• The Languages of Íröd
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• Ban De languages
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•  Tim Ar-O languages
•  Proto-Tim Ar-O
•   Tim Ar languages
•    Classical Ĝare n Tim Ar
•   O languages
•    Proto-O
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•     O
• Caber languages
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• Isolates & Lesser Families

META

Classical Ĝare n Tim Ar (CT) was pretty much the third or fourth conlang I ever really attempted. I started it back in 2009 or 2010. I remember wanting it to sound "strong", whatever that meant. I have a special fondness for the voiced pharyngeal fricative and Semitic broken plurals; both of these have made their mark upon the language.

IN-UNIVERSE

CT was spoken following the breakup of the Proto-Tim Ar-O (PTO) cultural complex. It was the language used in daily and official life during the dynasties of Sa Sárde, Tíḫeḫ, Lo Ḫáhtes, Môon, and Ḫrgar--all of the pre-Kên dynasties--as well as the interregnum between Tíḫeḫ and Lo Ḫáhtes. It survived, in specialized uses, until the khanate of Bleffys Udd, whereupon it was revived as an official language within the khanate. The subsequent Preto Dynasty retained it in this capacity and it has ever since been the official language of the Tim Ar Empire.

While all this was happening on the back end, in practice, CT developed as most languages do into a number of specific daughter idioms. The Tim Ar language family is rich, diverse, and wide-ranging, being found across much of Matanhír and in the vicinity of the Burning Mountains. Diglossia is present and persistent in the day-to-day of the Empire's operations, often with one of its descendants and with official CT, but also between multiple related daughter languages. The Empire maintains a ministry for the regulation and administration of CT for official purposes, but this has no governance over any of the descendant tongues or their use.

Phonology

Consonants

CT had the following consonant phonemes:

Vowels

In terms of vowels proper, CT had the following phonemes:

Vowels could take one of two tones, high or low. High tone is marked using an acute accent, as á, or a circumflex if the plain vowel has an umlaut (e.g. û, the high-tone form of ü). Low tone is unmarked.

Syllabic consonants

A series of five consonants could stand as the syllable nucleus. These were all sonorants: The three nasals m, n, and ĝ as well as the two approximants r and l. (The pharyngeal fricative, as relayed below, converts to a low-tone a.)

Syllable structure

The maximal syllable in CT is of the format CVC. Consonants are obligatory neither in the onset nor in the coda. If the nucleus of the syllable is a syllabic consonant, it cannot take a coda.

Phonological development from PTO

The phonological development of CT from PTO occurred in the following manner:

Loss of final obstruents

In the course of development from PTO to CT, the first change was a loss or devoicing of final obstruents. If the final was voiceless, it dropped entirely; voiced obstruents simply lost their voicing.

Tone split

A tone split, conditioned by the voicing of the onset, then occurred. This was followed by lenition of the fricatives to sonorants and a general devoicing of voiced obstruents.

Fricative genesis

Before high vowels, stops became fricatives.

Loss of high vowels

PTO *t̪in '2SG' > CT łn

Sandhi developments

By this time, the plural marker *aɹ had reduced in quality to something like *ɐ when standing before a consonant. What happened next was metathesis:

Around the same time this was accomplished, the genitive marker began to assimilate in place to a following consonant; this consonant, if nasal, deleted:

This change is responsible for the assimilatory phenomenon displayed by the genitive particle, hence m hadál ü 'of the person', n 'tił 'of a wall', ĝ kuasa ü 'of the landmark'.

Loss of diphthongal *i

The first element of diphthongs in PTO was invariably *i; this *i was then lost:

With respect to the environment around vowels other than i or u, this phonemicized the fricative distinction that developed earlier--hence CT dégu < PTO *tiɛko.

Raising of mid vowels

Mid vowels each raised one degree in height, collapsing the original seven-vowel system to a five-vowel one:

By introducing new i u, this change fully phonemicized the fricativization process mentioned above.

*ʁ-vocalization

Historic *ʁ vocalized when not adjacent to a vowel:

This resultant a is invariably of a low tone.

Spirantization of coda resonants

When standing before a glottal stop in the coda, non-nasal sonorants became fricatives, as below:

For instance, CT ĝus '1SG' < PTO *ŋiojʔ.

