Late Andanese

Andanese is the name of a people who currently have no language of their own. Around the year 4200, their language went extinct although it was preserved in loanwords and in written records. This written language is called Late Andanese, a language with a very simple phonology.

Phonology

Late Andanese, spoken around the year 4200 and thereafter as a ceremonial language, has only 12 phonemes: the consonants /l h k m n ŋ s p t/ and the vowels /a i u/. And of these, the consonants /s/ and /ŋ/ are rare because they originated primarily from sequences rather than single phonemes. Vowel sequences are allowed, but final consonants are not. Thus there are only 30 syllables in the language.

By contrast, Old Andanese had a much higher syllable count because it had more consonants, five vowels, two tones, and allowed clusters and syllable-final consonants. However, in reality the vast majority of syllables in Old Andanese were open syllables as well, and only one syllable per word could carry tone, which means that for the most part Old Andanese could be spelled with only 75 syllables, not greatly different from its descendant. Also, the Old Andanese consonants /kʷ qʷ/ could be analysed as non-phonemic.

Late Andanese as spoken today is based on historical records, since there is no surviving population that has been continuously speaking the language during the entire 4500 years that have passed since its extinction around the year 4200. Thus the pronunciation varies from place to place without the language itself being different. In general though, these differences are small and mostly related to the pronunciation of whole syllables rather than individual phonemes. It could be argued that syllables like /ni/, /ti/, /si/ are actually single phonemes because many populations read them as single consonants such as /ñ/, /č/, /š/ when they occur before a vowel and in some cases even before a consonant. And thus it could be said that modern Andanese has more than 12 phonemes after all. However, no Andanese tradition has reintroduced tones or phonemes not directly descended from one of the 30 syllables in the language.

Consonants

Consonant frequency

The frequency of consonants is roughly the same as their order in the syllabary: /l h k m n p t ŋ s/. However, as detailed below, some consonants are more common before certain vowels, and it is more accurate to think of syllables rather than consonants and vowels as the minimal phonemic unit.

The voiceless bilabial stop /p/

The voiceless bilabial stop p has an interesting history. In the Tapilula language, it was one of the commonest phonemes, and remains so in most of its descendants. However, in Old Andanese, a polyconditional sound change split /p/ into three phonemes /p b w/ depending on its position in a word, the tone of the syllable, and the location of the stress. Of the three reflexes, /w/ was most common at the beginning of a word, /b/ most common in the middle, and /p/ uncommon everywhere. This happened at the same time that the inherited t phoneme, which had originally been also very common, was split into /t d k/ following the same pattern.

However, Old Andanese had also had a very common phoneme kʷ and a somewhat less common qʷ, which had arisen partly from direct inheritance and partly from sound changes. In Late Andanese, both of these changed to /p/ in most positions, thus making /p/ once again a common sound. However, an earlier shift had delabialized these sounds when the next syllable also began with a labial or labialized sound; therefore, words with two labial sounds in a row remained rare.

Meanwhile, the earlier rule that had voiced non-dorsal stops in intervocalic positions was reverted, thus turning all of the /b/ inherited from Old Andanese back into /p/. On the other hand, the /w/ inherited from Old Andanese was delabialized, becoming either /l/ or silence depending on its environment and its position in the word.

Because word-initial p- arises almost entirely from earlier /kʷ/ and /qʷ/, the association of /p/ with the epicene gender was lost in Late Andanese. Instead, the epicene gender has disappeared from the language.

Phonemic contractions and other processes of morphophonology

Historical use of the glottal stop

Old Andanese had held onto a phonemic voiceless uvular stop /q/ inherited from Tapilula. This eventually changed into a glottal stop /ʔ/. While this glottal stop was still phonemic, Andanese underwent a sound change that turned the sound sequences /ki ti hi/ before another vowel into a new phoneme, /s/. Then, later on, the glottal stop disappeared, leaving behind new vowel sequences. Thus, sequences of /ki ti hi/ plus a vowel were once again possible, and the words in which it had changed to /s/ as part of a grammatical operation came to be seen as irregular. The native Andanese script kept the now-silent glottal stop distinct by using different symbols for its syllables, so this unpredictability was not generally a problem for the speakers of the language, but soon the use of the separate symbols fell out of use and they came to be recycled to spell /s/ itself. Thus, one of Andanese's few irregularities is that compounds of a morpheme ending in /ki ti hi/ and one beginning in a vowel sometimes collapse into /s/ sequences and sometimes they do not. This has still not been regularized by analogy.

