Karyoł as I describe it, ‘spoken’ at time we’ll call Year 0 Absolute Time (AT), is a language in a state of change, and it’s this sense of forward momentum that seemed to make it a good candidate for this project. My recently begun Paleo-Pagric is certainly underdeveloped in comparison to Karyoł (it is, after all, only a month old – I began it for Lexember), but I approached it with more a holistic mindset and with a greater maturity. If anything, Paleo-Pagric is in a state of equilibrium, reflected not only in a more well-rounded vocabulary but also in a grammar more assured of itself. Karyoł’s grammar developed out of a series of back-of-the-envelope notes, some of which date back to 2007. Since then I’ve put a lot of effort into making a synchronic hodgepodge seem to be the result of diachronic fluidity, and I’ve had to shoot a lot of my darlings on the way, but the project simply seems to have no polish, not at least in the eyes of its more scathing critic, its creator. It seemed to me that poor Karyoł, with its sprawling dictionary of 2388 monomorphemic roots and its baroque and ponderous obsession with transitivity was much more in need of an in-depth study than sparkling Paleo-Pagric, with its effete Americanist-expired inspired orthography and its self-confident polysemies. If Paleo-Pagric is the straight-A-student baby in the family, Karyoł is the surly teen with growing pains and a self-destructive past.

But that all having been said, my diachronic investigations, all trying to legitimize the mishmash of back-of-the-envelope-isms, have led through some very satisfying travels to the realm of exotica. These labors have led me to decide to present Karyoł as a “snapshot” of a language in a state of change, a language with self-conscious inconsistencies which bend (but rarely if ever exactly break) linguistic universals. Before we begin grammaticalizing the day away, I’d like to give you a brief run-down of prominent Karyoł features:

Perhaps what sticks out most in my mind (probably because it took the most research), is that Karyoł has an ergative/accusative split conditioned by transitivity requirements (and which is about 200 years away from becoming fully accusative). Word order up until recently (let’s say -400 AT) had followed alignment: imperfective clauses fail the requirements for prototypical transitivity and are forced to become, at the surface level at least, antipassive. These antipassive clauses were marked by an auxiliary in Wackernagel position which headed a VP with a fairly nouny participle which was free to be placed essentially wherever it wanted to be within in the clause. Influence from neighboring strictly-SOV languages (Karyoł belongs to a Sprachbund with two minimally described sketchlangs, Matē and Mocē) has caused Karyoł speakers to reinterpret their nouny participles as echte, reine verbs in their own right and to demote their auxiliaries from heads of their own clauses to modifiers. Increase of the use of the imperfective (as it shoulders out the unmarked ‘present tense’ roughly around -300 AT) makes the ‘antipassive’ far more common than the ergative perfective, and it ceases in the speaker’s minds to be a more-marked construction. Voilà, the ergative antipassive becomes an accusative active. Moreover, once recast as modifiers, the erstwhile auxiliaries may occur or be omitted with equal probability, and the Karyoł three-way tense-voice-aspect distinction, ‘present-imperfective-antipassive’ vs. ‘past-imperfective-antipassive’ vs. ‘past-perfective-(active)’, becomes just a two-way distinction, ‘imperfective-accusative’ vs. ‘perfective-ergative’. Modifiers which may occur either directly before the verb or in Wackernagel position, with differences in their scope depending on their position, will be a theme I’ll be exploring throughout this project.

Another example of Karyoł-of-0-AT’s shifting character just so happens to be of direct importance to today’s Grammaticalizanuary topic, that is, its obsolescent system of vowel harmony, which I created for the sole purpose of disrupting and writing out the language. – One of the earliest foundational design goals behind Karyoł was to produce a believable system of ablaut. Like an early abstract painter who believed he could not paint non-objectively without having passed through an impressionist, post-impressionist, and Cubist phase, I felt the only way to believably design a system of ablaut would be to posit a system of regular vowel harmony, add irregularity, and then let the system cease to be productive. Karyoł in 0 AT presents a snapshot of this process when it’s almost-but-not-quite finished.

