Table of Contents
Languages
Language families of the takmar and xtauh
The takmar and the xtauh are closely related species, and diverged from each other much more recently than did humans compared to their own nearest relatives, the Neanderthals. This is even true to the extent that some degree of interbreeding is still possible, though problematic. The separation between the two species took shape over some time, but did not become complete until between 9000 and 6000 cycles ago - in human terms, 50,000 and 32,500 years ago. While this means the history of the takma species is quite short in broad evolutionary terms, this is still considerably longer than the evolution of languages can be reliably traced for humans, for whom even the major language families can only be conclusively reconstructed to 8000 to 5000 years ago.
While these factors are somewhat mitigated by the limited population of both species, both in numbers and in geographic spread, the fact remains that although it can be safely assumed that the takma languages are all related to ones that were, at one time, spoken by xtauh, this does not mean that the precise connections can be reliably identified. There is no guarantee that all takma languages are even related to each other - the migration process that separated them from the xtauh occurred over a long enough period of time that it could have, and probably did, involve multiple linguistic groups. But even above this, it means that enough time has passed that any relationship between takma and xtauh languages would be badly obscured - even assuming that the nearest related xtauh languages survived to the present day in any case.
Takmar
- Southwestern? (speculative)
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- Old Citadelese
- Other Imperial vernaculars
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- Uzhidan proper
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Xtauh
- ???
- ???
- ???
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