Proto-Dené-Caucasian language

Proto-Dené-Caucasian is the reconstructed hypothetical common ancestor of the Dené-Caucasian languages, a proposed language superfamily to which Basque, North Caucasian, Burushaski, Sino-Tibetan, Yeniseian, Na-Dené and possibly also other language families may belong.

Reconstructed phonology

As with Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic, linguists working on reconstructions of the Proto-Dené-Caucasian language usually do not use the IPA. To facilitate comparisons with the literature, Starostin's transcription (largely identical to Bengtson's) is used in this section, followed by the IPA equivalents between slashes (for phonemes) or brackets (for actual phones). It differs from the IPA especially in the affricates, all of which are written with a single character, the laterals, and the pharyngeal and epiglottal consonants (complicated by the fact that Starostin did not use the term "epiglottal").

As in all reconstructions of proto-languages, every value in the tables below is a hypothesis and may change as more work is done.

Consonants

"...to be completed soon..."

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Consonants

§1 Stops

Note: Na-Dené languages have three series of stops usually realized as voiceless lenes, aspirated fortes, and ejective fortes, respectively. These are most often transcribed as IPA|/t tʰ tʼ/ (emphasizing the aspiration contrast and the fact that all three series are usually voiceless). In the following table, they are transcribed as IPA|/d t tʼ/ to make comparison to the other Dené-Caucasian language families (and to the orthographies of the Na-Dené languages) easier.

ound correspondences "(finished except for footnotes and Na-Dené)"

The following table depicts how the phonemes of Proto-Dené-Caucasian are hypothesized to have changed into the phonemes of its descendants. Starostin's transcription is used for Proto-Dené-Caucasian, the Basque orthography is used for Basque; IPA is given for all. (Burushaski does not have a fixed orthography.) The Na-Dené correspondences are rather tentative and come exclusively from Bengtson (2008). Hyphens indicate that a phoneme evolved in different ways depending on its position in a word, for example at the beginning or the end. "0" indicates disappearance without a trace. The exact identity of the Proto-Yeniseian phoneme "r₁" is unclear. The derivatives of Proto-Dené-Caucasian consonant clusters are not shown when their constituent phonemes evolved independently.

Note: Na-Dené languages have three series of stops usually realized as voiceless lenes, aspirated fortes, and ejective fortes, respectively. These are most often transcribed as IPA|/t tʰ tʼ/ (emphasizing the aspiration contrast and the fact that all three series are usually voiceless). In the following table, they are transcribed as IPA|/d t tʼ/ to make comparison to the other Dené-Caucasian language families (and to the orthographies of the Na-Dené languages) easier.

* ¹ /h/ has disappeared in the southern dialects of Basque in historical times.
* ² IPA|/ɦ/ is reconstructed (*) for earlier stages of Basque; it has become /h/ in two northern dialects and disappeared in all others (the remaining northern one and the southern ones).
* ³ Next to /o/ and /u/.
* ⁴ Lengthening of the preceding vowel.
* ⁵ Nasalization of the preceding vowel.
* ⁶ In PNC, the prosodic feature of morpheme-wide tenseness is marked by presence of one or more long (tense) consonants in a morpheme. Starostin also uses a superscript ^T to mark a tense morpheme and a superscript ^L to mark a lax one, i.e. PNC *(...)Cː(...) = *(...)C(...)^T and *(...)C(...) = *(...)C(...)^L.
* ⁷ Or rather, when the stress was on the last syllable and the second consonant was a liquid (/IPA|CVˈRV/), the word became /CRV/ instead of the otherwise expected /CVR/.
* ⁸ At the third position of the first (or only) syllable (/IPA|CVʔC/), unless that syllable is long (/IPA|CVːC/).