OKAYY so. I'm not a Linguist tm, but I am taking a class in it, which empowered me to see if i could come up with gender-neutral "niece/nephew" that also follows from the same latin roots, since to my knowledge "nibling" doesn't, so it opens an interesting puzzle.
I'm showing my math under the cut, but based on the way niece/nephew evolved I propose navom (NAY-vum) instead.
Okay. If anyone has critiques on my work in a way that doesn't just get us nephew again, please feel free to discuss.
The way I've laid this out is to trace nephew / niece line to get a sense for how transitions happen, and then I go into how I thought through the neuter version.
Step 1:
Both words come from the proto-indo-european (PIE) "nepōts"
nep - ōt - s -> descendant, noun-ifier, singular masculine
Step 2 (masc):
Moving into classical Latin, we get "nepos."
nep - ot - s -> unchanged root, "t" isn't pronounced due to shortened vowel sound and contact with "s", still singular masculine
Step 3 (masc):
Vulgar Latin, which was the precursor to the romance languages saw the word shift to "nepotem"
nep - ot - em -> same root, "t" is back because no more "s", latin endings were leveled/simplified so we get "-em"
Step 4 (masc):
Old French gives us "neveu," which. Big change.
nev - eu -> the "p" softens to "β" then to "v" as was typical moving into romance languages, the "em" nazalized and combined with the preceding "o" to make the "-eu"
Step 5 (masc):
English borrowed the term and adjusted it to our needs, giving us "nephew"
neph - ew -> "v" sound became "f", spelling was adjusted to English standards
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Step 2 (fem):
Latin gave us "neptis"
nep - t - is -> same root, noun-ifier but modified for the i-stem that follows, singular feminine
Step 3 (fem):
Then we get Vulgar Latin "neptia"
nep - t - ia -> same root, same transition, "ia" ending standardized word with other feminine words
Step 4 (fem):
Another big jump. Old French gives us "niece"
nie - ce -> vowel rose from "eh" to "ee" following trends before palatal consonants, "tia" became "tsia" became "ts" became "s" as it palatized
Step 5 (fem):
English, as before, grabbed the term and ran with it. In this case, no changes. We have "niece"
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Step 2 (neu):
Okay so thing with Latin is that people-nouns are inherently binary. So I had to get a bit creative, and look at singular third person neuter endings that *didn't* imply people-ness, and instead implied "concept."
From there, I got Latin "nepomen"
nep - o - men -> base root, non-morpheme connector sound, neuter singular ending
Step 3 (neu):
Vulgar Latin would likely give us "nepome," due to the way people would likely drop the final "n." This is based on parallel patterns of similar words dropping final the "n" in "-men" endings.
Step 4 (neu):
Like with the Old French in nephew/niece, we get some greater phonological shifts. "nep" will become "nev" and the "e" ending will reduce down to near-silence, if not fully disappearing. Thus we would get something like "nevom(e)"
Step 5 (neu):
Here's where English would borrow from Old French. English tends to put the stress on the penultimate syllable, which would be the first one in a two syllable word, which would emphasize it: the "e" sound would become "ay." We'd also drop any residual schwa on the end of the word. Hence, we'd end up with "nevom"