At the same time as the above shift, the syllables /ku tu pu/ plus a vowel all shifted to /p/. This was not a new phoneme, but it previously had been rare in initial position because of an earlier shift which had changed it to /gʷ/ (whose pronunciation varied between a true [gʷ] and [w]) when it began an accented syllable, and most words at that time were accented on their initial syllable. Thus, this sound change also takes place unpredictably when a word ending in one of those syllables is compounded with certain vowel-initial words.

NOTE, WOULD IT MAKE MORE SENSE TO RESTRICT THIS SECOND SHIFT TO JUST THE INHERITED LABIALIZED CONSONANTS?

At older stages of the language, similar shifts had taken place which led to different results. For example, the classifier prefix ki-' indicates men or boys, and contracts to a k- before a word historically beginning in a vowel. It doesn't become s- because the sound shift that caused this change happened much earlier than the /ki/ > /s/ shift, and therefore /ki/ had been eliminated in all of the environments in which it would have been able to shift to /s/. This /ki/ > /k/ shift is still blocked by words historically beginning with a glottal stop, though, because the glottal stop was still there (as /q/) at the time of the /ki/ > /k/ shift. Thus, to refer to the ulihipinimu "hip bone" of a male, one would say kiulihipinimu "man's hip bone", not *kulihipinimu or *sulihipinimu.

Phonology and vocabulary

With only 30 syllables in the language, many sentences, even with basic vocabulary items, are highly repetitive. For example hahaha is the word for "hat, cap, headgear" (ha- "shaped like" + haha "hair of the head").

NOTE, ALL OF THESE EXAMPLES OMIT THE VERB TENSE MARKERS UNTIL I KNOW WHAT THEY ARE. I DONT KNOW IF THEY ARE COGNATES WITH KHULLS/BABA/ETC OR NOT.

They will probably be infixes on the classifiers.

The commonest consonant in the language is /l/. Sentences containing no other consonant are possible:

Lili lilalialali liluli.

The girl is sitting on the mushroom cap.

The voiceless velar stop /k/ is also a common sound:

Kikaki kiyakukaa kikui.

The prince bit the strawberry.

Note that most Andanese speakers do not consider /j/ to be a consonant, since it is simply an allophone of /i/. However, a word like kikaku "banana tree" could easily be substituted.

Consonants besides /l h k/ are less frequent. The overrepresentation of the consonants /l h k/ (in roughly that order) is part of the reason why Andanese words are often so long even compared to other languages such as Babakiam that have small phonologies.

Boys' names

Late Andanese names, particularly names for boys, were often extremely long-winded even for what one would expect of such a small phonology, due to the deliberate repetition of similar-sounding words and syllables. For example, Kukukukukukuku was a common boy's name; Kaaaaaaia was another. Haaaaaaaaaaa was also a very common boy's name. Taaaamaaaaaamaaaaa was less common but still not unheard of. Aaaaaaaaaaatataaaa is another common boy's name. Each /a/ is a seaprate syllable. The longest boy's name in common use was Kakakaaakakatakakakakakakakakaka. A close second was Matamataamatatataamaataaaatata. Lilalaaiilalalalalalaa is another very long boy's name, but can be abbreviated to Lalaaalai.

A classroom of children would often sit quietly when a teacher called out one of their names, as if hearing lottery numbers read off, as a boy with a lengthy name would need to listen for quite a while to know whether the child being called up to the front of the class was him or his friend whose name differed only on the 17th syllable.

Relationship to other languages

Andanese is highly divergent even from closely related languages. Speakers of Pabappa fail to recognize even those few words that are cognates, because both languages have changed them radically over time. One such word pair that does look similar is Pabappa Uranu, Andanese Ulanu, the name of a god. However, this similarity is partly coincidental, as both languages removed the initial consonant of the name independently and at different times.

Allophony and sandhi

Allophony in Andanese is best understood as a process that affects whole syllables rather than individually affecting consonants or vowels. With only 30 syllables in its phonology, the syllable has come to be the minimal phonological unit, and each of the 30 syllables behaves uniquely. For example, si behaves sometimes like ti, sometimes like su, and sometimes unlike either of them.

Rate of speech

Andanese is spoken so quickly that speakers of neighboring languages perceive it as a harsh, guttural language consisting mostly of consonants, especially /l h k/, the three most common consonants in the language. However, even though /s/ is rare, it is generally a louder consonant than those others, and speakers of neighboring languages often perceive Andanese to be rich in /s/ as well.

