An Introduction To The Ancestral Word
With the exception of onomatopoeia, each Ancestral word was woven of two strands: one consonantal, one vocalic.
Put simply, the consonants of an Ancestral word symbolized a kind of being, and its vowels symbolized a state of being.
Put another way, the vowels of each Ancestral word expressed its referent’s dynamicity – it’s natural or metaphorical position on the universal journey from pre-existence to post-existence.
The Semantics Of The Ancestral Simple Consonant
Ancestral’s consonantal roots were mimetic in origin. To the Ancestral ear, Ancestral’s forms of articulation suggested permanence, and its flows of articulation suggested transience. Those consonants formed in the back of the mouth suggested simplicity and purity; those in the front, complexity and fragility.
The Semantics Of The Ancestral Simple Vowel
Each of Ancestral’s five cardinal vowels expressed one aspect of a single semantic sphere: the natural and metaphorical meanings of existence e.g. being, living, changing, waxing and waning.
To my knowledge, the nearest equivalent in today’s languages are the sing, sang, sung pattern of Modern English, the vocalic transfix of the Semitic triliteral root, the sound-symbolic vowel hierarchies of the Tai language Zhuang, the onomatopoeic vocabulary of Japanese, the demonstrative system of the Uto-Aztecan language Shoshoni, and the semantic clines of the Tierra del Fuegan language Yagán.
Every Ancestral word (with the exceptions noted above) included at least one of these five simple vocalic transfixes, the quality of which indicated the state or phase (literal or metaphorical) of its referent, as follows:
- i the unforeseeable future, far ahead, the dreamtime, the mythological future, pre-birth
- e the foreseeable future, ahead, young, growing, waxing, living
- a the present, here, now, peaking, mature, climax
- o the remembered past, behind, old, fading, waning, dying
- u the unremembered past, far behind, the dreamtime, the mythological past, post-death
Please note that, strictly speaking, each Ancestral verb inflected for aspect rather than tense. If relevant, tense was indicated by the addition of the appropriate temporal word or phrase: day, week, season, year, generation, et cetera.
Examples Of The Ancestral Word
CAMP
- qì a potential camp site ~ to choose a camp site
- qè a young camp ~ to set up camp
- qà a camp ~ to camp
- qò an old camp ~ to break down camp
- qù a former camp site ~ to recall a camp site
FLOWER
- fákî a flower bud ~ to bud
- fákê an opening flower ~ to begin to flower
- fákâ a mature flower ~ to flower
- fákô an old flower ~ to wither
- fákû seed ~ to seed
ANTEATER
- xíwí the spirit of a pangolin ~ to be the spirit of a pangolin
- xéwé a young pangolin ~ to be a young pangolin
- xáwá a mature pangolin ~ to be a mature pangolin
- xówó an old pangolin ~ to be an old pangolin
- xúwú the ghost of a pangolin ~ to be the ghost of a pangolin
The Typology Of Ancestral
Given it’s extraordinarily low morpheme-to-word ratio, it’s clear that Ancestral was an isolating language, much like Mandarin Chinese or Yoruba.