Oldlanguage

Oldlanguage is an ancient, extinct language documented from inscriptions and clay tablets recovered in a river-valley civilization dating from roughly 1200 to 600 BCE. The surviving corpus comprises several thousand graphemic units, including short inscriptions, longer manuscripts, and administrative records, making it one of the most thoroughly studied languages of its period in the region.

Linguistic classification and structure: Oldlanguage is generally treated as a synthetic, primarily subject–object–verb language with complex morphology. Nouns show case-like markings and number, and there is a system of postpositions rather than prepositions. Verbs encode tense, aspect, mood, voice, and agreement with elements of the sentence, often via affixes and clitics. The lexicon reflects agriculture, religion, governance, and daily life; semantic shifts across a millennium are evident in the textual strata.

Phonology and writing system: The sound system likely included a set of voiceless and voiced stops, fricatives, nasals, and a liquid, along with a five-vowel inventory possibly bearing length distinctions. Oldlanguage was written using a mixed script combining syllabic signs with logograms and numerals. The signs show limited phoneme inventories and frequent logographic conventions for common terms.

Attestation and historical context: The language appears in administrative tablets, temple dedications, and literary fragments. Its decline is linked to political disruption and new linguistic influences, after which Oldlanguage ceased to be spoken.

Scholarly reception and legacy: Modern linguists and paleographers reconstruct grammar and lexicon from the surviving texts, publishing dictionaries, grammars, and editions. Oldlanguage's terminology survives in later regional dialects and in place-names and ritual language.