Voicing of consonants

The voiceless consonants /h k s p t/ are always voiceless, even between vowels in rapid speech. The Old Andanese sound rule that caused /p t/ to become [b d] between vowels has disappeared in Late Andanese (it had never affected /h/ or /k/, and Old Andanese did not have /s/). However, these consonants are at most only very weakly aspirated, unlike the voiceless stops of neighboring languages such as Khulls. Loanwords from Andanese into Khulls nevertheless use the aspirated stops, since Khulls does not have a true voiceless unaspirated series, but only a two-way contrast of voiceless aspirates versus voiceless ejectives.

Allophones of syllables beginning with /h/

As /a/ is the commonest vowel in the language, the allophone of /h/ that occurs before /a/ is considered the primary one. This varies between [x] and [χ] depending on stress and emphasis. Before the vowel /i/, /h/ is fronted to a voiceless palatal fricative [ç], and before /u/, it becomes a sound that varies between a rounded voiceless bilabial approximant [hʷ] and a spread voiceless bilabial fricative [ɸ].

In some environments, the [h] may spread backwards over the vowel of a preceding syllable. For example, puha may sound like [pʰwa] or [pʷxʷa]. However, this does not happen when the preceding consonant is another fricative or the preceding syllable is vowel-initial.

Since the allophones of /h/ are entirely determined by which of Andanese's three vowels follows it, in rapid speech the vowel may be spoken so quickly that the listener does not even hear it, and perceives instead a consonant cluster beginning with one of the above sounds. This shortening never occurs in word-final position, even when another word follows. Also, /a/ is less likely to be dropped than either of the two high vowels.

The vowels are also less likely to be dropped when the syllable precedes another /h/. For example, hihahuhi "womb" is usually pronounced something like [çixaɸuçi], with four clear vowels, albeit very short ones.

Note that despite the presence of these allophones, Andanese normally loans foreign words with [f] using either its /p/ syllables or its /h/ syllables, and rarely uses /hu/ plus an additional vowel. Thus Fitikia, a boy's name, became Pitikia in Andanese.

Alternative analyses

It is possible to analyze /j/ as a separate phoneme, rather than an allophone of /i/, on the basis that the regular reflex of Tapilula /j/ in any position is Andanese /j/, and Tapilula allowed minimal pairs between its /i/ and /j/ phonemes. However, Andanese does not maintain this contrast.

Grammar

Andanese uses prefixes for inflection and suffixes for derivation. There are no exceptions to this pattern, despite the strong influence of the many Gold-family languages surrounding Andanese, which use suffixes and infixes, but never prefixes. There are still some infixes inherited from Old Andanese, but because they can only infect the prefixes, Late Andanese is best described as a language that has tables of related prefixes, with one row of prefixes for each infix, rather than a system combining prefixes and infixes.

There is no morphological distinction between nouns and verbs in Andanese, but there is a fixed word order of Subject-Object-Verb, showing that verbs and nouns cannot be considered the same part of speech. In this respect Andanese resembles isolating languages such as Chinese and to a lesser extent English.

Classifier prefixes

All words have classifiers, except for a few that are sometimes considered to have a null morpheme as their classifier. For example, the classifier li- means "humans, human body parts". Its accusative form is na-. However, classifiers for inanimate objects do not have distinct forms for their accusatives.

NOTE, LI- PROBABLY SHOULD BE GI- SINCE /nʷ/ IS SUPPOSED TO UNCONDITIONALLY GIVE /ŋ/.

Repetition of classifier prefixes across nouns and verbs

Note that classifiers stack on top of the verbs. That is to say, any verb in the sentence will take a prefix agreeing with the noun classifier of the subject, unless it happens to already have the same classifier.

However, humans are spread across several classifiers, which mark different genders and ages of humans. These all share the same verbs, so it is not necessary to repeat the classifier before the object if the subject and object of a sentence are both human. For example, hinuhuki means teacher (adult female), tukuu means student (young child of either gender), and tuupi means to kiss. The accusative form of hi- is mi-. Thus one can say

Tukuu minuhuki tututami.

The student kicked the teacher.

Stacking of classifiers

Classifiers stack across nouns that are dependent on other nouns. For example, kuha means "(a) piece", and sikupi means "wood", so one can speak of

Kuha kusikupi.

A piece of wood.

However, when a two-word phrase such as this is used as an object in a longer sentence, the subject's classifier is repeated only on the first word:

Hinuma hikuha kusikupi hikigi.

The woman scratched the piece of wood.

This can be thought of more clearly with an analogy to mathematics. The sentence above can be visualized in three dimensions, with kusikupi as a branch off of hikuha, or as an equation:

Hinuma hi(kuha ku(sikupi)) hi(kigi).