Karyoł’s vowel harmony is a Sprachbund feature (its fellow Krelyic language Gralli will merrily combine two vowels of any quality), and as a contact feature, it is less complex than the genetically inherited systems found in Matē and Mocē. Matē and Mocē vowel harmony systems work primarily according to ATR, with vowel height applying secondarily on -ATR vowels. Early Karyoł, spoken perhaps between -900 and -700 AT, lacked an ATR distinction, and its system of vowel harmony worked primarily according to a system of vowel height: e~i, a~ə, o~u. In fact, in Early Karyoł, before a period of increased contact with Gralli in the north of Twāo Proper and in Pagria, we can think of this system as actually only containing three vowels, Front (I), Central (A), and Back (U), each with the feature [±height]; the realization of these vowels is absolute in terms of backless, but relative in terms of height. The marked feature [-height] is ‘strong’ and trigger lowering-harmony both progressively and regressively, with the result that a phonological word (a root along with any of its bound morphemes, including clitics) will contain only low or only high vowels. (Originally, I conceptualized [-height] as being the unmarked feature, until came across the concept of quantal vowels while doing research for a Neanderthal conlang, which hasn’t gotten very far because the grammar is fairly simple, and thusly must be taken very seriously lest it become absolute drivel.)

Now a few changes happen over the course of the next few hundred years, between roughly -800 AT and -550 AT: First, there’s an umlaut of ə before (and only before) both i and u; both systems of umlaut initially result in new vowels, ɨ and ʉ, but ʉ almost immediately merges with u.

Second, ə destabilizes entirely. Karyoł is spoken over a very broad area, and some dialectical difference is only natural. Most of these differences are matters of vocabulary, some are matters of grammar, and some are matters of pronunciation. The prestige dialects of the south merge ə into ɨ, whereas the dialects spoken in the economically depressed northern reaches of Twāo Proper merge ə with a. The southern solution alters the original system but maintains a one-to-one contrast between high and low vowels. The northern solution, however, leaves behind a precarious situation in which some instances of a trigger lowering-harmony and others do not. Nothing indicates which instances of a will behave in which way; from a synchronic perspective the system is entirely irregular. This second development is the beginning of the destabilization of the harmony system in favor of a system of ablaut.

Third, the southern ɨ becomes a shibboleth of prestige, widely copied through the Twāo Empire. Hypercorrection leads to some incorrect instances of the ɨ-realization being applied to both a-from-a and a-from-ə. Some of these pronunciations become fairly standardized, and used by speakers who don’t affect ɨ; these non-ɨ speakers use i for ɨ.

Between -600 and -520 AT the Twāogowe ‘colonize’ heavily-wooded Pagria after having largely deforested their territories making charcoal to produce steel. The principle economy of this isolated colonial possession revolves firstly around timber-felling and secondly around growing crops for export to an increasingly desertified Twāo, hard and low-paying work, and most of the settlers are northerners looking to better their circumstances abroad, or ethnic Gralls who have very few prospects in bitterly racist Twāo. Soon, Gralls outnumber Twāogowe in Pagria, though Karyoł remains the language of all commerce and most daily intercourse. It’s illegal to speak Gralli in public, and the law is even more strictly enforced by the Twāo religious institution, the Astronomical College, in Pagria than it is in Twāo.

Gralli has several effects on the Karyoł of Pagria. Karyoł has no phonemic fricatives, but Gralli has s and z and may produce both laminal alveolar t̻ and apical post-alveolar ȶ̺ with an optional affricated release. When speaking Karyoł, some native-Gralli speakers grammaticalize an opposition between t and t^s and use the latter for Karyoł’s palatal-alveolar c, a sound which does not occur in Gralli.

Gralli also has no internal system of vowel harmony. When native-Gralli-speakers produce the northern dialect of Karyoł prevalent in Pagria, they have to memorize every vowel alteration, rather than producing them naturally as a kind of suprasegmental feature sandhi. The outcome may be the same, but one system requires more mental resources. They occasionally make mistakes. By the year -300 AT, ethnic Gralls make up just over half of the non-native population of Pagria, and we can say people who learn to speak Karyoł there are speaking a language without a system of vowel harmony, but instead with a very young and only moderately grammaticalized system of ablaut.

But that isn’t to say that the Karyoł of Pagria and Karyoł of Twāo Proper are at this point separate languages. People continue to arrive en mass from Twāo Proper, and Pagric settlers having made their fortunes continue to abandon the wooden shacks and dirt cowpaths of Pagria in favor of the manicured pleasure gardens and rosy granite palaces of Twāo. The languages of the motherland and of the colony continue to affect one another.

