Kxënt'exo evolution

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This page gives instructions on how to take Proto-Kxënt'exo and evolve it into Classical Kxënt'exo.

These notes are for experienced conlangers so that they are able to modify the conlang, coin new words, affixes, derivational strategies, conjugations, or whatever they want. Consider this a behind the scenes peek into how the language was actually made.

To get an overview of how Proto-Kxënt'exo works see Kxënt'exo proto language.

Tools used

In order to evolve the phonology of the language, the words from Proto-Kxënt'exo get put in a sound change applier known as Lexurgy, I basically wrote code that automatically takes the proto-words and applies every single historical sound change to them in the correct order to produce the final evolved forms of words.

I also typically use Lexurgy to automatically get the romanizations of words and even their spelling, though the code isn't perfect and sometimes I find some unexpected result that I then have to patch periodically, because maybe the way I wrote a sound change allows for some weird edge-cases that I hadn't considered before.

A document containing the different Lexurgy codes and instructions on how to use them will be posted here at some point.

I also doubt that I will have the patience to take the Lexurgy code and write it in plain-text, I don't want to have to explain every single sound shift and write it down in detail because there's a lot of them and I think the Lexurgy code is perfectly legible as is. I know that it's probably only legible to me and not to other people, but if you have any questions feel free to reach out and ask.

I also wrote a code for Lexifer that generates random words using the phonology of Proto-Kxënt'exo, it's important to keep in mind the morphology of the language when coining new words, but this can be a good tool for deriving new roots, getting inspiration or even for testing out the Lexurgy code, by generating around 300 words and putting them into Lexurgy you can see how the sound changes affect all sorts of words.

Just like with Lexurgy, there will be a link to the code used for Lexifer here at some point in the future.

Class

The class markers ended up being eroded away in the evolution process and most of them are no longer pronounced at all in Classical Kxënt'exo, though they are all still visible in the orthograpy of the language.

To see the way the class suffixes survive in the orthography of Classical Kxënt'exo see Kxënt'exo grammar.

The suffixes *-t͡ʃˤi, *-nu, *-xo and *-wa are still pronounced, they take the forms /-t͡sʼe/ /-n/ /-χo/ and /-wa/.

This is just a natural result of following the phonological evolution of the language, if you input the proto-words with the class suffixes into Lexurgy and you use the code I wrote it will output the words and you will see that most of them don't survive the sound changes.

Most dangerous nouns ended up being grouped together with the rest of the animate nouns, whereas every other category usually became inanimate, which means that the ending /-t͡sʼe/ is associated with animate nouns, while the endings /-n/ /-χo/ and /-wa/ are associated with inanimate nouns.

Noun inflections

Here's how to evolve nouns into Classical Kxënt'exo:

Inanimate nouns:

You can take an abstract, tool or inanimate noun (or even a dangerous noun that breaks the expected pattern and evolves into an inanimate noun) and then you follow this pattern:

Then you apply the sound changes to the proto-word and you get all the Classical Kxënt'exo inflections of the inanimate noun.

The genitive prefix comes from a preposition meaning "of, from" getting affixed onto the noun and eroded:

• *ʃəka => *ʃa-

The locative prefix comes from a preposition meaning "at, on, in" getting affixed onto the noun:

• *ku => *ku-

Animate nouns:

You can take an animate noun and follow this pattern:

Then you apply the sound changes to the proto-word and you get the starting Classical Kxënt'exo inflections of the animate noun, to get the dual ones you simply take the evolved singular forms and then add "-(t)ə" (with the /t/ to break up any resulting vowel hiatus) to the end of them (removing any silent letters from the spelling as well).

The reasoning behind this is that the dual forms evolved quite late by suffixing the number two *tˤə (Classical t'a /tʼa/) onto singular nouns, and the suffix got eroded in quick speech so the stop became plain /t/ and the vowel became a schwa /ə/.

• *tˤə => *-(t)ə

The reason they're suffixed onto singular nouns is because the plural tends to be longer (though that's not always the case) so a lot of words would become a mouthful to say with the plural marking + the affixed -(t)ə at the end, besides affixing the dual onto the plural is kind of redudntant, so people just subconsciously used the shorter base form of the word when forming duals because it was more convenient.

The objective prefix comes from a preposition meaning "to, toward" getting affixed onto the noun:

• *mi => *mi-

The vocative comes from an interjection meaning "hello, hey" (which comes from an adjective meaning "happy, joyful" as a way to wish someone joy) that got prefixed onto the noun:

• *kˤuɬu => *kˤuɬu-

The plural prefix comes from a noun meaning "group" that got eroded and prefixed onto the noun, and the prefix was only applied to animate nouns so the animate class ending was seen as a bit redundant, which means that the prefix is attached to the root of the word; you drop the class suffix:

• *ɬiriʃi => *ɬi-

The plural marking evolved before all of the case prefixes.

If you're evolving an animate noun that originated from a dangerous noun you start as if it was an inanimate noun:

(You can omit the locative, since animates don't have it).

And then you take the evolved form and manually add the objective prefix /mi-/, which becomes /ni-/ before a palatal fricative /j/ and it becomes just a nasal /n-/ before non-clustering affricates, fricatives or stops, the nasal also assimilates to the same place of articulation as the consonant after it.

Manually add the vocative form by adding kɬu-, unless the first syllable of the word has the /i/ vowel or it starts with an ejective or the uvular fricative + /e/ as in /tʼe/, /χe/ or /kʼe/, in that case you would add kɬʉ- because those patterns indicate umlaut, so Kxënt'exo speakers picked up on that and just imitated that pattern in the dangerous nouns.

Then the plurals are formed by simply adding the following prefixes to the singular nominative form of the word:

And you can make the duals in the same way as you do for the regular animate nouns.

The reason why these extra steps are followed when evolving an animate noun from a dangerous noun is because the dangerous nouns were grammatically treated the same as the inanimates for a long time. It's important to take into account the sequence in which different things evolved, because that ends up making the words look slightly different.

First the plural markings evolved on the regular animates, and once that had already happened the dangerous nouns started to be grouped into the animate class, so the speakers of the language just applied the patterns that show up in regular animates onto the already evolved dangerous nouns, which results in a slightly different result than if you had just used the dangerous noun root with the proto-language affixes and applied the sound changes as if they were always considered animate, some words that would've had a prefix affected by umlaut don't actually end up having it, and the endings of words are unnafected by plurality.

Other links

• Back to the main Kxënt'exo page