Polysemy and homophony of classifiers

Classifier prefixes sometimes arise from more than one root. For example, the li- classifier above, which denotes humans and human body parts, is also the classifier for birds, which means that humans can use birds' verbs and vice versa without needing to stack an additional classifier on the verb. These were originally two different roots that coalesced due to very aggressive sound changes. A third meaning of li- is "lake, pond"; however, this is rare, confined to placenames, and not in active use.

Use of classifiers to derive new words

New words can be formed by copying a word from one class to another. For example, in Old Andanese, the word for vampire was kʷĭhe. It was used without a classifier prefix, as were many words for living beings (gender at this time was often marked by internal consonant changes). However, today, the commonest use of this morpheme is in the word pair gipihi "sharp tooth; canine" and kipihi "to bite". Thus, a noun for a living being became a noun for just a distinctive trait of that being by simply changing the classifier prefix.

For some classes, the entire vocabulary can be assumed to be copiable. For example, li- nouns denoting body parts pair with ki- verbs denoting the action of striking or hitting something with that body part, and with mi- denoting that body part served as food. For example, the word for thigh is lihuliti, but somebody's thighs served for dinner could be called

Yahuliti yatulihi.

Human thigh with spices.

Likewise, the word for a young student, tukuu, is actually derived from the word for book, ikuu, by changing the prefix from i-, which denotes handheld objects, to tu-, which marks the "human children" noun class.

Derivation of words

Andanese is a head-initial language. That is, within a word, a classifier prefix will come first, giving the general broad meaning of the word, and each additional morpheme will narrow the meaning of the word further. This is the opposite of surrounding languages like Pabappa, where it is the last morpheme within a word that defines the general broad meaning of the word. Thus Andanese could be described as having a taxonomic vocabulary. Someone hearing the first part of a word will not know its precise meaning, but will have a general idea of what it might be. But someone hearing only the end of a word will have no idea which of the many possible categories of the vocabulary the word belongs to.

The genitive prefix si- is never used within a word; this appears only heading up a full, independent word describing a definite object. Thus, all compounds are single words, and some can be very long. In general, Andanese words are often highly precise, and may seem long even given the small phonology of the language. Many words have been lengthened by adding additional morphemes over time, even when such lengthening was not necessary to prevent collision of the word with a homophone. For example, the word for heart, as inherited from Old Andanese, is vi. But this is padded with the body part classifier prefix li- on one side and the precising morpheme tu "blood" on the other; thus, the resulting word livitu can be analyzed as "body part heart of blood".

Reassignment of classifier prefixes

Words have moved from one class to another over time. For example, the inherited root word for snow, reflected in Late Andanese as gina, is now indifferent to the form of precipitation and only pairs with classifiers: gagina "snow"; vugina "rain".

Classifier prefixes and titular words

Classifier prefixes cannot be used as words of their own. Every classifier prefix has at least one titular stem, whose meaning simply repeats one of the meanings of the classifier prefix so that it can be used as an independent word. For example, the classifier prefix sa- means "love", but the proper verb for "to love" is sanala. Thus one would say

Kikuhigi nanuma kisanala.

The soldier loved the nurse.

Likewise, ka- means "tree", but the full form of the word for tree is kakupi. Classifier prefixes with more than one meaning will have more than one titular word. Since ka- also means "insect", one finds words such as kahunu and kakui, both meaning "insect, arthropod" with little difference in meaning.

Dropping of classifiers in compounds

Compounds of two nouns generally drop the classifier from the second noun, even if it creates a potentially ambiguous result. Generally, cases of true ambiguity are rare. For example, hikala "seashell" and lakala "bear" share the same two-syllable root but have different noun classifier prefixes. But the compound word pugikala, which adds pugi "claw", can only be used to mean "bear's claw" because the other possible interpretation makes little sense.

This rule has some exceptions. However, dropping the second classifier is mandatory when it is the same as the first classifier or of the same syntactic field. In fact, some teachers insert null morphemes before every element of a compound that repeat the first classifier, saying that, for example, there exists a secondary Andanese word pukala "bear" alongside lakala, which is never used in bare form but is called up when speakers create compound words such as the above pugikala. This theory is one way of explaining the limits of which compounds are allowed to drop the classifiers and which are not. However, a dictionary based on this theory would list over a million words, most of which would be simply duplicates of others.

Assignment of classifiers

Assignment of newly coined words to classifiers usually corresponds either to the place ("locative classifiers") or the purpose of the object ("thematic classifiers"). For example, a spoon is not an edible object, but it is frequently found with them, and therefore the word for spoon, miguha is in the food class rather than the handheld object class; iguha instead means "shovel".

