Tambakhan

This article is adapted from a section of Overview of the Languages of Southeastern Vèkya: a Diachronic Approach, Tabros Institute of Linguistics, 4th edition (702).

Tambkhan was spoken in the eponymous Tambakhan Highlands before c. -700, possibly up to the -600s. It survives only in words borrowed into Hlorasan, and a few possible attestations in fragmentary ancient Naskuyan texts. As such, the evidence is almost exclusively phonological and lexical, and almost nothing is known about Tambakhan’s grammar.

Relationships with Other Languages:

Antecedents:
Determining whether Tambakhan is a language isolate or related to other lost languages is equally impossible. Most scholars who attempt to categorize it place it with either the Pre-Hlorasan language, the Pre-Célibrían, or both, or believe that Pre-Hlorasan and Pre-Célibrían were the dialect spectrum of one language. Since even less evidence exists for those hypothetical languages, there simply isn’t enough evidence to make an informed judgement.
The best evidence for linking Tambakhan with Pre-Célibrían and/or Pre-Hlorasan is the word for horse—Hlorasan ëndisë, from Tambakhan *ndisa. Some scholars theorize that *ndisa could be related to the source for the Middle Célibrían word for horse, star (mostly attested in the later form staren), of unknown origin, but considered likely to be a borrowing from a substrate language, possibly in the form *tsar (consistent with the phonotactics of Pre-Célibrían place-names). Some consider *ndisa and *tsar to be possible cognates from a hypothetical *ntsar or *ntisar (those who suggest that *ndisa is somewhat onomatopoeic favour the latter, though the former seems more probable as an ancestral form), however this is clearly highly conjectural, and even if the words are connected, it could be through borrowing from one language into another rather than evidence of sister languages.
Descendents:
Tambakhan’s influence on Hlorasan is a bit easier to gauge. The basic Hlorasan colour words, which divide the spectrum into white, red, yellow/green, and blue/black—not found in any other Hlorasan-Erkavic language—is probably Tambakhan in origin, though it could be Pre-Hlorasan. Most prominent, however, are the numerous Hlorasan personal names, toponyms, and words which derive from Tambakhan. Geographic words are a particularly strong group, with examples such as:

• ŋutsø from *ŋutasa (crag, tor, rock outcrop)
• tsyarè from *chari (isolated hill, inselberg, monadnock)
• nyandarè from *nyandari (wide, lowland river valley)
• vilë/wilë from *wila (combe, cove valley)

Hlorasan’s development of palatalized sounds has also been connected to Tambakhan’s palatals, though again it seems to be a broader areal feature to some extent, also present in East Velkaran idioms and some Naskuyan languages (or again, could be coincidental, since the timeline of the other languages’ adoption of palatalization is less clear).

Phonology

The phonology of Tambakhan has been reconstructed as follows:
Consonants:

p	b	ᵐb	t	d	ⁿd	tʃ	dʒ	ⁿdʒ	k	g	ᵑɡ
f			s			ʃ			x
	m			n			ɲ			ŋ
	w			l			j
				r

Most of these are fairly certain, however there is some debate on whether the palatals were single consonants, or sequences, since both the Naskuyan and Hlorasan writing systems of the time used sequences of letters to convey palatal and palatalized sounds.
The character of the rhotic is debated, with most scholars suggesting that it was either an approximant (as in Hlorasan) or a tap/flap.
The prenasalized stops have been deduced through the varying methods of transcribing them into different languages. Most Naskuyan languages preferred to use glyphs used for plain voiced stops, while Hlorasan adopted them as nasal-stop sequences.
Vowels: Tambakhan had a three-vowel system of a, i, and u.
Syllable Structure: (C)V
Stress: Initial (ex. /ˈa.ma/, /ˈɲa.ⁿda.ri/)

Morphology

Most linguists adventurous enough to attempt reconstructing Tambakhan’s morphology either interpret it as a highly analytical or highly synthetic language. There isn’t much evidence either way. Synthesis is attested in Early Hlorasan, so its presence in Hlorasan can’t be counted as evidence for Tambakhan’s morphology. Furthermore, even if one goes so far as to assume the language which was substrate to Early Hlorasan was related to Tambakhan, synthesis was common among the Hlorasan-Erkavic languages, and is reconstructed as having begun in Proto-Hlorasan-Velkaran.

Syntax

As with morphology, little information can be deduced. Even the many attested Hlorasan names which derived from Tambakhan compounds are of little help, since their meanings are long lost. Only a handful of name components have been identified, mostly cognates or derivatives of words borrowed into Hlorasan’s vocabulary. An example of the latter is Simyëli, from Tambakhan *simia-li; *simia is a regional word meaning “lion” also found in the Naskuyan languages, and *li is probably a name-forming suffix. Examples of the dithematic names are more numerous, such as Ëndayèfarà (*ndayi-faru), Khatyama (*xati-ama), and Zindëfisë (*rinda-fisa), but without the meanings of the names, what order the components follow is unknown.
There is some evidence that Tambakhan made use of enclitics. Middle Hlorasan adopted possessive enclitics for the first and second persons, and Tambakhan is the most likely source. Some have argued that the enclitics came from Naskuyan influence, since the second person one ends in -s (not a valid coda in Tambakhan), however those in favour of a Tambakhan origin suggest that the -s is epenthetic, to suit Hlorasan’s more consonant-heavy nature. Those who cited the -os form as likely related to Naskuyan -o were unaware of the Middle Hlorasan texts which consistently used -as or -ës; the vowel set was switched at the end of the Middle Hlorasan period. This yields Tambakhan *ui or *wi for “my” and *a for “your”.