Heláin

[Leilis]

Heláin is the language spoken in the Telian Commonwealth (Let-Curéid Telian), a confederation of coastal states called fyrdlands (freanda). The Telian are known throughout the world for their maritime trade, their medicine, and their religion: the worship of one, most high god according to the teachings of the high priest, prophet, and lawgiver Tersas. Writings attributed to Tersas and his descendants form the core of Liturgical Heláin, the literary dialect with which my reference grammar is chiefly concerned.

Key features:

• Sandhi causes less euphonious phoneme clusters to change to more euphonious ones.
• Finite verbs are ergative, and inflected for two tenses (past/nonpast) and nine aspects/moods (but not for person, number, or gender).
• Word order is verb-patient and noun-modifier.
• Nouns (a category including most adjectives) are inflected for five cases; they have two genders (masc./fem.) in the singular only, and common-gender plurals, as well as rare dual, trial, and collective forms.
• Pronouns (a hard-to-name category including various determiners) are inflected for nine cases, four of them shared with nouns. Any of their five ‘oblique cases’ can modify an oblique noun.
• Adpositions are not a disctinct part of speech; instead, their functions are handled by cases, pronouns, and some nouns. (One could also explain oblique-case pronouns as compounds of pronouns with post-positions that never appear independently.)

Real-world history: Heláin started as a naming language for a never-quite-finished story. Sometime around 2011, I read the LCK and scrapped my over-inflected, under-syntaxed mess. By 2013, I’d mostly settled on new phonology, morphology, and syntax, so I filled out vocabulary while writing some conworld texts.

Late last year (2025), I finished drafting three prose religious texts (about 4600 words of Heláin) as well as some bits of metrical poetry. Since then, I’ve slightly tweaked morphology and syntax, and am revisiting my entire lexicon to ‘reconstruct’ a proto-Heláin. The first pass has under 300 words left: that’s about 20% of the lexicon, but the hardest 20%.

My goal is to create a language that I find beautiful, and to write more poetry in it. Meanwhile, I want all etymologies to make sense.

Here's a sample of Heláin poetry; a few words will need to be changed to reflect my 2025 edits. The metre, based on syllable length (L = long, s = short), has three ‘feet’ of the form LLs or LsL or Lsss followed by one ‘foot’ of the form LsLs.

mur rint melien ever, u cweri avi teigladann i;
mur talama aistwín etir, finis ic, siurra,
aián mun: an, far so tallis il indis, asta.
ŋun mu ecres f’ithis s’istanas, har fi detta.

2-VOC.M be.kindled.PERF all.stars which-VOC.M, and white-ABS.F sun-ABS.F sky-go-IPRF a.ABS.F
2-VOC.M more dawn a.REL.M be.seen-INF.OBL.F a.ABL.F bright-VOC.M
say-PAS 2-REFL.M go.IMP be.obeyed.IMP 1-ABS.M will-OBL.F a.LOC.F righteousness-OBL.F beloved-VOC.M?
be.given.IMP 2-ABS.M fire-OBL.M and-flame-OBL.F my-be.worshipped-INF.GEN.F high and holy-VOC.M

O Thou who hast kindled the starry hosts, and they, white ones, suns, go in the sky;
O Thou more bright than the dawn, beyond seeing,
Thou saidst: Go, obey Me according to [My] will, rightly, O beloved.
Receive Thou the fire and flame of our worship, O High and Holy One.

[Lērisama]

This looks lovely! I have some questions¹. Please don't feel you have to answer all of them².

Heláin is the language spoken in the Telian Commonwealth (Let-Curéid Telian), a confederation of coastal states called fyrdlands (freanda).

Is there any particular reason you translate freanda thusly? Because it sounds nice or some kind of etymological relationship or something else. Whatever it is, I like the Old English-ism³.

Writings attributed to Tersas and his descendants form the core of Liturgical Heláin, the literary dialect with which my reference grammar is chiefly concerned.