Animacy

Inanimate objects have classifiers that do not change for syntactical active or passive roles. Since the subject of a sentence is always animate, however, their classifier is always buried underneath another classifier that repeats the subject's classifier. Note that there are no sound changes; if two vowels come together, they are still pronounced as separate syllables. Since this happens also to the verb, often a sentence will consist of three alliterative words. Thus one can say

Tulata tuinuhu tuyula.

The student threw the torch.

List of common noun classifiers

All noun classifiers are one syllable long, but some classifiers can precede other classifiers and create what are effectively two-syllable prefixes.

a : roads, streets

la : large land animals

i : handheld objects; small land animals

ha : clothes, "shaped like"; hair of the head, back of body; to worship; needle

ka : trees; some flying insects

u : water, liquid

ma : some grasses

ga : winter, things encountered in winter

na : accusative of li- (all senses)

li : humans, human body parts; birds

sa : love

pa : words loaned from early Pabappa

ta :

pi : pregnant women, babies, and couples

hi : tree (bark); worm; the ocean(?); bowl, cup, dish; adult women (nominative); men, boys (accusative)

ti : foot, motion

si : genitive prefix (etymologically hi-i-; often seen in contracted form as s- before vowel-initial words)

gi : protective objects; sharp, firm, protective

mi : food; breast, nourishment; adult women (accusative)

ni : young girls; place of X, generic placenames; snakes

pu : sexual reproduction, obscene body parts (only when following another classifier such as li-)

hu : fire; celestial objects; insects

tu : small plants; children; blood, bodily humors

su :

lu : some body parts (a 2nd-order classifier that often comes between the gender marker and the root word)

ku : arrow, sharp weapon

mu :

gu : breast, nurture, nutrition (secondary use only)

nu : fruit; buildings

ki : verbs of motion (corresponds to li- body parts); weapon, claw; men, boys; darkness, night, sleep; some buildings

The sequences /ja ji ju va vi vu/ have taken on the role of pseudo-classifiers, since even in Classical Andanese their pronunciation was already monosyllabic:

ya : some grasses; pineapple, large fruit; meat, food

yi :

yu :

va :

vi : eye, vision, knowledge

vu : rain, water; horse, rideable animal

Note that there are many monosyllabic morphemes that are not classifiers. For example i means "shoulder", but is only used with a body part classifier li-.

Consonant-based gender system

Andanese inherited the consonant-based gender system from Tapilula. Due to sound changes, the consonants do not line up well with those of the parent language. An Andanese innovation was that, despite the Andanese language in general being nonfusional, gender markers used as prefixes affected the words they attached to. This is actually not truly an innovation, because the Tapilula language did this as well, but Andanese got rid of other such fusional aspects of grammar while retaining the gender "shaping" process. The genders are:

li: Babies; also used for humans of indeterminate age and gender (accusative is na-)

pi: Pregnant; adult males and adult females together; parents, childbirth

ki: Men and boys (contracts to k- before a vowel; accusative is variable, alternating between hi- or s- when acted on by "weak" agents and a contracted form of the prefix of the agent itself for "strong" agents)

tu: Young children (accusative is ti-)

ni: Young girls

hi: Adult women (accusative is mi-)

There is no neuter gender and no epicene gender. Note that females have two genders (three if "pregnant" is considered to be exclusively feminine) but males have one. This is a trait common to many languages of the area, and was present in their common parent language of Tapilula.

As in Gold, all objects found in bodies of water are grammatically feminine even if syntactically masculine.

A very small number of words show relics of the older internal mutations that marked gender in the Tapilula language. In Tapilula, classifier prefixes were dropped in more situations than they are in Late Andanese, and therefore the existence of separate stems for different genders was necessary. In Late Andanese, only a few such words survive, such as the word pair kilitu "king" and hiitu "queen". Even though the stems are different, the use of the prefixes is mandatory in Late Andanese.

Marking the accusative case

Unlike the related Gold language and its descendants, Andanese marks the accusative case by changing the noun classifier prefix, if there is one. For example, the noun classifier for adult women is hi- in the nominative (agentive) case, but this changes to mi- when a woman is the patient (direct object) of a verb. This case is still padded with the additional case marker of the agent itself, meaning that there will be two noun classifiers stacked together. This is the normal case in Andanese when an noun is the direct object of a verb.

On the other hand, inanimate nouns and most animate nouns do not have separate forms of their noun class prefix for showing the accusative. In the animates, this situation is the result of the decay of a previously existing accusative marker -i- into silence due to regular sound changes. However, inanimate nouns had never used that infix to begin with.

