Qʼač languages

The Qʼač languages are a theorised primary branch of the Koyanic language family. They are grouped based on a set of shared sound changes and common features, but it is not known whether they compose a phylogenetic clade or if they just spent an extended period of time in contact after Proto-Koyanic split into its early dialects.

Name
The name Qʼač is representative of the reflexes of the Proto-Koyanic numeral *qx₂əc "one" found in the Qʼač languages, for example:


 * Old Qʼachkav q̓eč
 * Tøhaol raċ
 * Proto-Hnäzb *qʼats

This particular root demonstrates a few characteristic phonological features of the Qʼač languages, namely uvular consonants, ejectives and affricates. In many Koyanic languages, *qx₂əc lends itself to meanings involving people, particular in endonyms, being the source of the name Qʼachkav.

Two more well-established primary Koyanic branches, Gäj and Kát, are similarly named after their reflexes of *qx₂əc.

Common sound changes
The primary phonological change distinguishing Qʼač languages from other Koyanic languages was the development of affricates through a variety of sound changes. Most of these changes involve sequences of coronal plosives and fricatives being reinterpreted as a merged single consonant, e.g. sequences like -t.s- and -tʰ.ɬ- become single consonants -ts- and -tɬʰ- respectively.

Additionally, voiceless sonorants are treated as phonemic consonants in Proto-Qʼač, rather than allophones in fortis clusters. The voiceless lateral patterns as a fricative, so is transcribed *ɬ, as opposed to Proto-Koyanic's *l̥. Note that implicit in the development of Qʼač is the equivalence tʰɬ tʼɬ tʰs tʼs > tɬʰ tɬʼ tsʰ tsʼ.

The following sound changes are reconstructed to have occurred in all Qʼač languages in roughly the order presented, though some languages seem to reflect a slightly different relative chronology or additional changes in between those presented.

Vowels
Like all other Koyanic languages, a schwa *ə *ə̄ was coloured by an adjacent laryngeal consonant *x₁ *x₂ *x₃ within the same syllable. Stress and vowel length are retained from Proto-Koyanic and do not affect the resulting vowel quality. In addition, the laryngeal consonant is lost in all environments except at the start of words and between vowels. The quality of the vowels resulting from laryngeal-colouring are difficult to reconstruct, but are typically assigned the symbols *e, *æ and *o respectively when discussing early Qʼač languages.

In the Tsittar languages, the position of the laryngeal with respect to the schwa had an effect on the colour of the resulting vowel. One hypothesis describes Proto-Qʼač has having contrastive tense and lax forms of each vowel, where the tense vowels derive from Proto-Koyanic *əX and the lax vowels from *Xə.

Proto-Qʼač
The Qʼač languages may have a more recent common ancestor than Proto-Koyanic, the hypothetical Proto-Qʼač language. If it did exist as a distinct language stage, it must have developed from one of the late dialects of Proto-Koyanic in a relatively short period of time, perhaps only a few centuries. This is evidenced by the relative chronology of sound changes, which suggest that most of the evolution must have taken place before the laryngeal colouring of vowels, a process which is thought to have taken place in all four major branches around the same time in the 4th millennium BGS.

Reconstruction of Proto-Qʼač has proven possible, though not that useful since it is not far derived from Proto-Koyanic, and perhaps not a historically meaningful language stage. One possible reconstruction of a Proto-Qʼač consonant inventory is presented below.