Is liturgical Heláin still the prestige written language? Have you done any work on the differences between it and the vernacular?

Sandhi causes less euphonious phoneme clusters to change to more euphonious ones.

Could we have some examples of this please, and of pronunciation more broadly. Your Romanisation gives me a pretty good idea, but I'm not sure what the acute means⁴.

Finite verbs are ergative, and inflected for two tenses (past/nonpast) and nine aspects/moods (but not for person, number, or gender).
Word order is verb-patient and noun-modifier.

What does it mean for the verb to be ergative if it's not agreeing with anything (in some ergative way, of course). Is it marked with word order and/or case on the nouns, and your just distinguishing it from some (presumably non-ergative) non-finate clauses, or have I missed something?

[*]Nouns (a category including most adjectives) are inflected for five cases; they have two genders (masc./fem.) in the singular only, and common-gender plurals, as well as rare dual, trial, and collective forms.
[*]Pronouns (a hard-to-name category including various determiners) are inflected for nine cases, four of them shared with nouns. Any of their five ‘oblique cases’ can modify an oblique noun.

Does this mean that pronouns lack one of the noun cases in addition to their oblique cases? Or is it that the nominal oblique is only used in conjunction with a pronoun in some oblique case.

Late last year (2025), I finished drafting three prose religious texts (about 4600 words of Heláin) as well as some bits of metrical poetry. Since then, I’ve slightly tweaked morphology and syntax, and am revisiting my entire lexicon to ‘reconstruct’ a proto-Heláin. The first pass has under 300 words left: that’s about 20% of the lexicon, but the hardest 20%.

Oh, I'm way too familiar with that kind of work. Good luck!

Here's a sample of Heláin poetry; a few words will need to be changed to reflect my 2025 edits. The metre, based on syllable length (L = long, s = short), has three ‘feet’ of the form LLs or LsL or Lsss followed by one ‘foot’ of the form LsLs.

What counts as a long syllable in Heláin? My best guess from trying to scan the poetry is any coda consonant, maybe with some Latin/Greek style word final codae -> onsets of vowel initial words. Is that right? Is the specific meter inspired by anything? It sounds nice, but the description feels a bit odd somehow, but I don't know enough about meter to know why.⁵

mur rint melien ever, u cweri avi teigladann i;
mur talama aistwín etir, finis ic, siurra,
aián mun: an, far so tallis il indis, asta.
ŋun mu ecres f’ithis s’istanas, har fi detta.

That sounds really nice!

¹ Good questions, I hope. I may have missed something
² I definitely couldn't answer all of these about Lēri Ziwi…
³ It feels like there should be a word for this. I want to say Anglicism, but that isn't Old English by default.
⁴ Long vowels?
⁵ And what I do know is way too influenced by traditional analyses of Latin to be that much use here

[bradrn]

Finite verbs are ergative, and inflected for two tenses (past/nonpast) and nine aspects/moods (but not for person, number, or gender).
Word order is verb-patient and noun-modifier.

What does it mean for the verb to be ergative if it's not agreeing with anything (in some ergative way, of course). Is it marked with word order and/or case on the nouns, and your just distinguishing it from some (presumably non-ergative) non-finate clauses, or have I missed something?

I presumed that it was an attempt to say that ‘arguments of finite verbs are marked in such a way that they have ergative alignment’, presumably with case-marking.

[Leilis]

I think I can answer them all, they'll just be long answers if I don’t oversimplify!

freanda = frea + anda 'land'. frea (Old Heláin *ferea < far 'receive those summoned; be obeyed') can be translated 'obedience' or 'duty', but in Telian law, it refers to the duty of free men to defend their region, something analogous to the Old English fyrd.

Liturgical Heláin is still the language of education in 'modern' times (about 600 years after Tersas). I haven't done much work on the vernacular.

