Old Dwarven language

The Old Dwarven language was the earliest attested variant of the Dwarven language, and it is the second most attested ancient language of Artograch that was spoken before the Proto-Elven invasion of Artograch. It is still used as for religious purpose in the Dwarven religion, although with modernized pronunciation - this form is known as Temple Dwarven.

Evolution from Proto-Norlokian
Old Dwarven - or rather, its written form - was rather conservative seems to have not diverged much from its ancestor, though some differences still existed:
 * The affricates deaffricated, which crowded out the original sibilant fricatives  to the postalveolar region.
 * While the precise articulation of the seven monophthongs and four diphthongs in Proto-Norlokian was not known, and it was unknown whether they were coloured by neighbouring slender and broad consonants. In contrast, in Old Dwarven, it was well-documented that the palatalization of slender consonants and velarization of broad consonants mainly manifested itself in the colouration of neighbouring vowels, rather than actual audible palatal or velar offglides following the consonant.
 * and contract to
 * contracts to

Phonotactics
In Old Dwarven - just like in its ancestors Proto-Norlokian -, the acceptable syllable structures were and. Vowel clusters were forbidden, all syllables had to begin with a consonant. Word-initial and word-final consonant clusters were forbidden - with the notable exception of word-initial and word-final  clusters. because of the accepted syllable structure, each consonant cluster could only consist of two consonants. When a syllable began with a consonant that was identical to the one the previous syllable ends with, the result was gemination by assimilation. This even applied when one of the consonants was slender and the other was broad.

Consonants
In Old Dwarven, each individual consonant came with two variants: Slender (palatalized) and Broad (velarized/pharyngealized).


 * In Steelhelm, the voiceless broad dorsal stop was pronounced as a fricative.
 * The broad coronal stops had retroflex allophones  in clusters with the corresponding postalveolar fricatives,  respectively being pronounced as
 * The consonant clusters respectively allophonically coalesce into affricates, just like in the successor languages.
 * Because the semivowels - being considered both vowels and consonants at the same time - could appear in both vocalic templates and consonantal roots, the invalid consonant clusters, ,  and  could theoretically appear word-initially and in the coda-position. In order to make them fit the phonotactics of the language, their pronounciations were changed.
 * became word-initially,  in the coda position.
 * became word-initially
 * became in the coda-position
 * became word-initially,  in the coda position.
 * In Old Gnomish, it was and  instead.
 * became word-initially,   in the coda-position
 * became word-initially,   in the coda-position

Vowels
Old Dwarven had seven monophthongs - - and four diphthongs. Unlike in the predecessor language, Proto-Norlokian, these vowels were heavily coloured by the surrounding consonants.