The masculine noun class, marked by ki- in an agent role, is the most changeable of all noun class prefixes, and the only one whose accusative form depends on the noun class of the agent acting on them. That is, a man stung by a bee will have a different noun class than a man kissed by a woman, in addition to the noun class of the agent which is stacked before the noun class for the man.

Sample sentences below illustrate the different possibilities:

Kuinau kusatu kukiu.

The bee stung the man.

Hiuma hisatu hikiihumi.

The women hit the man.

FIX THIS LATER!!

note, the verb tense prefixes are still not on.

note, used the word for soldier as the word for man.

need to find the original vowels for all classifier prefixes!!! also, males will also have a special form when another male is the PATIENT, whereas not when it is a female.

Second order classifiers and length of words

Because of the noun classifier prefixes, most word bases are at least three syllables long. Exceptions are of two kinds: some very common words are used with no classifiers, and some words have classifiers but stems that are only one syllable. Generally these result from recent sound contractions.

Often, a classifier prefix is not sufficient to precisely define a word, and the word will take a second-order classifier between its "exposed" classifier that interacts with the grammar and the rest of the root word. For example, many body parts are classified under the prefix lu-, such as lilulali "head", which breaks down as li- + -lu- + lali.

Most words of this type acquired their second-order classifiers only fairly recently, when drastic sound changes led to phonological collision of words even within the same noun class.

Some syllables can be used either as primary or secondary classifiers. For example, the -lu- above can only appear after a human gender classifier, but ku- "arrow, sharp object" often follows i- "handheld object" to create words for handheld weapons such as ikukivuni "slicing knife" and ikukuhigi "one-handed sword".

Private verbs

Andanese preserves the private verbs of its parent language Tapilula, whereas in the Gold branch of the family they disappeared early on.

Private verbs are verbs whose meaning is entirely dependent on the noun classes of the subject and object that precede it. For example, if the subject is "boy" and the object is "orange", a verb spelled lua could mean "to eat". If the subject is "boy" and the object is "girl", the same verb would mean "to kiss". The only commonality between the two verbs is that they both involve the mouth, and indeed, lua is derived from the word for mouth.

Through cultural osmosis, similar phenomena later reappeared in some of the Gold languages, particularly those most closely culturally linked to the Andanese.

Archaic traits

Andanese has many unsuual traits. For example, in an early stage of the language, ala meant "children, people falling down, animals, abstract concepts, claw-hands raised, swinging arms". Unusual meaning shifts also have taken place; aka means "baby; blocking" and is not considered to simply be a set of two homophonous words.

There was also a "grand truth particle" at the beginning of every sentence. It was omitted if the sentence was true, but la if the sentence was false; if false, any -a- in the sentence (that is, /a/ with no consonant) would change to -la- to match the truth particle.

Body parts and certain other inalienables change depending on the gender of the referent. However, whole syllables change, not just consonants.

Script

Andanese had aseveral scripts. The oddest looking one, "batam" (an exonym), was not a script at all but a means of drawing objects with the angular shapes of one of the many 30-letter syllabaries. It is similar to ASCII art. Thus, "words" made from Batam were generally more than one line long and were absurdly long even comapred to the rest of Andanese. Nevertheless, Baram inspired the symbololology of earlyt Khull;s, so e.g. a l;etter that looked like a pineapple came to mean "pineapple", meaning that Khulls ironically developed words even shorter than it had already had by using the same method ANdfanese had used to make its already long words even longer.

Adoption of foreign loanwords

In its early history, Andanese adopted many loanwords from surrounding languages, mostly of the Gold and Haswaraba families. By the time of Late Andanese, however, the speakers of the language lived only in Paba and therefore were surrounded by speakers of Babakiam. Andanese thus began to loan words from Babakiam, and stopped adopting words from all of the other languages, including the other branches of Andanese.

During this time, many foreign peoples settled in Paba, bringing languages such as Khulls into contact with Andanese. However, the Andanese generally distrusted these peoples, preferring to associate with Pabaps, and therefore few words from these languages were adopted into Andanese. An additional factor was the great divergence in phonology between Andanese and Khulls: whereas Andanese has only 30 syllables, Khulls has 35 consonants, 5 vowels, and 5 tones, and allows consonant clusters whereas Andanese does not. Although Babakiam's phonology is also quite different from that of Andanese, the two languages can more easily share vocabulary without merging many sounds into one.

