#diachronics

Which means that even if medical technology advanced to the point of allowing us to live for hundreds of years or even be functionally immortal, our language would still continue to evolve and transform.

Hajec is the often forgotten sister of Old Sumrë and Old Tuura, the runt of the family, having gone extinct and leaving no descendants behind. Hajec is the most conservative of the Proto-Sumric daughters as it diverged from Early Proto-Sumric whereas Old Sumrë and Old Tuura diverged from Late Proto-Sumric and share innovations such as umlaut. However even in Hajec we can observe interesting changes. In this post we’ll look at the various words for “because” in Hajec. 

Early on in Hajec there were many ways to mark causality, often with expressive phrases to mark very specific instances of “because”. At this point they could be analysed as discourse particles rather than conjunctions. I’ll list them here: 

easnuzǫz “that which emerges from jealousy” - when an action was done because of the subject’s jealousy. From easu- “that which emerges from” + zǫz “jealousy”. 

tsioest ilasf napfo easnuzǫz

refuse-3S.ANIM.PST submit king-DAT.ANIM that emerger-jealousy

“he refused to submit to the king because he was jealous (of him)”

kitis “with intimidation” - when an action was done because the subject was forced to or had no choice in the matter. From k- “supine prefix” + it “to intimidate” + -is “with”. 

ilasfest napfo kitis

submit-3S.ANIM.PST king-DAT.ANIM SUP-intimidate-with

“he submited to the king because he was forced to to

kativokōis jirt “with imitation upon” - when an action was done because someone or something else had already done it. From kativokōis “imitation” (from k- “supine prefix + ativokō “to intimidate” + -is “with”) + jirt “upon”. 

ilasfest napfo kativokōis jirt klesmir

submit-3S.ANIM.PST king-DAT SUP-imitate-with upon friend-3S.POSS

“he submitted to the king because his friend did so (also)”

ḥvēris “with the opinion” - when the subject did the action because he thought that he should. From ḥvēr “opinion” + -is “with”. 

ilasfest napfo ḥvēris 

submit-3S.ANIM.PST king-DAT opinion-with

“he submitted to the king because he thought that he should have”

vexil ezvetér “out of the mist” - used as a general “because”. From vexil “out of” + ezvetér “the mist”. 

ilasfest napfo vexil ezvetér vrāōvestsāt ilasf

submit-3S.ANIM.PST king-DAT out of DEF/mist want-3S.ANIM.PST=SUB sumbit

“he submitted to the king because he wanted to”

exskį́ji “from the seed” - Also used as a general “because”. From exskį “seed” + -ji “from”. 

ilafest napfo exskį́ji vrāōvest ilasf

submit-3S.ANIM.PST king-DAT DEF/seed-from want-3S.ANIM.PST submit

“he submitted to the king because he wanted to”

F dom /ˈdom/, n, 'overgrown nail'

PM dom /ˈdom/, n, 'incisor'

M1 dom /ˈdom/, n, 'incisor'

The Latin word for "father-in-law"—father of one's spouse—is socer /ˈso.ker/. From this the term cōnsocer /ˈkon.so.ker/ is coined for "co-father-in-law"—that is, one child's father-in-law, or one of the two fathers of a married couple.

This word survives realtively unmolested in semantics into Italian consuocero, Portuguese consogro, Romanian cuscru and even Albanian krushk (for which we can only claim 'metathesis'), among others.

Further north, however, the word is eventually lost (though in French suire survives until the second millennium) everywhere except on Borland, where it broadens from the domain of marriage to business partnerships in general.

Already in third-century texts we see cōsocer, cōsocrum used for "the other party to a contract (for example, the other father of a couple who are to be married)" or in the plural cōsocrī, cōsocrōs for "both parties to a contract".

It is likely that by the late fifth century the word has consistent penultimate stress, following the pattern of words like integrum (classically pronunced /ˈin.te.ɡrʊm/ and later on pronounced /inˈteg.rʊm/ [ɪnˈtɛg.rʊ̃]).

At this point or soon thereafter the marital sense is entirely superseded by alternative patraster, patrastrum (giving modern paðrastr [pɐˈʀast(ɐ)]). We can reconstruct ca. 500N cōsocrum as something like [koˈzɔg.ɾʊ].