And so it’s hand-in-hand that the two Karyołs lose their alternating SVO/SOV syntax and become strictly SOV. A few prepositions are still encountered, but these are becoming increasingly fusional: the extremely common dative/accusative-marking rI or rI-[A,-height]- already has a tendency to procliticize when the Twāogowe first journey to Pagria. The oblique preposition ac passes through its entire life cycle between -1200 AT and 0 AT: It begins as an independent word able to take its own stress, then procliticizes, becomes fusional, loses its coda vowel, and then entirely disappears leaving behind only vowel-lowering harmony. In a few linguistically-conservative communities, especially in Pagria, several commonly used words which begin in a vowel mysteriously (from a synchronic perspective) pick up a c when functioning in a non-S/O role. But largely it disappears.

The first instances of suffixal nominal morphology begin in conjunction with this ephemeral oblique proclitic. Its phonological attrition closely mirrors its grammaticalization and the bleaching of its semantic content, and over time, roles it was once quite happy to denote become the province of periphrastic constructions. The most notable of these is ac-N ała, originally a comitative, which surfaces in the contemporary languages as -(a)ł. -(a)ł then itself is bleached of its semantic content, and becomes an oblique marker which signals any non-S/O role (including the ergative, and later the more-marked nominative). As a(c) loses its semantic content, multi-word phrases must then be employed to describe more exact grammatical roles; these are formed with an a(c)-marked N followed by a ‘relational N’ (an N with vague semantics which functions more or less as either an adposition or a kind of demonstrative). a(c)-marking may also be deployed on the relational N, Präfixaufnahme being a defining feature of Karyoł complex NPs, but the –(a)ł enclitic only follows after the first element of the NP (cf definite –k(a) which also occurs only once in an NP in Wackernagel position). Over time, a(c)– is lost (as described above), –(a)ł becomes a fusional suffix, and the ‘relational noun’ becomes a new enclitic. Vowel-initial enclitics may follow an optional interfix -c- from the second occurrence of a(c) following Präfixaufnahme. This process occurs in both the Karyoł of Twāo and in the Karyoł of Pagria, but is more complete in Twāo Proper.

In doing research for a Neanderthal conlang (which hasn’t gotten very far because the grammar is fairly simple, and thusly must be taken very seriously lest it become absolute drivel) I read a book by Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy The Evolution of Morphology, which was for the most part of absolutely no use to the conlanger, save two discussions which have been tremendously helpful in developing these relational nouns. One is less of a discussion and more of an the observation that morphemes, just as lexemes, may have polysemous meanings. The second more discussionly discussion (pp 71 – 80, for those of you following along at home) is of what James A. Matisoff in Areal and universal dimensions of grammaticalization in Lahu calls ‘juxtapository productivity’ and what Carstairs-McCarthy calls ‘unselectivity’. I haven’t read the Matisoff paper myself, and so I only have to work with what Carstairs-McCarthy tells me. Effectively ‘juxtapository productivity’ (the term I prefer as, for whatever reason, I have troubles keeping which words are ‘unselective’ versus which ones are ‘selective’ separate) is a relative measure of a word’s combinatorial possibilities with other words. So, to quote Carstairs-McCarthy quoting Matisoff, ‘a full verb meaning to send someone on an errand will combine with fewer other lexemes than a bleached verb that means causative’. causative is more juxtapositortily productive than is to send someone on an errand.

A rather prosaic but nevertheless fundamental feature of Karyoł phonological stress assigment is that in collocations consisting of a less juxtopositorily productive form and a more productive one, the primary stress will be assigned to the less juxtapositorily productive form, which will likely be the less-grammaticalized one, as well as the dependent. This is, I think we’ll agree, what makes the most sense, and what most natlangs do. To talk about it a different way, a juxtapositorily productive form will be more likely to combine with other lexemes, and thus more expected to do so; its combinatory patterns will be, to an extent at least, cliché. As clichés, they’ll represent a kind of shared background information. Now consider pronouns, which refer to definite referents known to all participating in the discourse, and are also thusly a kind of shared background information. Pronouns are far more likely to be unstressed and eroded than are uncommon nouns occuring in focus position. And so Karyoł tends to stress less juxtapositorily productive forms in compounds.