I'm not quite sure how to make a table here, but here's the consonant inventory (with romanisations when they're different from IPA). Nothing too exciting (except for some rare weirdness with L that I won't get into yet).

m n̪~n ŋ
p b t̪~t d̪~d k(c) g
ɸ~f β~v θ(th) ð(dh) s h
l
ʍ(hw)
r(rr)
ɾ

Vowels: a o u /ä~ɑ ɔ u/ and e i /ɛ ɪ/ (but /e i/ before other vowels)
Diphthongs: ye /jɛ/ ei /e:~ej~i:/ ai /ɒj/ oi /ɞj/

Apostrophes mark elided vowels (as in English contractions). Acutes mark ultimate stress (normally stress falls on the penult or antepenult).

The main rule of sandhi is that any time you have two adjacent consonants (excluding s, l, r, h, and hw), the first one becomes the nasal in the same place of articulation as the second one:

iv + then = inthen
ec + bas = embas
un + cir = uŋcir

If you have three or four adjacent consonants, the middle one(s) normally drop out (with some exceptions) and then sandhi applies to the first and last. There are also rules handling s, l, r, h, and hw, and vowels. These are not historical sound-changes; they happen any time a compound is formed (and Heláin really likes compounds).

I plan to answer everything else, just not tonight!

[Lērisama]

I think I can answer them all, they'll just be long answers if I don’t oversimplify!

That's fine. I did ask a lot of questions¹. I like your answers so far.

I'm not quite sure how to make a table here, but here's the consonant inventory (with romanisations when they're different from IPA). Nothing too exciting (except for some rare weirdness with L that I won't get into yet).

That looks good. As for tables… they're a pain. The two ways to make them are a) remember how html tables work, and then write on, except with slightly different tag names, or b) use our boardlord's phono tool².

Acutes mark ultimate stress (normally stress falls on the penult or antepenult).

Oh, that makes more sense.

¹ No, I had nothing to procrastinate on, why did you ask?
² Glosses are similar. You can either make them yourself, in a tedious and error-prone way, or use Neonnaut's gloss my gloss tool.

[Leilis]

Yes, I meant that the arguments of most finite verbs have ergative-absolutive alignment. At least, I hope those are the right words for what I mean. I reinvented ergativity when first developing Heláin (my early notes painfully describe how the accusative is the direct object of transitive verbs but the subject of intransitive verbs) and only later discovered the correct terminology, so I'm still not always sure I'm explaining it correctly:

ammus iŋge
sleep-IPRF boy-ABS.M
'the boy sleeps'

finnus iŋge sera
be.seen-IPRF boy-ABS.M girl-VOC.F
'the girl sees the boy'

The Old Heláin ergative case collapsed into the vocative (which is also the citation form). I gloss it as voc. but here it's acting as erg. Anyway, I was distinguishing finite verbs from participles, which are aligned differently (mostly active/passive but sometimes intentional/unintentional or animate/inanimate).

The noun/pronoun cases might be easier to explain by example. (I'm using 'pronoun' to translate the Heláin word corelfoi 'tool for tidying after/under'; terms like 'pronoun', 'determiner', 'demonstrative', 'deictic', 'quantifier' apply to some, but never all, of the corelfoira.)

The five noun cases are vocative (which also functions as an ergative), absolutive, reflexive, genitive, and oblique. Pronouns have voc., abs., refl., and gen. as well (I call these 'primary cases'), and then, instead of a single oblique case, five different cases: comitative, locative, allative, ablative, and instrumental. (I guess one could say instead that nouns have nine cases, but identical forms in five of those cases.)