Loanwords from Babakiam

Unusually, loans from Babakiam are generally borrowed using a different phoneme matching than other loanwords. Baba's /f/, /b/, and /p/ are all merged as /p/, and long vowels are borrowed as doubles. Often, these words are assigned the classifier prefix pa- regardless of meaning, which means that most Babakiam loanwords begin with /pa/. Babakiam's /ž/ phoneme is borrowed as /l/. All final consonants are dropped.

Bābā's loanwords into Andanese can be said to sound like an exaggerated form of Babakiam, characterized by words like papupipa "room, chamber" from Bābākiam pubipa.

Boomerang loans

As Andanese culture died off, some words that Andanese had borrowed from Babakiam were loaned back into Babakiam, creating a large assortment of lexical doublets. For example, Babakiam aafa "dark-haired" was borrowed into Andanese as paaapa, and then borrowed back into Babakiam in this same form. Babakiam generally borrows Andanese /l/ as /ž/, which means that /ž/ in boomerang loans is preserved intact. The classifier prefix pa- is sometimes retained, as Babakiam often does with other prefixes.

Diachronics

Old Andanese

Old Andanese: /p m f t n l k g h q kʷ ŋʷ w qʷ/ for consonants, /a e i o u/ on two tones for vowels. Note that Old Andanese preserved the lack of /s/ passed down from the parent language. /f/ is usually analyzed as /hʷ/, and /w/ as /gʷ/, which means that all the fricatives (/h hʷ g gʷ/) are laryngeals. (The letter "g" always indicates a fricative; ġ is used for the stop in related languages but does not occur in any stage of Andanese.)

Old Andanese /p/ and /t/ became voiced between vowels.

The language is very guttural compared to its neighbors; after all, it has 9 dorsal conosnants, but only 3 coronals and 2 labials (though five of the dorsals are labialized). However, the syllable strucutre is almost entirely CV, so it does not sound quite as aggressive as one might think.

Note, also, that /l/ patterns grammatically as a dorsal consonant, which means that from the viewpoint of the Old Andanese speakers, there were only four non-dorsal consonants in the language: /p m t n/.

Loss of tone

The loss of tone was actually the very last change that occurred in Late Andanese. Even as late as 3700 AD, there were still minimal pairs of words that differed only in tone, although the tones carried a very minor functional load since only one syllable per word could carry stress and many words were very long. The final loss of tone came in part due to influence from the speakers of Babakiam, whose nation was also home to most Andanese at the time.

Culture and habitat

Historically, the Andanese people have preferred to live as parasites in other nations rather than to form nations of their own. Early on, they established settlements in the empires of Thaoa, Paba, and Subumpam.

Early Andanese settlement in Paba

Andanese people living in Paba practiced what they called handful culture, meaning that anything they were able to grab with their hands was considered their property. Beginning around the year 1300, Paba transformed itself into a pacifistic economic power and reduced the size of its military and police force. This worked well for the Andanese, who were very militaristic. The Andanese people realized that they no longer would need to worry about famine since they could simply raid a farm whenever they needed food, or steal merchandise from a store. The Pabaps realized they had a problem, and decided to enact a new tax to pay for food and merchandise in order to compensate people who had been raided by the nomadic Andanese gangs. This new tax reduced the Pabap peoples' living standards, but increased their physical safety, as the Andanese people realized that victims they allowed to live would be restored to a state of lootability in the close future.

Early Andanese settlement in Thaoa

Thaoa was a kingdom that broke away from Paba in the year 1085 and became markedly more militaristic. Unlike Paba, they banned all ethnic minorities from even living on Thaoa land, except as slaves. But the Andanese were able to get the better of even the Thaoans because the Andanese were willing to endure a standard of living far worse than that of the average Thaoan, to the point of living in unheated caves even during winter in order to hide out from the police and army. In fact, the Andanese were able to exploit one of Thaoa's few weaknesses: the Thaoan military was so strong that they went hundreds of years between battles, and nearly always won on those rare occasions that they fought. Thus, the average Andanese lived a harsher and more rugged life than even the soldiers in the Thaoan army, and found that they were able to get away with provocative behavior such as stealing Thaoan civilians' food and belongings and retreating into the mountains before the army or police could catch up with them.

History=

The Andanese arrived on the continent of Rilola around the year 0, at the same time as the other Tapilula tribes such as the ancestors of the Poswobs, Pabaps, Moonshines, and so on. They were a distinct people however, and kept to themselves. In fact, the Tapilula people branched early on into two groups: the Andanese, and everybody else. The other tribes are merely subdivisions of the "Gold" tribe that includes all non-Andanese.