When two equally juxtapositorily productive forms are put together, though, as in the case of a portmanteau, stress falls on the second element, which is understood to be the head. Consider the ˌyabeˈmało/ˈyabemaˌło example from my bonus post on Lexember the 17th. The former pronunciation is the older one, and is explicitly a portmanteau form. The second pronunciation is only possible at a time at which the boundaries between yabe and mało have disintegrated. It’s the kind of pronunciation only someone who has cause to do a lot of talking about a yabemało would use, someone like an elephantryman.

I think at this point we’re armed well enough to face our first Grammaticalizanuary post. Now onto the topic at hand.

Today’s Grammaticalizanuary traces the noun irtiu on its path to become a local enclitic on the one hand, and an enclitic demonstrative on the other.

irtiu (underlying ArtIU) orginally meant ‘someone else’s property, another nation’s territory, land the speaker has no right to’, but I had already grammaticalized it (last winter, I believe) as a distal demonstrative which may only modify spaces. In part, it fills a niche in the demonstrative system left empty boɲo becomes more or less neutral to distance, but some of the semantics attached to irtiu remain intact, and it may not easily modify anything other than a place OR a state (for example, an emotion), following a states-are-places conceptual metaphor. Being of nominal origin, like the –ka proximal demonstrative, irtiu is a postposed demonstrative: it follows its head, unlike boɲo which precedes.

The original concrete sense ‘someone else’s property’ has largely been lost in Twāo Proper, but has been retained in Pagria, where it is used to refer to Kepper territory the Twāogowe settlers are not able to penetrate into. Because it has some currency as a full noun in Pagric Karyoł, the speakers tend to remember that it’s an A underlying the first instance of i in irtiu. (Of course, as noted above, mistakes are made.) They generally produce arteoł and not *erteoł in the oblique, and they produce arteoka when the absolutive is paired with the proximal demonstrative enclitic –ka (which itself is on a cline with the suffixal, not enclitic, definite article –k).

Around -400 to -300 AT, Karyoł undergoes a period during which the verbal system is simplified and more emphasis is placed on the noun to describe the unfolding of events in both space and time. As a corollary, a number of spatial relational nouns are grammaticalized as enclitics and lose their position as heads of their clauses. One such relational noun that undergoes this change is irtiu. Following a general linguistic trend for bound morphemes to simplify, irtiu is reduced from a three syllable word to a two-syllable one, irtyu. This change is complete by the year -300 AT, and irtyu may now make up a single phonological word along with its host.

As an enclitic, irtyu describes movement toward a (distant) place, it’s an allative, but its original semantic content, the notion of land belonging to someone else or to an alien people, shines through, and a secondary sense arises, with a flavor of the Australian aversive, that suggests some trepidation on the traveler’s part and that the place being traveled to should be avoided or feared.

irtyu combines with the –(a)ł oblique form (and never with interfix –c-, as this would produce an illegal sequence of two heavy syllables), and does so at a time when vowel harmony is still productive enough a feature to work across morpheme boundaries. However, once it cliticizes, irtyu has drifted far enough away from its original form that the speakers no longer recognize that there is in fact an etymological A underlying the first i. When attached to a [-height] word, irtyu is expressed as ertyo, and not as *artyo or *arteo.

irtiu in its demonstrative sense also continues to change and develop, in Pagria at least. It too loses a syllable, this time its last one, as well as its ability to receive its own stress. But from there it moves in two different directions. In both cases it cliticizes, but it may suddenly be pulled to the front of the NP, under influence from boɲo, or it may be left at the very end of the NP. Over time, this difference is grammaticalized such that pre-head irti is only used in conjunction with –k/-ka and post-head irtu is only used with boɲo.

This instance of grammaticalization and cliticization happens fairly late in the game, though, perhaps as recently as -100 AT. At this point, vowel harmony has ceased to be a productive feature in Pagria, and high and low vowels are both phonemes in their own right. We then have two different classes of enclitic morphemes, one which expresses lowering-harmony (or lowering-ablaut) in the presence of other low vowels, and one which is indifferent to the quality of the vowels of the word it attaches to. I’m calling these two different classes conjunct enclitics and disjunct enclitics respectively, following terminology used to describe Navajo I learned from the Conlangery Podcast.