Nyango (working name) scratchpad

[linguistcat]

Nyango is intended to be a language related to Japanese, but spoken by cat spirits known collectively as kaibyou (怪猫) in Japanese, with the main subtypes within the population being bakeneko (化け猫), manekineko (招き猫) and nekomata (猫又).

Although stories about kaibyou in some form or another date back to some time in the Kamakura period, kaibyou appeared in Japan much earlier as an off-branch of a similar being in China. (I have found it referred to as Senri in Japanese, and Xian Li(?) in most likely Mandarin(?), written 仙狸. Finding more about this entity is proving difficult right now.) But the important aspect is that they showed up long before any written record of their existence. Because of this, they began speaking a form of Old Japanese (or possibly Pre-Old Japanese), which I will call Proto-Nyango until I have a proper endonym for Nyango and its predecessors.

Especially in the earliest stage, kaibyou actually avoided humans except to hunt them, so their language diverged from "standard" Old Japanese relatively quickly through differences in word usage and sound changes, although the basic grammar stayed pretty similar for a while. Later, as kaibyou became more common living among humans, especially in the Imperial Court and cities, large numbers of kaibyou were bilingual speakers of Japanese and Nyango of the time. Because of this increased contact, this was also about when stories started to pop up, which in turn pushed them to hide their presence again (along with many other types of youkai).

I'll be posting things here about the language(s) as I figure them out, and use it as a place to link back to if I have specific questions. For now I'm just going to take a break before posting the proto-language's (assumed) phonology.

[linguistcat]

I'm still not 100% on where I'm breaking Nyango from other Japonic languages, but I'm assuming that Old Japanese vowels are more or less i1 = /i/, i2 = /ɨ/, e1 = /e~^je/, e2 = /ɛ/, o1 = /o~^wo/, o2 = /ə/, a = /a/, and u = /u/. What later mostly became voiced stops and the allophones of /z/ were prenasalized, where what later turned into unvoiced stops and /s/ varied freely in voicing; the main difference was whether they were prenasalized or not. /p/ fricativizes intervocalically, especially within a root. /w r j/ are about the same as in Modern Japanese. Syllables are strictly V or CV and bare vowels are only allowed word initially.

Does this look right for at least some conception of Old Japanese, I'm not getting super specific here and just sketching it out enough that I can derive Proto-Nyango from it or as a sibling.

[akam chinjir]

I can't help you with Old Japanese, but "xianli" (or "xiānlí") is correct for "仙狸" in Mandarin.

[linguistcat]

I can't help you with Old Japanese, but "xianli" (or "xiānlí") is correct for "仙狸" in Mandarin.

Thank you, I might get more information in English with the proper tone markings. If not, it's good to know in itself.