Here's iŋga 'boy' again, with the pronoun tur 'that'.

voc. iŋga tur 'that boy [e.g. sees a dog]'
abs. iŋge tu 'that boy [e.g. sleeps]'
refl. iŋgeon ton 'that boy [e.g. washes] himself'
gen. iŋgos tos 'of that boy'
obl./com. iŋges tuvra 'with that boy'
obl./loc. iŋges tul 'on that boy'
obl./all. iŋges tullu 'towards that boy'
obl./abl. iŋges tuc 'from that boy'
obl./instr. iŋges tum 'by means of that boy'

Heláin metre is very loosely inspired by Classical metres (I'm a Latinist by background). An open syllable with a simple vowel (a, o, u, e, i) is short, and a closed syllable or a syllable with a diphthong or semivowel-vowel pair (ai, oi, ei, wV, yV) is long. By 'open' I mean the vowel is followed by no more than one consonant, or is word-final before a caesura or line-break. But this is oversimplified; for instance, a nasal before a caesura or line-break doesn't close a syllable, and the prefix lle- is weighted as if it were pronounced lei- (it isn't).

This particular metre is meant to have a sort of driving-forward feeling. If we think of a short syllable as one unit, and a long syllable as two, the first three feet have five units each, which is a little weird and unbalanced, and then the fourth foot (after a caesura, forgot to mention that) has six units, which is more settled. So:

MUR RINT me- / LIEN e-ver u / CWE-ri a-vi // TEIG-la-DANN i
MUR ta-la-ma / AIS-TWIN e- / TIR fin-IS // IC si-UR-ra
AI-AN mun / AN FAR so / TAL-lis IL // IN-dis AS-ta
N,UN mu EC- / RES f'i-THIS / S'IS-tan-AS // HAR fi DET-ta

(The five-unit foot, which can be LLs or LsL or Lsss, is called a lei centa. Normally you don't want every lei centa in a line to be the same form, so the fourth line here, which has LsL three times, is not ideal, but it's all right now and then. Also, ultimate stress doesn't change the metrical length/weight of a syllable, but you never put it in a short syllable, so here, aián has to be followed by a word starting with a consonant, to force -án to be long.)

I've been working on a longer conworld hymn in the same metre but have been held up three stanzas in by my hatred of my words for 'mountain' and 'forest' (which come from the very earliest layers of Heláin).

I think I've answered everything, but if I missed something, feel free to ask again.

[Lērisama]

Interesting things

Thank you for the answers. I especially like the metrical system now you've explained it more.

[Leilis]

Thank you for the answers. I especially like the metrical system now you've explained it more.

Thank you for reading!

*****

I started working on Proto-Heláin only a few months ago, which has meant devising rules to explain things that were never meant to form a coherent pattern. Thus, some descendants of Proto-Heláin roots are words that I haphazardly made to sound similar (because their meanings were related), and some are words that were never intended to be similar but I've now discovered can also be derived.

I won't post my list of sound-changes (from Proto-Heláin to Old Heláin), at least not yet, because it might change, and it's boring, but I'm planning to post groups of PH roots as I work through them. Variants exist because of fronting and affixes:

• Sometimes a vowel was fronted to match an added -i; sometimes it was fronted but no -i stayed to affect other sound-changes. a > æ > i, o > y
• a-, m-, ŋ-, s-, and -s represent unknown affixes that disappeared after triggering sound-changes; the affixes may have been longer, only ending (or beginning) with those letters, or may even have involved other vowels (a), bilabials (m), velars (ŋ), or unvoiced consonants (s).

Proto-Heláin inventory:
m? n ŋ?
p pʰ t tʰ k kʰ
l ɬ r s w~ʍ
i~j y
o
a æ

(I'm not yet sure whether m and ŋ were distinct phonemes, or just allophones of n.)

*kʰatʰ

*a-kʰatʰ-s > gat ‘be snatched’
*s-kʰatʰo > cadha ‘black’
*kʰætʰ-s > het ‘be cooked’
*a-kʰætʰ > geth ‘be charred’
*kʰitʰ > itha ‘flame’
*s-kʰitʰ > cith ‘be burnt’

Other possible descendants:
eth 'mould, mildew, rust' could be from OH *heth < *kʰætʰ, because mildew damage could be compared to burning.
hidh 'be tied, be bound' could be from a dialectical variant *hedh < *kʰætʰo because ... erm ... maybe you snatch things by tying them up? That one's a stretch, though.

