Language

Introduction

It is important to draw a distinction between varieties of the Oderian language that may find use in the Oderian project. In the context of Oderian varieties, the koiné language that was spoken naturally as a living language in the original trading culture between the first and sixth centuries BC is sometimes referred to as Classical Oderian. It is this variety that is mainly documented on this page.

Beyond Classical Oderian's death as a living language, specific fossilised or revived varieties find use throughout history. These further forms may be grouped together under the label Neo-Oderian, though it is more correct to apply the precision of multiple labels: Biblical, Medieval and modern Neo-Oderian.

Biblical Oderian

Despite its loss of first language speakers, the legacy of Glatēs' fourth-century-BC writings secured Oderian's literary tradition well beyond the lifetime of its speakers. This reverence and fascination led to early Oderian translations of the Christian Bible in the 5th century AD, which found some use in cementing Oderian's continued status as a fringe religious lingua franca amongst the educated religious classes of central Europe.

Medieval Oderian

Following on from the legacy of Biblical Oderian, some European writers of the medieval period, starting in around the 9th/10th century, translated their non-religious works into Oderian. This began a central European tradition that also resulted in original Oderian works, with the language form used still mostly adhering to Glatēs' prescriptivist documentation from more than a thousand years earlier.

Sound changes

Consonants

Consonantal development in Oderian remains fairly close to the changes seen in Celtic, which is part of the evidence given by some linguists for Oderian’s categorisation as a Celtic koiné rather than a higher level western Indo-European koiné.

• The ‘palatovelar’ series *ḱ, *ǵ and *ǵʰ merged with the plain velar series *k, g and gʰ.
• The voiceless plosive series *p, *t, *k and *kʷ remained as voiceless plosives with the exception of *p which fricated to /ɸ/ (transcribed as <f>).
• The plain voiced plosive series *b, *d, *g and *gʷ merged with the breathy voiced plosive series *bʰ, *dʰ, *gʰ and *gʷʰ, with both becoming plain voiced plosives.
• In contrast to the development of other western Indo-European languages, Oderian retained Indo-European syllabic resonants as syllabic consonants.

Vowels

Vocalic development in Oderian, in contrast to the consonants, displays a higher level of regularisation and simplification.

• As is typical of western Indo-European dialects, earlier Indo-European laryngeals (*h₁, *h₂ and *h₃) remain only as artefacts of their effect on surrounding vowels
  • *h₂ and *h₃ coloured adjacent vowels to /a/.
  • Additionally, laryngeals caused lengthening of a preceding vowel.
  • All other laryngeals are lost.
• The vowels *o and *a (typically associated with syllabic-h₂) merged into a single low vowel /a/
• Vowels preceding semivowels merge into specific semivowels, mostly also losing any length distinction in the vowels
  • *ey, *ēy → ei
  • *oy, *ōy, *h₂(e)y → ai
  • *ew, *ēw → eu
  • *ow, *ōw, h₂ew, h₃ew → au
  • One specific exception to the rule of the loss of length distinction in diphthongs is that length was sometimes artificially reinserted into some diphthongs in final or near-final position in consonant-stem nouns by analogy with the vowel length variance displayed in that stem’s paradigm, e.g. saqāi ‘fellow soldier’ (with declining stem saqai-).