Pre-Seneran Hickic

Pre-Seneran Hickic is the working label for the stage between the maritime settlement layer and the attested Early Hick dialects of Senera. It covers the period when Hickic-speaking communities had settled on Senera but before the best-known Early Hick reference dialects had fully crystallized.

This page is a staging area for Seneran-specific innovations that should not be projected directly onto Proto-Hick or Proto-Maritime Hickic.

The current testable sound-change model is implemented in early-hick.lsc. In that file, Pre-Seneran corresponds most closely to Stage 2, while Pre-Hick corresponds to Stage 3.

Historical Position

The Seneran branch likely began as maritime Hickic-speaking settlers became established on Senera and grew less tightly connected to the Princely Channel island network. Coastal settlements, river trade, inland expansion, and regional isolation all contributed to later Early Hick dialect differences.

Approximate working chronology:

Layer	Approximate Position	Notes
Proto-Maritime Hickic	before Seneran settlement	shared island and straits layer
Pre-Seneran Hickic	after settlement on Senera; before Pre-Hick	Seneran-specific innovations before Early Hick dialects crystallized
Pre-Hick	before ~1000 PF	immediate pre-Early-Hick layer modeled by Stage 3 of early-hick.lsc
Early Hick	~1000 PF to 300 PF	attested reference stage used for most Seneran Hickic grammar

Pre-Seneran is especially useful for discussing:

• forms that are too Seneran-specific to be Proto-Maritime;
• changes shared across Early Hick dialects before local divergence;
• regional dialect drift that later becomes visible in Early Hick;
• case markers and demonstratives that were productive by Early Hick but not securely reconstructable to Proto-Hick.

Working Sound Changes

Current Stage 2 Proto-Seneran changes include:

1. unstressed vowel reduction, with exceptions after initial clusters;
2. disabling final vowel repair as inherited forms become more stable;
3. initial-syllable vowel fronting after fricatives;
4. final vowel centralization.

Current Stage 3 Pre-Hick changes include:

1. final glide vocalization and diphthong repair;
2. initial glottal fricative and glottal stop deletion;
3. animacy marker reduction;
4. dental fricative cluster formation;
5. vowel coalescence and weak hiatus repair;
6. coda simplification;
7. restricted first-syllable syncope;
8. final cluster metathesis and other surface cluster repairs.

Relationship To Early Hick

_{See also: Early Hick}

Early Hick remains the main attested reference point for Seneran Hickic. Pre-Seneran is a reconstruction layer used to explain how the productive Early Hick system formed.