Proto-Iuxatic is a language group believed by linguists to be the ancestor of
Munyobu, various regional dialects of
Iuxat, and other language isolates found in the ruins of
Lost Tribes found throughout the
Rostran Arc.
Dating all the way back to the
Curved Time, Proto-Iuxatic is closer to modern Iuxat than other languages because the
commissures of the
Rostral Tesseract, though traversible without resort to modern technology like
dieseltech airships or pre-built
commissure transit stations, still caused linguistic speciation due to how difficult they were to navigate on foot. Ironically, given their previously hostile stance towards outsiders and relatively new sentience as a species, the
ovinex have proven to be crucial resources in the research of the early Proto-Iuxatic language because their
oral histories span the whole length of the
Manifold's history as a space inhabited with
sentient life.
Writing System
Proto-Iuxatic is a relatively recent reconstruction, as the marine circumvective forces of Rostral C - the homeland of the majority of extant Rostran populations -tend to have a destructive effect on written works from the era of the 'proto-world' Proto-Iuxatic existed in. Moreover, the earliest reaches of Proto-Iuxatic were spoken in pre-literate times and, thus, left little in the way of evidence beyond what could be gleaned from what later peoples recorded of the speakers' oral traditions.
What texts in Proto-Iuxatic tongues do exist feature a logography with diacritics to mark whether a given glyph should be interpreted as a complete concept or, as in the names of places and people, as a syllable. Declension particles or affixes (see Syntax) had their own glyphs which grew more abstract over time. Words were often not spaced out on the written media, but sentences might be given their own lines. Proto-Iuxatic script was written left to right, then top to bottom, like in modern Iuxat.
Proto-Iuxatic syllables are constructed as CV(C)(N). Like in Iuxat, many common consonant clusters and diphthongs were treated as individual sounds for the purpose of constructing syllables. There were many more of these phonemic groupings in Proto-Iuxatic than in any of its descendants, a decline in complexity over history that matches other accounts of the Curved Time mythos.
Like modern Iuxat, Proto-Iuxatic featured a declension system using particles placed before the words they modified, though it is unclear if these particles were placed independently within the sentence as words in their own right or were concatenated with roots in the manner of a synthetic language. Proto-Iuxatic actually featured more kinds of particles than found in modern Iuxat, and, in fact, some complete roots could be completely put in the semblative case by placing them in front of other roots in the manner of declension particles.
Proto-Iuxatic features a seven vowel system which shrank to five in Iuxat and three in Munyobu.
Like Munyobu, Proto-Iuxatic features a VSO word order. Adjective and adverbs precede the words they modify, and it is believed that this placement may have influenced the development of the prefix-based declension system found in Iuxat and other language isolates found in the Rostran Arc. The shift of OSV word order in Iuxat is of uncertain origin, though there has been speculation that this was a further extension of this concept, with speakers reasoning that the object somehow modified the subject in the sense of becoming that towards which the object directs its actions.
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