[Leilis]

More Proto-Heláin...

Update on the *kʰatʰ group: eth 'rust' will be a descendant, hidh 'be tied' will not. Also *kʰatʰ-s > hat ‘be cooked’; and I found another descendant: *kʰætʰi *k[ʰ]oa ‘mouldy/burnt lung’ > edeico ‘pneumonia’.

*kʰor

*s-kʰor > cor ‘under’, cor ‘be asked (for s.th.)’
*s-kʰor *opʰæ ‘under(ground) egg’ > OH *corva, dial. *covva > cova ‘onion’
*a-kʰors > gos ‘kill’ = ‘lay low’
*kʰorá > OH har ‘be above, excel’ > ar ‘high, noble’
*a-kʰorá > gar ‘be steered’

*-awor-

*aworm > OH *aum > aim ‘be in pain’
*nawor > OH *naura > naira ‘evil’
*naworá > nar ‘be wounded’
*naworn > OH *naun > nain ‘spear’
*næwor > OH *neur > nur ‘be torn’

I'm not sure how to format PH roots. I'd been using a hyphen to separate a word from affixes that influence it without becoming part of it, but then it's confusing to use hyphens e.g. in compounds. Maybe brackets for the disappearing affixes, but I don't really like how that looks (e.g. *[s]kʰor). Edit: actually, initial s- *does* become part of the word, until a sound-change removes initial s- before all consonants, so *s-kʰor is fine, but maybe I should be writing e.g. *[a]kʰors, or picking some symbol to stand for a disappearing vowel.

[bradrn]

I’d be very interested to see the sound changes for this thing.

I'm not sure how to format PH roots. I'd been using a hyphen to separate a word from affixes that influence it without becoming part of it, but then it's confusing to use hyphens e.g. in compounds. Maybe brackets for the disappearing affixes, but I don't really like how that looks (e.g. *[s]kʰor). Edit: actually, initial s- *does* become part of the word, until a sound-change removes initial s- before all consonants, so *s-kʰor is fine, but maybe I should be writing e.g. *[a]kʰors, or picking some symbol to stand for a disappearing vowel.

Perhaps you could use - for affixes and = for compounds? For disappearing, unreconstructable vowels, I think ‘V’ is the most sensible choice.

[Leilis]

I’d be very interested to see the sound changes for this thing.

I'll post them after I've sorted a problem with b and v that I found today...

Perhaps you could use - for affixes and = for compounds? For disappearing, unreconstructable vowels, I think ‘V’ is the most sensible choice.

I thought about V but it wouldn't work well in sca2. I might just pick some vowel that I don't use otherwise (ə? ø?).

Edited to add: I've started skimming your ergativity posts. I kind of invented ergativity for myself in the course of constructing Heláin, and only afterwards learned that it existed in real-world languages, so I'm not always sure I'm doing it naturalistically or describing it correctly. Unfortunately, while most Heláin nouns are marked for both voc. (= erg.) and abs., or for neither, some nouns ending in -r or -s or short-front-vowel-plus-unvoiced-plosive mark abs. only. The Old Heláin ergative case (which collapsed into the usually-but-not-always-marked vocative) was always marked, though.

[Leilis]

All right, I think I've worked out my b/v problem. Here are the sound changes, with commentary. (Note that these get us from Proto-Heláin to Old Heláin; there are a few more changes from OH to Liturgical Heláin, but I do those by hand.)