Pharyngealization of *l and resultant pull chain

*l (and *ʁ, though it had no influence on the following chain shift) retracted to ʕ. To fill this gap, *ð lateralized to l, taking θ along with it (becoming the lateral fricative *ɬ). Following this, there was a general fronting of alveolar obstruents:

Lenition of *t̪

*t̪ then lenited; the outcome differed whether it stood before a front vowel versus in other environments.

Lenition of *p

*p then unilaterally weakened to *f:

This *f debuccalized later; see below.

Vowel coalescence and genesis of complex vowels

The so-called complex vowels are those vowels which have a roundedness attribute other than the "default" one would expect for their place of articulation--i.e. front rounded vowels and back unrounded vowels (the other vowels, to include a, are considered "simplex"). The complex vowels were formed by a coalescence of two unlike vowels, neither of which were low, in hiatus; two identical vowels in hiatus instead produced a high-tone copy of the vowel:

Glottal stop deletion

The glottal stop then dropped entirely:

Tonal dissimilation

The loss of the glottal stop in the previous step generated some sequences of like vowels in sequence; the second of these flipped its tone:

Fricative changes

The fricative *f completely debuccalized to h at this point, and the phonemes *q and *χ merged as x:

Assibiliation of *tk

The sequence *tk became tsk. (This is a recent change not indicated in normal romanization.)

Voicing of obstruents

Obstruents other than h gain voicing when standing between other voiced sounds.

Lenition of stops

The stops *t and *k, which became [d] and [g] in the environments listed above, underwent further changes:

Grammar

Parts of speech

Tim Ar grammarians consider CT to have had three parts of speech: These are isúu (singular sîu) 'islands', ige (singular kige) 'currents', and eĝnr ar (singular eĝnr) 'flotsam'. The isúu include nouns and verbs, as well as most derivational morphemes (cf. how they are treated with regards to inpositions, below); ige comprise a number of modifiers--adjectives and adverbs (grouped together in an "adstantive" in CT), numbers, measure-words, and inpositions; the eĝnr ar would be everything else. This appears to largely be motivated by the prevalence of zero-derivation within the language.

Word order

Word order in CT was very often VOS; in other words, the verb came first, then the direct object, then the subject.

Equivocations are also of the format verb-predicate-subject:

Plurals

There are three main types of plurals in CT, to wit metathetic, decompositional, and discrete plurals. Which kind of plural you're looking at depends on the phonotactics of the word itself:

• If the word is consonant-initial, and the first vowel therein is a simplex vowel, the plural class is metathetic.
• If the word is consonant-initial, and the first vowel therein is a complex vowel, the plural class is decompositional.
• If the word begins with a vowel or the first vowel in the word is a syllabic consonant, the plural class is discrete.

In metathetic plurals, the initial CV- sequence swaps the order of its elements. This can only occur with simplex vowels, that is to say a á e é i í o ó u ú.

As the name suggests, decompositional plurals involve the fission of a complex vowel into simplex components. The resultant initial simplex vowel has the roundedness of the original complex vowel whereas the resultant medial vowel maintains its place and tone.

Discrete plurals do not alter the noun in any way, but exist as a postposed particle ar.

The name "Tim Ar" is an example of a deliberate employment of this plural for effect; the standard plural would have been itm.

Inpositions

In preference to prepositions (which precede the governed noun) or postpositions (which follow them), CT prefers inpositions. Inpositions occur immediately after the head noun in the noun phrase (i.e. between the noun and any of its modifiers).

For purposes of deciding on word order, the first element of a derivational construction is treated as the head noun:

In constructions involving measure-words (about which see below), the inposition occurs immediately following the measure-word:

Numbers & measure-words

One through ten

The first ten numbers are simple enough:

From a historical perspective, only the first three--dún 'one', hága 'two', and isë 'three'--are truly "atomic", that is to say underived. The earlier ones can actually be broken down as follows:

Eleven through twenty

The terms for the 'teen' numbers are formed from a construction involving PTO *neheʁʔ 'son' (> CT nég).

