In a nutshell: the proto language (which at this point I've been calling Protogyafe because hee) uses consonantal roots. Nouns come in thirteen classes that are loose lexical categories (abstract, person, place, food, etc.), and each category has a sort of word template you plug the root consonants into. So for the root STB you get ustób "book" (in the "manmade tools" category), sótabé "library" (in "places"), and ísátbé "scholar" ("people"). Verbs use different forms syntactically to denote aspect and tense. Which, you know, I think is fun.

Then I ran all these forms through two differet sound change templates and got two totally different languages. WOO GOOD TIMES.