Writing outside of the Latin used in monasteries is thin on the ground for the next few centuries. We know that by the tenth century (from Hostilian's Histories) the word—now usually spelt cosoȝre and presumably pronounced /koˈzɔɣ.ɾə/—has again broadened, and can be used to refer to a member of any natural pair:

... s il vont senestre eð Marc calaȝre retenoi il cosoȝre... 3s.gen def glove left and Mark knight hold.back-pst def other.in.a.pair ...his left glove, and knight Mark kept the other...

Until this point, cosoȝre has been used exclusively as a noun. A new adjectival use (difficult to distinguish from simple apposition) starts to appear in the record, in examples such as plum cosoȝre [plym koˈzɔʝ.ɾə] "quill (in an inkpot)" and rockel cosoȝr [rɔˈkɛl koˈzɔʝ.ɾə] "distaff (with a spindle)".

So now il X cosoȝre is taken to mean "the X that comes along with other thing in its pair" when used with a single thing, and also "the two Xs that together are a pair".

Moving into the second millennium and the Middle Boral period, two related constructions arise, using cosoȝr [koˈzɔ.jr̩] as an adverb:

Jan eð Mary eurn a cliȝs cosoȝr Jan ew a cliȝs cosoȝr a Mary John and Mary went to church as a pair John went to church in a pair with Mary

This differs from ordinary a couȝl "together" (modern accougl) in implying the two people or things 'go together' in some sense. Very quickly it is established that its use with people implies they are romantically attached (in a distant echo of its etymological roots!).

The first adverbial usage survives to Modern Boral: one might say, for example,

J'acatau y dois eð y scaumel cosogr. [ˌʝakˈto i ˈdɔjz e‿ði xʊˈmɛw kʊˈzɔ.jɐ] 1s-buy-pst def tablet and def pen as.a.unit I bought the tablet and stylus as a set.

The other construction falls into line with other preposition-adverb pairs by the seventeenth century, with cosogr a X increasingly attested simply as cosogr X "together with X, in a set with X, in a relationship with X".

And so in my translation of Tim Minchin's You Grew on Me we see

Cosogr tey, jo smarc plu l'aubon. /koˈzɔ.jʀ̩ ti | ʒo ˈsmaʀk pli loˈbɔn/ [kʊˈzɔjɐ ti | ʝʊˈzmɑːk pli lʊˈbɔn/ together.with 2s.dsj | 1s surface no.more def=morning (Now that I am) in a relationship with you, I no longer get up in the mornings.

A comment from Biblaridion’s Youtube video about phonological evolution, presented here for some learning.

If you wanna be really weird, do it like ancient greek: 1. make EVERYTHING in your language subject to palatalization, all ns, all sibilants and all stops. Then you get a HUGE phoneme inventory which is too huge so you don’t need it anymore so you REDUCE EVERY SINGLE FUCKING SIGN of palatalization. Then you get some nice allophonies. If you have labiovelars you can also delete every sign of the labial element. Because both palatalization and labialization are fundamentally identical to sequences with j and w so it’s a nice symmetry and in fact it happened to Ancient Greek.

examples: 

1. *treyes → delete the palatal and get trees which get’s contracted to trēs written as τρεῖς. 

2. root *gʷem- meaning ‚go, come‘, still present in english come → build a present stem with the suffix *i̯ó → *gʷem-i̯ó- → now m assimilates to the y → *gʷen-i̯ó- → n becomes palatalized and geminated because of compensatory lengthening for the glide → *gʷeɲːó- → now the unstressed vowel becomes a → *gʷaɲːó- → now you get rid of the labialization and turn labiovelar gʷ befor a and o into b (and before u into plain g and before e and i into d) so you get *baɲːo- → now the palatal n influences the a and produces a tiny little i sound right infront of the palatal nasal just as you can hear it in languages like Spanish which have the palatal nasal → *bai̯ɲo- (since you now have a diphthong you need to shorten the geminated nasal to keep the rythm) and then you delete the palatal element → *baino → this is basically the ancient greek word for ‚to go‘ which is βαίνω (baínɔ̄). I don’t know how the accent shifted but this is secondary. The palatal doesn’t get deleted in this case because it’s part of a diphthong, that is the only exeption to the tendency.