Categories (I'm not sure all these letters actually show up):
V=aeiouáíyæjø
C=ptkbdgfþqvðqmnŋlɬrscz
P=ptk
B=bdg
F=fþq
W=vðq
N=mnŋ
L=pbfv

Sound changes:
0. Regularising input.

h/ʰ/P_
pʰ/f/_
tʰ/þ/_
kʰ/q/_
ł/ɬ/_
*//_

1. Voicing + fricativisation: Plosives become voiced and unaspirated between vowels, and unvoiced and unaspirated next to s or before another unvoiced and unaspirated plosive. All aspirated plosives become unvoiced fricatives (i.e., at this point in sca2, fþq silently cease to represent aspirated plosives and instead represent unvoiced fricatives); also d fricativises before a rounded vowel, and b before any vowel.

P/B/V_V
F/B/V_V
F/P/_[sP]
F/P/s_
d/ð/_[oy]
b/v/_V

2. Vowel/semivowel changes: By this point, o has dropped to a in a syllable before a stressed á. Before w, p becomes voiced (unless s or an unvoiced plosive forces it to stay unvoiced) and ɬ becomes l; wo becomes u, and w is deleted initially before a or æ, anywhere before y, and after r or any labial. Then æ becomes e everywhere except word-finally, where it becomes a. I is lengthened except after another vowel and y is unrounded (becoming short i); j after a vowel becomes i and after a consonant becomes the same consonant; short i disappears before any vowel that is followed by any i; double-short-i becomes long i. (Some i-related rules might be unnecessary; I’ll double-check as I get to more i-heavy words.)

o/a/_(C)(C)á
p/b/_w/[sP]_
ɬ/l/_w
wo/u/_
wy/y/_
w//#_[aæ]
w//[rL]_
æ/a/_#
æ/e/_
i/í/_/V_
y/i/_
Cj/C²/_
Vj/i/_
i//_V[ií]
ii/í/_

3. Disappearing consonants: Initial s before a consonant is deleted; the first of any nasal/r pair is deleted (unless it's double-r); kh becomes c between vowels or word-finally, and otherwise becomes h, which is deleted before any nasal; and hl becomes ɬ, but word-final ɬ becomes l.

s//#_C
N//_[rN]
r//_N
q/c/V_V
q/c/_#
q/h/_
h//_N
hl/ɬ/_
ɬ/l/_#

4. Contractions: A vowel is deleted between between two consonants framed by vowels, as long at least one of the consonants is a nasal, l, r, or s; a vowel is also deleted between two identical consonants, if any vowel precedes the first of those consonants.* Initial mystery vowels disappear.

V//V[Nlrs]_CV
V//VC_[Nlrs]V
V//Vp_p
V//Vb_b
V//Vf_f
V//Vv_v
V//Vt_t
V//Vd_d
V//Vþ_þ
V//Vð_ð
V//Vk_k
V//Vg_g
ø//_

* I know I've left out some consonants for this. Not sure if I need to write more sca2 rules, or re-write my description to be more specific; I'll find out as I go. I think everything else works out, but very likely I'll soon run into something new that's wrong.

[Axas mlö]

Hi! I'm enjoying reading about Heláin. I like the groups of words from the same root - those are fun. I was confused by the meter but I think I understand now.

I'm trying to understand the gloss in the first post, and I'm confused by the lowercase a, as in a.ABS.F. I couldn't figure out how it fits as the English word 'a, an', nor as 'agent-like argument of canonical transitive verb'. What does it mean?

[bradrn]

I thought about V but it wouldn't work well in sca2.

Might I take this opportunity to advertise my own Brassica?

Edited to add: I've started skimming your ergativity posts.

It’s worth noting that those posts are rather old and my views on some analyses have changed a bit since then. (All the specific data and examples should still be correct, though.)

Unfortunately, while most Heláin nouns are marked for both voc. (= erg.) and abs., or for neither, some nouns ending in -r or -s or short-front-vowel-plus-unvoiced-plosive mark abs. only. The Old Heláin ergative case (which collapsed into the usually-but-not-always-marked vocative) was always marked, though.

Sounds fine to me. Who says all cases should have an overt casemarker? Far weirder things have happened.

(And in fact, in most ergative languages the absolutive isn’t overtly marked.)

