Old Shár language

Old Shár was the stage of the Shár language between 3500 BEKE and around 100 AEKE.

Evolution from Proto-Limjiang

 * The voiced velar stop softened to a voiced velar fricative
 * The clusters became labialized.
 * The clusters became softened.
 * and were more or less reinterpreted as allophones of the same vowel phoneme, with  appearing in open syllables and before,  appearing everywhere else.
 * became after, remained  after alveolar sibilants and , became  everywhere else
 * became after
 * The sibilants developed heavily palatalized allophones  when followed by.
 * The alveolar and dental consonants developed rhotacised/retroflexed allophones  when followed by.

Syllable structure
In Old Shár, a syllable normally consisted of:
 * (Optionally) An initial consonant, or a consonant + glide cluster.
 * The velar glide could only exist after the velar consonants
 * The palatal glide could exist after any consonant
 * (Mandatory) A vowel
 * (Optionally) A final glide or a coda-consonant

Initials

 * The actual status of is unknown. It could have been an alveolar trill, alveolar approximant  or retroflex approximant  like in most current variants of Shár. Most likely, it was a trill in an early stage of the language, but became an approximant later.
 * The voiced fricative was probably much more approximant-like, as it later on merged with
 * was bilabial. It later became a labiodental.

Jao broke off from Early Old Shár - every other Shár language, such as Imperial Shár evolved out of Late Old Shár. Between Early Old Shár and Late Old Shár, various initials have changed:
 * Voiced and unaspirated voiceless stops, affricates and fricatives merged (with the notable exception of ), yielding one unaspirated series that is voiceless initially, voiced medially.
 * At the time, medial was still a voiceless . It gained the intervocalic voicing only after the Old Shár period has ended.
 * The rhotacised stops, rhotacised sibilants and palatal sibilants  merged, yielding a new shibilant affricate series
 * became
 * merged with
 * became instead
 * became

Finals
In Old Shár, every final consisted of a vowel (chart below), and optionally a glide or a coda-consonant. After the Old Shár period ended, the finals became tones, for example,  became.

There were some limitations to the positions in which these vowels occour.

For example, occurred exclusively after alveolar sibilants and the rhotic, and could only appear in open syllables or before. In contrast, was absolutely forbidden in open syllables or before, occurring only before the codas. In a way, one could say that and  were in complementary distribution, except that  could occur after any kind of consonant, not just alveolar sibilants and. Similarly to, was also disallowed in open syllables, being shifted to  in that kind of context.

Legacy
Due to the expansion of the Shár Empire under the rule of the Jing dynasty - as well as the spread of the religion of the Ten Heavenly Principles by missionaries sponsored by said dynasty - the Old Shár language left a tremendous amount of influence on various languages, mainly Old Sak and Old Týrýng (and their modern counterparts Sak and Týrýng). The aforementioned two languages incorporated so much Old Shár vocabulary, that they developed their own formalized systems of pronounciating characters within the Shár script (analogous to real-life Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese pronunciations of Chinese characters) - for instance, Old Shár  evolved into    in Contemporary Imperial Shár,   in Contemporary Týrýng and   in Contemporary Sak. Similarly, a word like  would warrant the outcomes ,   and.