds I have represented with the letters y and w patterned as consonants, not semi-vowels. As mentioned above, Ancestral did, however, allow vowels to occur in hiatus, as many Polynesian and Bantu languages do.
The Ancestral Writing Systems
The speakers of Ancestral created two distinct writing systems. The first was pictographic. The second was syllabic.
The pictographic system was used for “ritual” purposes, including a fully-developed gestural sign language. Indeed, I believe the sign language came first.
The syllabic system was used for “practical” purposes, including the teaching of children. Each syllable was represented by three elements: one for each for its two potential consonants and one for its vowel. Each symbol was “featural” in that it bore a logical relationship to the other strokes in the same phonetic series.
The Romanization Of The Ancestral Featural Alphabet
When it came time for me to “romanize” the Ancestral syllabary (i.e. to transform its featural writing system into a Latin-style alphabet), my goals were threefold.
First, I wished to make good use of as many standard English letters as possible.
Second, in my choice of these letters, I wished to suggest the approximate pronunciation of each sound, wherever possible.
Third, I wished to subtly suggest the representational nature of the Ancestral alphabet, which beautifully expresses “the form, flow, or flavor” of each sound.
After a bit of trial and error, it dawned on me that, after mapping the five English vowel letters to the five Ancestral cardinal vowels, I could use twenty of the remaining twenty-one letters to represent twenty of Ancestral’s twenty-five consonants. I represent the five remaining consonants with an umlaut or a capital, depending on the medium.
I’m quite pleased with the result. The odd man out in my scheme is the letter m, which I use to represent Ancestral’s unique utterance marker.