There are actually two competing terms for 'twenty'--the other is höarig 'brother of ten' (cf. höhsë 'four'). Either is considered officially acceptable by the imperial regulators, though which one won out in the common vernacular varies between dialects. For that matter, some descendant tongues reanalyzed né- as a marker of the dual, apparently on the reasoning that number X-teen is the Xth member of a second set of ten, therefore selecting X-teen was selecting a second X of sorts.

Tens through one hundred ten

Most of the multiples of ten have fairly obvious etymologies; one hundred is téngo:

The -ts- in aritsarê is actually a regular development from earlier *-hkr---though some descendants show traces of an alternate, analogical form *arihkarê. The adjective nihír means 'pitiful, pitiable, weak, deficient'; kahál, 'strong'.

Putting the numbers together

Place the higher-power numeral first when compounding numbers:

If you're trying to express a number that is X90 or X10, you round up or down from the nearest hundred, as appropriate:

Fractions

Fractions are generally expressed using a formula N n D, where N is the numerator and D is the denominator.

Improper fractions can be expressed in much the same way:

The fractional forms for 'ninety' and 'one hundred ten', and those of their related forms corresponding to 91 - 99 and 111 - 119, are irregular. While the derived forms téngo nihít and téngo kahál, respectively, serve to describe the numerators, their associated denominators are arihkêgê and téngo arig.

It is also possible to express fractions in conjunction with larger (i.e. whole) numbers. To do this, an inposition ëtrúr 'with, together with' is employed right after the numerator of the fraction:

Measure-words

CT possessed a rich bank of measure-words, words used in tallying up objects or units. These invariably end in -n, which -n assimilates using the familiar rules. A full list of the measure-words:

Measure-words come between the number and the noun counted, which noun appears in the singular.

Derivational morphology

Typology

CT is, by and large, an isolating language, though it is not without a complete lack of operations on the root.

Reduplication

It is known that full reduplication was used as emphasis or to point out a type specimen, for instance káłto 'idiot, moron' > káłtogáłto 'arch-idiot, know-nothing, ne'er-do-well' or kaá 'building' > kaágaá 'headquarters; (government) ministry'.

Zero-derivation

One method for deriving words from other terms is zero-derivation, that is, the derived term is the exact same as the source term.

Deverbal zero-derivation

Deverbal zero-derivation frequently produces a resultative (ösöl 'band together, represent a common group' > ösöl 'trade union; jati, subdivision of the caste system'; ḫëm 'cut, trim, maintain' > ḫëm 'lawn; product, finished product'; ḫírar 'murder' > ḫírar 'corpse'; suîg 'agree, be in accord, assent' > suîg 'agreement, understanding'), though in practice the exact nature of the resultant noun varies widely, as in hurúr 'wear (clothes)' > hurúr 'article of clothing, clothes', íor 'threaten, strong-arm, put pressure on' > íor 'deadline, time limit', dï 'to stop up' > dï 'cork, seal; sealant', or tëg 'to kick, to push' > tëg 'one Íröd gravity's worth of acceleration'.

Denominal zero-derivation

Denominal zero-derivation typically produces a verb with a connection to some salient property of the source noun, though it is common for such verbs to be more specialized as opposed to more general. Examples include sar 'eye' > sar 'to see', kelenkaá 'diarrhea' > kelenkaá 'have dysentery, suffer from diarrhea', and méḫ 'truth' > méḫ 'to accept, to understand, to internalize'.

Zero-derivation from other terms

You can zero-derive from other things too, like the adstantive méri 'pristine, natural, untouched' > the noun méri 'varna, ethnic classification in the caste system' or the adstantive nul 'today, on this day' > nul 'today'.

Derivational morphemes

Participles

There are four participializers in CT:

Agents and patients

There are two other deverbal morphemes, hadál and kedén, that refer to individuals or entities who are the agent or patient of the action, respectively. These are only used for sentient beings, e.g. adasar and humans.

Nonsentient agents and patients are indicated using tê and ûr, respectively.

Derivational markers can be employed on each other, resulting in utter trainwrecks like the following:

The adstantivizer

The particle î turns nouns into adstantives:

These constructions can be intensified by reduplicating the noun, e.g. î káłtogáłto 'profoundly unwise, extremely ill-advised' < káłtogáłto 'arch-idiot, Supreme Fool' < káłto.