Re: Hell hath no Fury (was: war and death are in my hand)

From: "Steg Belsky" <draqonfayir@...>

| But back to conlanging,
| While i was reading through lots of Ardalambion articles on Proto-Elven,
| Quenya, and Telerin, i decided that at least once in my life i should
| probably create a well-developed family of languages, with specific Grand
| Master Plans and roots in their ancestral tongue.
| So i came up with the phonemes for the "Proto-" ancestor of the
| languages, combining some ideas of other random conlangynesses that were
| floating around my mind:

Well if you got a language you need a history, and of course Tolkien knew that.
My version of the Elves (they sure are popular in [conlang] aren't they?) are
divided into two groups: Dark Elves (so-called because of their darker skin, NOT
because they're evil or anything), and Pale Elves, their light-skinned
counterparts.

Proto-Elven seems to be a form of a VERY ancient proto-language, related to both
Nostratic and Dene-Caucasian, and hence, maybe even pretty close to the elusive
Proto-World!  The north-south division of the Elves resulted in the two races
and the two languages.

The Dark Elves, centered in Egypt, are the Techians, and Tech is a Nostratic
language with strong affinities to Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European.  The Pale
Elves speak a language called Xqitzotl that has been proposed as a descendant of
Dene-Caucasian; it appears to be most like North Caucasian.

Apparently, the two races of Elves coexisted in Atlantis over 10,000 years ago,
then were divided after the downfall of their American homeland and went their
separate ways, the Dark Elves settling in Egypt and the Pale Elves in
Mesopotamia (they were apparently well-known to the Sumerians and the
Akkadians).

Anyway...

| Does it seem possible that the first two doubly-articulated stops would
| exist?  I remember seeing /kp/ and it's voiced counterpart /gb/ in
| African languages, but i've never heard of /pt/ and /tk/.  I can
| pronounce them easily enough...

Labiovelar double stops like /kp)/ and /gb)/ are all over the place in
Niger-Kordofanian languages, including Yoruba, Igbo, Wolof, Fulani and Vai.
They're found in some Bantu langauges, but not Swahili, and I don't believe
they're in Zulu, Xhosa and the Nguni languages either.  I believe the nasal
/Nm)/ may be found, though it's relatively rare; I haven't found /xf)/ in any
languages.

| That's all i have now, although i really like the Tolkienic name
| _Kinn-lai_ (a development of the word Quendi in an undescribed Avarin
| language), so i may 'borrow' it as Kin-La:i, or maybe Kpin-La:i, for the
| name of the people who spoke this proto-language.

I went the opposite direction.  I originally called the Pale Elves "Quaelitz",
but as an afterthought that sounded too Tolkienian.  I came up with a completely
ad hoc word, "Xqitzotl" (pronounced something like /çcits'otl'/ or
/StSits'otl'/) recently, and I guess I'll decide on that name.

~DaW~


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