The relationships of the Archaic Kaitian Languages
The Archaic Kaitian languages are those that are known from surviving writings from the archaic Kaitian period, which largely shared a system of writing sometimes called Archaic Kaitian hieroglyphs, which predates and shared no direct connection with the Kaitian writing system that would develop in the pre-classical period. The Archaic Kaitian corpus is far smaller than that of the contemporaneous Archaic Nicrean, but even in this limited collection there is considerable linguistic diversity, which has long made deciphering the languages and the texts challenging.
At least 8 different languages or dialects appear to be encoded in the surviving collection of texts, and while the writing system used for each is broadly similar, and clearly shares a common origin, there are a wide array of differences in how each language appears to be encoded, owing both to their linguistic differences and the vast span of time over which the archaic Kaitian writing system was used and evolved.
The initial attempts to decipher this script relied on similarities between proto-writing with known logographic values, and careful linguistic analysis to determine phonetic values (or at least approximations thereof). These approaches, combined with grammatical analysis and archeological interpretation of the findings eventually allowed for the languages to be placed into three groups, which presumed some sort of relationship between the languages contained within, known as Archaic Kaitian 1, 2 and 3, respectively .
These groupings were arbitrary, numbered based solely on the volume of inscriptions that were known in each group at the time these appellations were determined.
Various dating methods demonstrated that the oldest of all the inscriptions belonged to the Archaic Kaitian 2 group, appearing 150-200 years before the earliest inscription in Archaic Kaitian 1, and some 600-750 years before the first inscription in Archaic Kaitian 3. Some inscriptions of this have been controversially dated to as early as 6400 BCE, although these are extremely fragmentary, and are instead typically grouped with other pre-hieroglyphic proto-writing inscriptions which spanned 6600 BCE to 6000 BCE. The earliest confidently dated inscriptions that are clearly Archaic Kaitian 2 (and recognizably true written language) date from between 6250 BCE and 6100 BCE. Compared to the other groups, Archaic Kaitian 2 was highly conservative, and is believed to represent a single language. The last inscriptions in this language date to around 5000 BCE. The distinctiveness of this language both by its uniqueness and it's antiquity meant it was the easiest archaic Kaitian language group to distinguish.
Archaic Kaitian 1 , meanwhile posed the greatest challenge. With writings spanning almost the entire Archaic period,from 6000 BCE to 3800 BCE, comprising at least 4 clearly distinct different languages, it was only through careful analysis that these writings were grouped together into one group. The earliest language, Archaic Kaitian 1-A, appears to have given rise to archaic Kaitian 1-B and 1-C, and 1-C would later in turn give rise to 1-D, which would include the last Archaic Kaitian inscriptions.
Archaic Kaitian 3 was poorly known at the time of its designation, but later more material would be discovered that allowed a clearer picture to emerge. Similar to AK-1, Archaic Kaitian 3 appears to show a language and it's subsequent descendents. The first inscriptions in Archaic Kaitian 3 are from around 5600 BCE, and show clear evidence of having adopted the writing system from the Archaic Kaitian 2 culture. These inscriptions are in a language that was named Archaic Kaitian 3-A, which would be recorded for only about 300-400 years, before being replaced by two descendent languages Archaic Kaitian 3-B and 3-C. 3-B would be recorded until 4600 BCE while 3-C would last slightly longer, with it's last inscription dating to around 4300 BCE.
Comparisons to existing or known ancient languages of Kaitian at first eluded experts, but gradually a connection was drawn between Archaic Kaitian 3 and the East Kaitian languages. It appears that this archaic branch diverged before any of the attested classical East Kaitian languages branched from each other, but nonetheless showed tell tale signs of that language family. This neatly paralleled the traditional belief that the East Kaitian languages were some of the oldest and most conservative of the Kaitian languages, although the location of the inscriptions suggest that this language family once occupied a very different region of Kait than the speakers did from the classical period through to the present.
No such easy connection emerged for the other archaic Kaitian languages. While Archaic Kaitian 2 clearly influenced the other later Archaic Kaitian languages (and, it would later be determined many of the classical Kaitian languages as well) it had obvious and major linguistic differences from all of them, as well as all of the known modern and classical Kaitian languages. Even today it is generally considered to be a linguistic isolate, although some bizarre similarities have been pointed out with certain words in few historical Epipelani languages. These words are believed to be probable loans in both these Epipelani languages and Archaic Kaitian 2, perhaps suggesting shared introduction from an otherwise unknown language theorized to be spoken by a culture of ancient seafarers, although this remains merely a tentative hypothesis.
Only recently did a connection emerge for Archaic Kaitian 1, and a surprising one at that. While the later languages in this group are still difficult to decipher, and show no clear relationships other than to eachother and the ancestral language, Archaic Kaitian 1-A, (along with obvious influence from the unrelated Archaic Kaitian 2) that ancestral language itself proved to be accommodating to comparison. Certain features have gradually been demonstrated to clearly tie, specifically Archaic Kaitian 1-A, to Luomusu-ni, one of the three Classical languages belonging to the Central Kaitian family. Curiously, unlike with Archaic Kaitian 3 and it's relationship to the broader east Kaitian languages, Archaic Kaitian 1-A is clearly more related to Luomusu-ni than it is to either of the other two Classical Central Kaitian languages. The lack of resemblance between the other archaic Kaitian 1 languages suggest that Luomusu-ni and these languages share a common ancestors, rather than the Classical language being a descendent of the Archaic one. This result is in spite of the traditional belief that the Central Kaitian languages were among the "youngest" of the Kaitian languages.
Based on this evidence it's believed that Archaic Kaitian 1-A would have likely split with Proto-Luomusu-ni no later than 6500 BCE, and this language would likely have diverged from the ancestors of the other Central Kaitian languages perhaps as early as 8000 BCE. This analysis has also served to complicate attempts to construct a unified language tree for all the Kaitian languages. Much as in the traditional appraisal, linguistic reconstructions of a hypothetical unified Kaitian language family typically sees Central Kaitian as the last of the four Kaitian language families to branch off, which would in this case place the Proto-Kaitian language so far in the past as to be completely indiscernable.
There also exist a handful of other fragmentary inscriptions from the Archaic period, which while utilizing a script similar to the other Kaitian hieroglyphs, don't obviously resemble any of the 3 understood Archaic Kaitian language groups. These fragments are unlikely to ever be understood without additional findings.