By the 1900s, Andanese were most strongly settled along the south coast where the weather was warmest. For the most part, Andanese did not build their own nations; they settled in the nations of other people such as the Pabap people and the Subumpamese. They lived in the same territories as Pabaps but for the most part lived in separate cities.

Cultural traits of the early Andanese people

The Pabap and Andanese cultures were a lot alike, and despite having different religions the people worshipped the same gods. However, the Andanese were a very violent people, and stood out sharply from the pacifistic Pabaps they lived among. Young Andanese boys were trained from an early age how to hold a sword, and by the time they could read they were strong enough to kill wild animals and defend their elderly and infirm relatives from hostile would-be invaders. By contrast, young Pabap boys were trained from an early age how to plant trees and vegetable gardens, and how best to decorate their property with the most beautiful flowers they could afford so that people walking through their property could enjoy the scenery and stop to rest after they had eaten their fill of the fruits and vegetables in their Pabap neighbors' garden.

The Andanese and Pabaps generally did not battle each other, however, so having vampires living amongst them was not a problem for Pabaps.

Early Andanese language

See Old Andanese.

Later history

Eventually, the Andanese settled amongst the Pabaps to such an extent that they redefined themselves as merely a tribe of Pabaps, or sometimes a collection of tribes. This identity was still held to when the Swamp Kids took over the reins of power in the year 4149 and renamed their new empire Anzan after the Andanese that many of them were descended from.

Culture

Like other human peoples, the Andanese originated in the tropics, eating a diet of fish combined with tropical fruits such as pineapples and coconuts. Around the year 4175, they were on the losing side of a war which left them with no land to call their own. But some brave Andanese explorers spoke of an uninhabited island, thousands of miles to the north and still teeming with fish and plenty of land to live on. And so the Andanese people who had only ever known tropical rainstorms and blistering heat came to live in the coldest part of the Northern Hemisphere, the icecapped island of Xema. Others stayed behind and tried to hide behind their skills at learning new languages and creating new political parties; in 4165 the Bubbles were formed, and despite being Andanese in origin, the public face of the party was the Poswobs and Pabaps.

Andanese people tended not to build nations of their own; instead, they settled in nations developed by other peoples, chiefly the Pabap people and the Subumpamese living along the south coast of Rilola. They also settled in Thaoa; in fact, Thaoa had more Andanese people per capita than any other nation to its west. Soon the Andanese actually became a majority. But the Andanese people here were more intimiately linked with Andanese people living in other nations, and did not generally seek to actually take over the Thaoa government.

Andanese share with Moonshines the unusual trait of having women be strongly taller than men from puberty onward. However the Andanese in general are much shorter people than Moonshines; in fact they are the shortest people in the world. This has led to much lower rates of outmarriage with other peoples and therefore much less spreading out of the tall-female trait into surrounding cultures.

Even though Andanese women are much taller than their men, this did not lead to the Andanese becoming a peaceful, feministic society the way the Pabaps and Poswobs around them did. Arguably the constant feeling of helplessness experienced by adult Andanese men who could barely get through a day without injuring themselves on a solid object intended to be harmless, combined with the fact that they were the shorter sex among the shortest human tribe in the world, made Andanese men feel as though they were simply "waste" people whose lives had little worth and led to them frequently starting fights with other Andanese men, and even Andanese women. Andanese women, despite being stronger than their men, rarely participated in violence either against other Andanese or against foreign peoples or animals. Likewise Andanese people generally wore clothing that was intended to protect them from injury by sharp objects, rather than to keep them warm during winter. Thus the throat and wrists were generally covered even if areas closer to the heart were not.

When the Andanese nation was destroyed, many Andanese families literally climbed up palm trees and began to live like monkeys. They in essence became "soft monkeys" in the sense that they did not have the strong muscles or sharp teeth that their lifestyle required but tried to compensate by building sharp knives and other tools to protect them from nature. But even here there was no relief, because the species of monkeys that dominated their territory actually fed on humans, even if only as a minor part of a primarily fruit-based diet. Some Andanese decided to simply accept their fate and live amongst the monkeys that were eating them, but even with a high birthrate these people became fewer and fewer in number over time. Even after the monkeys were defeated in a war of their own, the "tree people" never resettled the land or established a new human nation. The remainder of the Andanese people had scattered by this time, either to other nations or to assimilate as a new tribe of Pabap speakers called Sonsona. These people were still very weak, and no longer warlike, but they had a strong tribal identity despite lacking a language of their own, and therefore they are the only surviving descanedants of the Andanese today.

Numbers

• apa 1
• nia 2
• munia 3
• huti 4
• haili 5