[Leilis]

I'm trying to understand the gloss in the first post, and I'm confused by the lowercase a, as in a.ABS.F. I couldn't figure out how it fits as the English word 'a, an', nor as 'agent-like argument of canonical transitive verb'. What does it mean?

It's a pronoun/determiner with minimal lexical information. So I did gloss it as the English word 'a(n)' there, but there must be a better way to handle it.

Sometimes it gives more specific case (or even number/gender) information for words that have fewer forms. In the second line of the poem, there's finis ic be.seen-INF.OBL.F a.ABL.F 'than seeing' -- ic (same word) is marking the non-specific oblique finis 'seeing' as an ablative ('more bright away from seeing' = 'more bright than can be seen'). Likewise, in l. 3, tallis il will-OBL.F a.LOC.F 'in [My] will'.

In l. 1, though, it's a clefting pronoun: properly it should be teigladann cweri avi, verb, then patient, but because the patient (cweri avi) comes first, the verb (teigladann) still needs a patient after it.

I need to edit the poem, because I merged the 'relative' case into the genitive a few months ago but there's still one here.

[bradrn]

I'm trying to understand the gloss in the first post, and I'm confused by the lowercase a, as in a.ABS.F. I couldn't figure out how it fits as the English word 'a, an', nor as 'agent-like argument of canonical transitive verb'. What does it mean?

It's a pronoun/determiner with minimal lexical information. So I did gloss it as the English word 'a(n)' there, but there must be a better way to handle it.

It sounds like a gloss of simply ‘ABS.F’ would work, perhaps?

[Leilis]

I'm trying to understand the gloss in the first post, and I'm confused by the lowercase a, as in a.ABS.F. I couldn't figure out how it fits as the English word 'a, an', nor as 'agent-like argument of canonical transitive verb'. What does it mean?

It's a pronoun/determiner with minimal lexical information. So I did gloss it as the English word 'a(n)' there, but there must be a better way to handle it.

It sounds like a gloss of simply ‘ABS.F’ would work, perhaps?

I think so!

[Leilis]

More Proto-Heláin. (Now ø = disappearing mystery vowel.)

*pʰan

*pʰanr > far ‘be attended, be obeyed’
*øpʰanr > var ‘be conquered’
*pʰæn > fen ‘come’
*øpʰæn > ven ‘turn; happen’
*pʰin > fin ‘be seen’ = ‘come into view’

Unrelated *øpar > bar ‘be held’, as well as maybe brec 'fruit, grape' (through a derivative meaning 'pick').

*pʰon

*spʰon > pon ‘swim’
*øpʰon > von 'sail'
*pʰonra > fora ‘sea’ [cf. *apʰa > *apʰara > avra ‘mountain’]
*pʰoná > fana ‘wing’
*øpʰoná > van ‘be fanned, be winnowed’

(Oops, ø//_ needs to happen earlier, otherwise *øpʰoná > *vná instead of > *vaná.)

[Leilis]

Three probably-related roots:

*tʰæ, *tʰæn, *tʰæs

*stʰæ > tea ‘be’

*tʰæn > then ‘stand’
*stʰænr > ter ‘doorway’
*stʰin > tein ‘end, stop’
*stʰini-*ti/tʰi ‘boundary-marker?’ > tindi ‘string’ (I don't yet have a proto-word *ti or *tʰi)

*tʰæs > thes ‘lie’
*øtʰæs > des ‘crouch’
*stʰæs > tes ‘sit’
*stʰæs + n + æ/i/y + t/ts/tʰs > tenta 'seat-cushion'
*stʰis > tiss ‘rest; be quiet’ (the extra s is from hissing, like 'shhh...')

Also dha 'here, thus' could be < *øtʰoæ, but I'd have to explain how the o got there.

(edited, I made up my mind about two possible descendants.)

[WeepingElf]

I'm chiming in late, and don't have much to say, except that it looks good. I love diachronic conlanging like this.