Wenja’s Roots: Dwani (Sounds), Part 4

Having taken a wonderful vacation after the end of the semester, we can now return to the blog. It’s been a while since we discussed the derivation of Wenja from PIE and today I’d like to focus on a topic that is near and dear to my heart — consonant clusters. A consonant cluster is a sequence of two or more consonants in a row.  Some languages, such as Hawaiian, do not allow any such sequences.  Think of the Hawaiian words that you know (Honolulu, Maui, Hawai’i, etc.). Each syllable is either a simple vowel (V) or a consonant plus vowel (CV). 

English, on the other hand, allows for a number of different types of syllables, many with very complex consonant clusters.

1. V = “a”
2. CV = “ray”
3. CCV = “pray”
4. CCCV = “spray”
5. VC = “(h)eck”
6. VCC = “ex”
7. VCCC = “(s)ects”
8. CVCCCC = “texts” [teksts]

As for as consonant clusters are concerned, Proto-Indo-European was much closer to English than Hawaiian. It permitted syllables of the following shapes:

1. V = *n̥ ‘un-‘
2. CV = *de ‘towards’, *só ‘he’, *h₂a (first person singular within certain verb paradigms)
3. CCVC = *pleh₁- ‘fill’
4. CCCVC = h₂stḗr ‘star’
5. CVCC = gʷénh₂ ‘woman’, wṓkʷs ‘voice’, sáls ‘salt’
6. CCVCCC = h₂wḗḱst ‘carried’, mlewh₂t ‘spoke’

So the largest word that you have in PIE is of the shape CCCVCCC, a hypothetical *spreḱst if you will. English is only slightly more tolerant in its consonant clusters.

While Wenja does allow for consonant clusters, it is much more restrictive than English & PIE. 

It allows for:

1. V = “u” (imperative)
2. VC = “aysh” (marker of posssibility, ‘maybe’), “an” (‘inside, in’)
3. CV = “ku” (question), “hu” (perfective marker), “ba” (marker of surprise)
4. CCV = “pra” (‘forth, earlier, in the morning’)
5. CVC = “san” (‘without; no’), “dus” (‘bad’), “pas” (‘behind, later, afterwards’), “tam” (‘even’)
6. CVCC = “bars” (‘barley’), 
7. CCVC = “smar.kaka” (‘hello’), “brash.tar” (‘brother’), “dwis” (‘2 times; again’)
8. CCVCC = “swansh” (‘play music!’ [command])

And why, you might ask did we make this decision?  Two reasons:

1. Recall that Wenja was designed to be “Proto-PIE”, a stage of the language before all of the fancy inflections were created within PIE.  (Much more on this in a future blog post)  There are no word endings per se, rather there are “clitics” that gravitate towards words to indicate additional grammatical information within the sentence.  In PIE the ending *-s marked either the nominative singular (the nominative marks the subject of the sentence) or the genitive singular (the genitive marks the possessive form, with other uses); cf. *h₃rḗḱs ‘king (nominative singular)’ and nékʷts ‘at night’ (genitive singuar).  With the -s directly attached onto the roots ‘king’ and ‘night’, it creates an even more complex consonant cluster.  No such situation exists in Wenja. 
2. As for the syllable initial “s” + stop clusters, there’s a really weird phenomenon in PIE called “s-mobile“, where an “s” may or may not appear at the beginning of a root.  A famous example is the verb *speḱ– ‘to see’, which shows up in English as spy, in Latin as spec- (seen in English spec-tacle), and Greek skep- (as in English sceptical). However, in Sanskrit the verb is paś- WITHOUT an s.  We really don’t know what s-mobile was, but it’s not unreasonable to assume that at some point it was a prefix of some sort, hence the variation. For this reason, our team assumed that in proto-PIE there were no roots with an original “s”, hence Wenja pacha ‘see’.